Educating the Empire

American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108473125
• eBook ISBN: 9781108597357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 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
• Bibliography
• Index