The historiography of British imperial education policy,Part I: India

Colonial education has been controversial and widely divergent interpretations have been offered from contrasting ideological perspectives. British imperial education policy was highly contended during the colonial era and remains a contentious issue amongst many contemporary historians and a critical review of the historiography of the subject is long overdue. British colonial education policy starts in India in 1813, the intention being to promote both Oriental culture and Western science. But a former Director of Public Instruction, writing in the 1920s, claimed that education had done far less for Indian culture than for the material and political progress of India. More recent academic writing about the history of education in British India has been both intermittent and of mixed quality. To date, much of the criticism of British policy appears to have been motivated more by emotion rather than by detailed scholarly analysis and this account argues that more ‘plodding’ in archives is urgently needed at the present time to substantiate, refine or refute the claims of India’s educational historians. This is the first part of a two‐part article, the second of which will deal with Africa and the rest of the colonial Empire.     

Talk about School: Education and the colonial project in French and British Africa (1860-1960)

As a study in comparative colonialism, this research attempts to identify similarities and differences in the French and British models of colonial education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Differences in colonial policy were conditioned to some extent by settlement patterns, the role of missionaries and variations in local politics and economies, but also by the moral stances underlying colonial practice. By calling attention to some of the 'signposts' of British and French colonial education policy, this research attempts to contrast British and French ideas about morality and the colonial project in Africa.     

略析战后英国在英属黑非洲的公职人员政策（1945-1963）

第二次世界大战之后,英国在英属黑非洲殖民地的公职人员政策有三次调整,分别以扩招、稳定和留任为重点,很好地配合了英国的整体殖民政策。扩招是为了落实殖民地开发计划和地方政府改革计划,稳定和留任都是为了在民族解放运动的大潮中尽力保持自己的殖民利益。其中英国对尼日利亚的公职人员政策较具典型性。英国的政策没有解决独立前后殖民地公职人员缺乏的状况,直接原因在于英国撤退得过快,深层原因则在于其长期以来对殖民地社会发展的忽视。     

Andreas Goes to Africa: A Comparative Historical Study of the Teachers for East Africa Programs

This article uses a comparative historical approach to examine the Teachers for East Africa (TEA) and the Teacher Education in East Africa (TEEA) programs, an influential educational development effort that involved U.S. and British college graduates in East African schools and colleges during the decade of 1961–1971. Drawing on postcolonial theory and Andreas Kazamias’s humanistic view of education, the “Paideia of the soul,” it explores how U.S. teachers interpreted the education system they encountered in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda at the end of the colonial era, seeking to made sense of a radically different system of schooling. The comparison of U.S. and British teachers’ views on pedagogy in this critical historical period as discerned in the TEA and TEAA archive illustrates deep fissures in the putative edifice of “Western” education.     

Education reform for the expansion of mother-tongue education in Ghana

In 1957 Ghana was the first sub-Saharan colonial nation-state to achieve independence from British rule. The language of literacy instruction, however, remained English throughout most of Ghana’s independence, effectively thwarting reading and writing in 11 major and 67 minor indigenous languages in use today. After years of policy shifts, including the intermittent of mother tongue in early childhood schooling to facilitate English language and literacy instruction, prospects for a bold move towards multilingual education have emerged from a coalescence of forces inside and outside of Ghanaian education policy circles. This article discusses how the inertia of a dated language policy and a historic disregard for Ghana’s multilingual landscape by the country’s own policy makers are being overcome, at least partially, by progressive powers of change, albeit not without challenge. It undertakes an analysis of how a policy environment that supports bilingual education was created in order to implement a comprehensive and innovative multilingual programme, the National Literacy Acceleration Program (NALAP), which was rolled out across the nation’s schools in early 2010. Having been involved in the process of designing NALAP, the authors describe the development of standards of learning and materials, as well as innovative aspects of a constructivist teacher education approach. The paper concludes with recommendations for further research, including combining a change process for key stakeholders and randomised language and literacy assessment with social marketing research in a unified approach.     

