In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union: over-65s were more than twice as likely to vote for Brexit as under-25s, amidst campaign rhetoric steeped in colonial nostalgia. This article explores how this generation was taught in many English state schools to imagine Britain's place in the world during a period of rapid decolonisation from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Drawing on history and geography textbooks, surviving school-work, BBC broadcasts to schools and school wall-maps, it is argued that English schools embellished the idea of a powerful Commonwealth to depict the continuation of Britain's global might during dramatic imperial decline. Attempts to reconcile decolonisation with the famous red-bespattered 'imperial' map are particularly revealing. By presenting decolonisation as the continuation of empire by other means, many educationists attempted to minimise the external changes to Britain's global status, allowing imperial ideas to survive in schools into the 1970s.