‘A Home for Poets’?

Chapter four, ‘“A Home for Poets”?’ builds on this idea of a culture of defiance in training colleges by showing how teachers-in-training reshaped the curriculum. The official curriculum of the 1840s, 50s, and 60s, with its narrow focus and emphasis on rote memorization, frustrated budding teachers. Despite enduring long, exhausting days, they stayed up after ‘lights out’ to hold informal classes on Shakespeare and Byron, ancient history and modern science. They also turned their geography lessons into opportunities to reflect on the political cultures of the empire and the global networks of production and consumption that connected Britons of all social backgrounds to peoples from around the world. In large part owing to the everyday pressure of teachers-in-training, the official curriculum in training colleges came, over time, to be much more liberal as well as socially and globally engaged.