Education Empire

"Education for Empire examines how American public schools created and placed children on multiple and uneven paths to "good citizenship." These paths offered varying kinds of subordination and degrees of exclusion closely tied to race, national origin, and US imperial ambitions. Public school administrators, teachers, and textbook authors grappled with how to promote and share in the potential benefits of commercial and territorial expansion, and in both territories and states, how to apply colonial forms of governance to the young populations they professed to prepare for varying future citizenships. The book brings together subjects in American history usually treated separately--in particular the formation and expansion of public schools and empire building both at home and abroad. Temporally framed by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion and 1924 National Origins Acts, two pivotal immigration laws deeply entangled in and telling of US quests for empire, case studies in California, Hawaii, Georgia, New York, the Southwest, and Puerto Rico reveal that marginalized people contested, resisted, and blazed alternative paths to citizenship, in effect destabilizing the boundaries that white nationalists, including many public school officials, in the United States and other self-described "white men's countries" worked so hard to create and maintain"--Provided by publisher.

This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality.

Despite the fact that more than one-half of the students in the United States are educated in suburban schools, relatively little is known about the development of suburban school systems. Education Empire chronicles the evolution of Virginia's Fairfax County public schools, the twelfth largest school system in the country and arguably one of the very best. The book focuses on how Fairfax has addressed a variety of challenges, beginning with explosive enrollment growth in the 1950s and continuing with desegregation, enrollment decline, economic uncertainty, demands for special programs, and intense politicization. Today, Fairfax, like many suburbs across the country, looks increasingly like an urban school system, with rising poverty, large numbers of recent immigrants, and constant pressure from an assortment of special interest groups. While many school systems facing similar developments have experienced a drop in performance, Fairfax students continue to raise their achievement. Daniel L. Duke reveals the keys to Fairfax's remarkable track record.

This book is about education and American imperialism from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror. Very little coordinated or sustained research has been devoted to the broader contours of America, education, and empire. And third, this volume seeks to inspire new directions in the study of American educational history.

For the vast majority of Native American students in federal Indian boarding schools at the turn of the twentieth century, the experience was nothing short of tragic. Dislocated from family and community, they were forced into an educational system that sought to erase their Indian identity as a means of acculturating them to white society. However, as historian John Gram reveals, some Indian communities on the edge of the American frontier had a much different experience—even influencing the type of education their children received. Shining a spotlight on Pueblo Indians’ interactions with school officials at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools, Gram examines two rare cases of off-reservation schools that were situated near the communities whose children they sought to assimilate. Far from the federal government’s reach and in competition with nearby Catholic schools for students, these Indian boarding school officials were in no position to make demands and instead were forced to pick their cultural battles with nearby Pueblo parents, who visited the schools regularly. As a result, Pueblo Indians were able to exercise their agency, influencing everything from classroom curriculum to school functions. As Gram reveals, they often mitigated the schools’ assimilation efforts and assured the various pueblos’ cultural, social, and economic survival. Greatly expanding our understanding of the Indian boarding school experience, Education at the Edge of Empire is grounded in previously overlooked archival material and student oral histories. The result is a groundbreaking examination that contributes to Native American, Western, and education histories, as well as to borderland and Southwest studies. It will appeal to anyone interested in knowing how some Native Americans were able to use the typically oppressive boarding school experience to their advantage.

This timely book takes a critical look at the teaching of English, showing how language is used to create hierarchies of cultural privilege in public schools across the country. Motha closely examines the work of four ESL teachers who developed anti-racist pedagogical practices during their first year of teaching. Their experiences, and those of their students, provide a compelling account of how new teachers might gain agency for culturally responsive teaching in spite of school cultures that often discourage such approaches. The author combines current research with her original analyses to shed light on real classroom situations faced by teachers of linguistically diverse populations. This book will help pre- and in-service teachers to think about such challenges as differential achievement between language learners and "native-speakers;" about hierarchies of languages and language varieties; about the difference between an accent identity and an incorrect pronunciation; and about the use of students' first languages in English classes. This resource offers implications for classroom teaching, educational policy, school leadership, and teacher preparation, including reflection questions at the end of each chapter.

When modern primary schools were first founded in Japan and Egypt in the 1870s, they did not teach art. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, art education was a permanent part of Japanese and Egyptian primary schooling. Both countries taught music and drawing, and wartime Japan also taught calligraphy. Why did art education become a core feature of schooling in societies as distant as Japan and Egypt, and how is aesthetics entangled with nationalism, colonialism, and empire? Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive. With aesthetics, educators sought to enchant children with sounds and sights, using their ears and eyes to make ideologies into objects of desire. Spanning multiple languages and continents, and engaging with the histories of nationalism, art, education, and transnational exchanges, Beauty in the Age of Empire offers a strikingly original account of the rise of aesthetics in modern schools and the modern world. It shows that, while aesthetics is important to all societies, it was all the more important for those countries on the receiving end of Western expansion, which could not claim to be wealthier or more powerful than Western empires, only more beautiful.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire considers how teachers took up this task, first at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, and then in a school system set up amid an ongoing rebellion launched by Filipinos. Drawing upon the records of fifty-five teachers at Carlisle and thirty-three sent to the Philippines—including five who worked in both locations—the book reveals the challenges of translating imperial policy into practice, even for those most dedicated to the imperial mission. These educators, who worked on behalf of the US government, sought to meet the expectations of bureaucrats and supervisors while contending with leadership crises on the ground. In their stories, Elisabeth Eittreim finds the problems common to all classrooms—how to manage students and convey knowledge—complicated by their unique circumstances, particularly the military conflict in the Philippines. Eittreim’s research shows the dilemma presented by these schools’ imperial goal: “pouring in” knowledge that purposefully dismissed and undermined the values, desires, and protests of those being taught. To varying degrees these stories demonstrate both the complexity and fragility of implementing US imperial education and the importance of teachers’ own perspectives. Entangled in US ambitions, racist norms, and gendered assumptions, teachers nonetheless exhibited significant agency, wielding their authority with students and the institutions they worked for and negotiating their roles as powerful purveyors of cultural knowledge, often reinforcing but rarely challenging the then-dominant understanding of “civilization.” Examining these teachers’ attitudes and performances, close-up and in-depth over the years of Carlisle’s operation, Eittreim’s comparative study offers rare insight into the personal, institutional, and cultural implications of education deployed in the service of US expansion—with consequences that reach well beyond the imperial classrooms of the time.