Agentive role of government in African education: North Nyanza, 1890–1920

This paper examines the agentive role of the colonial administration in accessing formal education for Africans in North Nyanza, Kenya from 1890 to 1920. It demonstrates the complexities of the colonial experience in which the ultimate application of policy and practice was shaped by the overriding principle of protection of the economic and political interests of the immigrant settler community. Africans lacked institutional agency in government functioning in the racialised society in this period. The agentive role of the colonial administration in improving conditions for African populations faltered from its earliest conception. The colonial project ultimately fell short of its goal, as the governmental commitment to improving the education for African populations was compromised by the agenda to advance the commercial interest of the colonial empire and the dominant influence of the European settler class.     

Educational borrowing as negotiation: re‐examining the influence of the American black industrial education model on British colonial education in Africa

This study explores the extent to which American educational ideas made an impact on policy‐making and practice of education in British African colonies between the two World Wars. The analysis re‐examines the apparent ‘borrowing’ of American black industrial education models for application in Africa. It is argued that, while the view that Americans were successful in handling racial conflicts by means of education at home carried strong symbolic meaning in the colonial political arena, the ideas themselves were not new. The paper focuses on the motivations and characteristics of the people involved in this political discourse and in transferring American and other models to Africa. By doing this, the paper draws attention to a more complex network of factors that were involved in the transfer of educational policies to British colonies in Africa.     

British Colonial Higher Education Policy-making in the 1930s: The case of a plan to establish a university in Cyprus

This article examines Britain's colonial education policy in Cyprus in the late 1930s, and more specifically, its efforts to establish a university on the island. The British unpublished plan for a university in Cyprus is considered in the light of the particular social and political context of Cyprus and also in relation to Britain's broader colonial education policy. Primary source material is used as the basis for investigation and analysis.     

The three duties of the historian of education

The origins of modern schooling in early nineteenth-century Africa have been poorly researched. Moreover, histories of education in Africa have focused largely on the education of boys. Little attention has been paid to girls’ schooling or to the missionary women who sought to construct a new feminine Christian identity for African girls. In the absence of personal accounts of African girls’ schooling from that period, this paper draws on a slim body of 71 letters written by women and girls associated with one British mission society in Sierra Leone between 1804 and 1826 to suggest a fluid and at times contradictory construction of gender and racial identity, which sits at odds with the ideology of domestic femininity that the missionaries sought to impart through girls’ schooling. The handful of letters written by African women and girls also casts doubt on the assumed subservience of black subjects to white officialdom.     

Portuguese,French and British discourses on colonial education: Church–State relations,school expansion and missionary competition in Africa, 1890–1930

This article draws a comparison between the Portuguese in relation to British and French discourses on overseas educational policies at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century until the 1930s. It focuses on three main colonial educational dynamics: school expansion (comparing the public and private sectors); State–Church relations (comparing these relationships at the European and colonial levels); and missionary competition (comparing Catholic with Protestant strategies towards educational incorporation). Colonial discourse is seen here as a power‐knowledge discourse aimed at constructing the colonial subjects as individuals, enabling them to imagine themselves as belonging to a particular cultural polity. The article intends to show how cross‐national discourses on education affect the principles on which theories of schooling are built and the ways in which they influence the first attempts to systematize pedagogical and school models in the colonial peripheries. On the other hand, it tries to understand, within government technologies of domination, the conflicting views, negotiations and ambiguities between global policy formulation and local school system implementation. In this sense, the author sought to analyse the different ways in which concepts such as ‘assimilation’, ‘civilizing mission’, ‘adapted education’, and ‘learning by doing’ were mobilized and appropriated into the colonial education discourses in order to legitimize particular governmental strategies. Two main ideas run through the text: the first attempts to demonstrate the existence of discontinuities between official educational ideologies at home and local system and school expansion strategies in the colonies. The second claims that educational borrowing from other colonies at the Empires' peripheries was, more often that is thought, a crucial feature of colonial educational discourse.     

