Educating the Empire
American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines

Examines the contested process of colonial education in the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt (Author)

9781108473125, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 May 2019

338 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm, 0.62 kg

'Educating the Empire should be standard reading for anybody seeking to understand the cultural history of US colonialism in the Philippines.' Oliver Charbonneau, American Historical Review

This book examines how education contributed to the creation of US empire in the Philippines by focusing on American teachers and the Filipinos with whom they lived and worked. While education was located at the heart of the imperial project, used to justify empire, the implementation of schooling in the islands deviated from the expectations of the colonial state. American teachers at times upheld, adapted, circumvented, or entirely disregarded colonial policy. Despite the language of white masculinity that imbued imperial discourse, the appointment of white women and black men as teachers allowed them to claim roles and identities that transformed understandings of gender and race. Filipinos also used the American educational system to articulate their own understandings of empire. In this context, schools were a microcosm for the colonial state, with contestations over education often standing in for the colonial relationship itself.

Introduction
1. Creating a catalog of colonial knowledge
2. A civil empire: determining fitness for colonial education
3. Professionals and pioneers: teachers' self-depiction in empire
4. Recreating race: evolving notions of whiteness and blackness in empire
5. A political education: Americans, Filipinos, and the meanings of instruction
6. All politics is local: American teachers and their communities
7. Speaking for ourselves: dignity and the politics of student protest
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], Asian history [HBJF]