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Seeing Britain and the World

Chapter six, ‘Seeing Britain and the World’ explores the remarkably widespread practice of travelling to the far corners of Britain, its empire, and the wider world during the summer holiday. Teachers tended to go alone or with just a couple friends and preferred to venture ‘off the beaten path’. When they got back, they wrote up short accounts of their trips for their training college alumni magazines. Teachers drew on bourgeois and elite conventions, but ultimately forged their own culture of travel and social and cultural observation. They put a premium on intimate knowledge about the everyday life of the peoples among whom they travelled and frequently confronted their own assumptions about important concepts like class and state welfare, race and the nature of imperial rule. Most of all, a sense of urgency pervaded teachers’ travel narratives. Engaging with the wider world was an ethical imperative and a key facet of teachers’ personal and professional identity.