The British Colonial Education 'Lending' Policy in Cyprus (1878-1960): An intriguing example of an elusive 'adapted education' policy

The case of the British colonial education 'lending' policy in Cyprus is very interesting, firstly, because Cyprus possessed cultural characteristics very different from those of almost all the other British colonies (African and Asian) and, secondly, because the colonial policy influenced to a great extent the post-colonial educational structures and practices in the island. This article will show that the British colonial education policy applied in Cyprus had the two main features of the colonial policy applied in almost all the other British colonies, namely, (a) it was an 'adapted education' policy and (b) it was very much dependent on the will of the governed people. There were, however, two essential differences: (a) the 'adapted education' policy was very elusive and took diverse forms, and (b) politics played a much more important role in Cyprus than in the other colonies in the formulation of this policy, both positively and negatively. The result was that the 'adapted education' policy explicitly applied during the first fifty years was later reversed and became an open and fervent policy of cultural and educational lending. The contention of the author is that this last policy was a form of implicit 'adapted education' policy .     

Welfare and education in British colonial Africa and South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s

Contemporary educational policy discourse in South Africa that seeks to serve the poor and address equity issues needs to engage with the roots of twentieth‐century social reform debates if it is meet its goals. One of the weaknesses of the templates for reform at the present time is that they often fail to engage with progressive traditions which have a long history. Present‐day reforms look to agency recommendations or comparative examples of “successful” emergent economies, but often fail to recognize the value and significance of previous initiatives which sought to address these issues. The long debate over the need for social welfare and educational reform in British colonial Africa has some significance in this regard. The period between 1930 and 1950 marked a key turning point in such policy in colonial Africa, and significant reform initiatives in South Africa from the early years of the Second World War provide the benchmarks for such investigations. The social welfare policies and the educational policy initiatives of the United Party government during the 1940s provide important signposts for such policies. This article attempts to investigate that legacy.     

‘To teach the natives English’: James Pope’s 1880 native schools code

From their inception in New Zealand in 1816, until the end of the century in some cases, most mission schools in the colony maintained instruction solely in the Māori language. However, from the 1840s, successive colonial governments promoted a secular schooling system in which English would be the language in which students were taught, principally because Māori was seen as an impediment to the governments’ assimilationist ideology. The 1880 Native Schools Code, devised by the first Inspector of New Zealand’s Native Schools, James Pope, was one of the final major steps in this era in advancing this assimilationist ideal through the country’s education system. Pope’s initiative was partly a continuation of state policy that had existed in some form since the 1840s, but it also served as the most explicit statement to that time of how the government intended to use schooling to incorporate Māori into colonial society.     

The Changing Nature of Non-formal Education in Latin America

This article highlights the history of innovation and creativity in non-formal education programming in Latin America since the 1920s. These include community-based programmes, literacy, fundamental education, community development, technical vocational training, extension education, consciousness raising, popular education, and community schooling. With the economic downturn in the 1980s, non-formal education became less viable as part of socio-economic development strategies owing partly to the social progress made in the region, a shift to schooling as a priority and the pulling back of governments from social service funding. Nevertheless, the 1980s saw the informal economy and social movements as emerging avenues for non-formal education programming and non-governmental agencies became the dominant vehicle for educational delivery. During the 1990s, technical education was going through privatisation and adult basic education was being criticised and overhauled. Citizenship education, a potential avenue for non-fomal education investment in the newly democratised region is identified as an area overlooked by policy makers. Similarly, the growing needs of the indigenous populations of the region and urban youth unemployment are singled out as potential areas for non-formal education programming.     

Japanese colonial education as a contested terrain: What

This historical analysis examines the process of structuring the Korean elementary schooling under the Japanese colonial rule for the period of 35 years, spanning from 1910 to 1945. Colonial education in Korea was used as an ideological device for perpetuating the colonization of Korea. But Koreans resisted to such education policy persistently, unlike for the case of other colonized countries in the same era. The majority of Koreans, including even a small number of pro-Japan people, irrespective of their social class status, demanded the expansion of elementary education and further took initiatives to raise necessary funds for it. Here we must realize that the aspiration of Koreans was incompatible with Japanese ruler’s intention. Korean and Japanese had different ideologies and expectations of establishing Common Schools. Japan’s colonial education resulted in unintended and unwanted consequences in Korea.     

满铁附属地的中国人实业教育创办的历史沿革及特点

日本殖民当局在中国东北实施了长达30余年的殖民教育,而面向中国青少年进行的实业教育占有举足轻重的地位。其中20世纪20年代在满洲铁路株式会社附属地内创办并实施的中国人实业教育的首要前提是维持日本人在政治、经济领域内的统治地位,其目的是保持在华日本人学生的优势地位,削弱中国人的竞争力,带有明显的民族歧视和愚民特质。     

The didactics tradition in South Africa: a reply to Richard Krüger

There has been a growing interest in the European Didaktik tradition as part of a process of ‘internationalizing’ curriculum studies. Krüger provides useful insights into some aspects of Didaktiek in South Africa. However, the essay does not contextualize this tradition within the broader history of South African education. This reply contends that Didaktiek was interwoven with ‘fundamental pedagogics’ and as a consequence played a role in reproducing apartheid ideology—it did not provide a language of critique or possibility. This is one reason why the tradition has seen its demise in post‐apartheid South Africa. I argue that curriculum theory, which crucially deals with the relationship between schooling and society and highlights the socially constructed nature of schooling, offers a more useful alternative for critiquing apartheid education policy and for charting a process of transformation of education in South Africa.     

Education and the marginalisation of girls in post-GATT Mauritius

This paper describes the history and geography of Mauritius and its elitist colonial educational system; presents a literature review of female education, development, and position in the labor market; discusses the economy in the post-GATT era and wasted potential; and calls for a new educational order. Mauritius has a multiplicity of cultures and a complex cultural, socioeconomic, and political context. French colonialism is characterized as limiting expansion of education on the island. Education was expanded under British colonial rule; mass education was promoted, but not much changed in the nature and role of schooling. The elites of today are those descendants of diverse ethnic people who managed to become educated. Mauritians are marginalized today due to the lack of implementation of its official policy of equal opportunity. About 6% of primary school children leave the system illiterate. About 20% are functionally illiterate. Many leave primary schools without passing the Certificate of Primary Education tests. A 1994 survey indicated that female labor force participation rates were higher among persons with lower levels of education. Women have a subordinate role in the labor market due to a long history of a subordinate role, gender inequity, a large concentration of women in the clothing sector of the Export Processing Zone, and gender segregation in managerial and professional occupations and advancement. Some associate development with marginalization of women. Teachers and textbooks reinforce gender roles. Mauritius needs to retain students, gender sensitize the educational system, and eliminate job discrimination.     

Phelps‐Stokes in Congo: Transferring Educational Policy Discourse to Govern Metropole and Colony

This article combines a historical with a social/political anthropological framework to examine the role played by the transfer of educational discourse between the United States‐based Phelps‐Stokes Fund and the Belgian Ministry of Colonies in the formulation of the colonial education policy of “adapted education” in the 1920s. The author argues that the transfer of racialized discourses of education and educational language was instrumental in the political governance of both metropole and colony as well as in improving the image of Belgian colonialism in the international political arena. In particular, the author emphasizes the political clout of the Catholic Party and the role played by two problems that ascended to the center stage of Belgian national politics after World War I (i.e. the cost of rebuilding the country and the so‐called “Flemish problem”) to show how colonial educational policy, and national and international politics are interconnected.     

Education,culture and politics: the evolution of Chinese education at The University of Hong Kong, 1911–1941

The University of Hong Kong (HKU), following its establishment in 1911, has assumed the mission of bridging British and Chinese cultures, to prepare European and Chinese elite youth for political and other professional careers, and thus to improve Britain’s cultural influence in competition with other western powers with regard to China. Dominated by its colonial character and pragmatic orientation, Chinese education at HKU was confined to no more than a supplementary subject at the initial stage. However, colonial crisis and cultural changes in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the endeavours of local cultural and commercial elites, made advanced Chinese education at HKU necessary and possible, and led to an independent unit for Chinese education and Chinese studies being established and strengthened. Organisational and curricular reforms before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to further modernisation and solidified the structure of Chinese education at this university, laying the essential foundation for its post-war recovery and development. The evolution of Chinese education at HKU demonstrated well the subtle entanglements of education, culture and politics in a colonial context, through which coexistence and tensions between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between the imperial and republican intellectuals were also vividly revealed.