Sarah Steinbock-Pratt. Educating the Empire

In 1898, President William McKinley famously declared the United States’ mission in the Philippines to be one of “benevolent assimilation.” The pithy phrase encapsulated an arsenal of cultural initiatives deployed in the islands by colonial administrators and Washington politicos, quickly making it, alongside Kipling’s call for America to “take up the white man’s burden,” recognizable shorthand for the US variant of the cross-imperial civilizing mission. At policy level, benevolent assimilation involved the radical reimagining of life in the archipelago: a colonial state stripped of Spanish inefficiencies and run by an Anglo-Saxon elect who would reproduce US republican norms and teach Filipinos to become national citizens via indefinite subjecthood. Key to this goal was the establishment of a colony-wide secular education system, where English language instruction at the primary level—with some secondary schools for children of the native elite—would serve as an engine of colonial norm making. This is the realm explored by Sarah Steinbock-Pratt in her valuable study Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines, which argues that “schools were a microcosm of the colonial state, with negotiation and contestation over colonial education often standing in for struggles over the colonial relationship itself” (4). The classroom, in other words, brought tensions between broad colonial policy objectives and the prosaic compromises of empire into stark relief.

Colonialism · Elite · Empire · Political science · Politics · Realm · Sociology · State (computer science) · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture