To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
How one assesses the characteristics, the major direction, and the role of republican education in the early national period is bound to be influenced by how one defines the kind of society in which it existed. The controversy still continuing among historians about the degree of democracy in the colonial and revolutionary eras has an important bearing on any estimate of what constituted republican education. This controversy revolves around such questions as: Did democracy exist in the colonial era or did it first emerge in the Jacksonian period? To what degree had hierarchy and status been broken down? Was there in fact a ruling elite or had it been dissolved by political democracy and a changing social structure? How much vertical mobility was there in allowing individuals to rise economically or to achieve political leadership?
On October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, in a military setting framed by symmetrical rows of soldiers bearing the colors of three nations, Charles Cornwallis, Major General of the British forces in South Carolina, surrendered his army to George Washington. As news spread up and down the coast and westward to inland villages and farms, citizens congregated for impromptu celebrations. No longer colonials, the victors now could transmute the hardships and tragedies of the war into memories of heroic deeds and patriotic sacrifices, and, for the moment, forget the uncertainties of peace and independence.
At the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, Stalin appraised the world situation optimistically. For five years, he argued, the capitalist world had been at mortal grips with an incurable economic crisis, disrupting industrial and agricultural production and destroying all national and international trade and financing. The capitalists sought salvation in preparation for a new imperialistic war. Hostility among capitalist countries was sharpening. The Sino-Japanese conflict and the occupation of Manchuria caused tensions in the Far East. In Europe the Nazi victory and rising revanchisme enhanced dangers. The Japanese and German departure from the League of Nations accelerated rearmament.
This article attempts to examine the various factors that influenced the introduction of legal provision for compulsory education in Ceylon and the machinery employed for the enforcement of these legal provisions with a view to ascertain the extent to which the legal measures for compulsory education effectively encouraged the development of elementary education.