Beauty in the Age of Empire

Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education

Raja Adal

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231549288
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: History

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.

1

The Modern School as a Global Archive

All new and old schools, whether in villages or towns, will come under … state supervision and inspection. This is so that they can reform themselves, improve their future condition and financial prospects, and promote their own private interests as well as the public interest. They will do this by educating the people, improving themselves, and providing support and service to their nation.

—Law of 10th Rajab 1284, promulgated on the 6th of Muḥarram 1285 (April 29, 1868)

Every person should pursue learning without misconstruing its purpose. In order to avoid mistakes in learning, the Ministry of Education has recently established a Fundamental Code and will also gradually revise its regulations and promulgate edicts. From now on, common people, nobles, samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants, and women shall never be without education and there shall be no home with an illiterate person.

—Fundamental Code of Education (Gakusei), promulgated on August 3 of the 5th year of Meiji (1872)

Education was of direct concern to modern states. In Europe, the United States, Japan, Egypt, and other societies around the globe, education came to be considered essential to the creation of good workers and loyal soldiers. This phenomenon was global. A quick look at the educational literature across the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world immediately leads to obvious parallels. First are the educational pyramids. Mandatory education was designed to have the formal education of every child start in primary school, which was the base of the pyramid. After a required number of years in school, most children were expected to enter the labor force, while a small minority would rise through various levels of more advanced schooling: secondary school, then any number of professional schools or the university. Schooling was one of the state’s earliest interventions in the lives of its younger subjects.

Getting children to school, however, was not enough. The state also sought to control the content of the schooling. National curricula everywhere featured grids showing curricular subjects on a horizontal axis, the grades of primary and secondary school on a vertical axis, and, at their intersection, the number of hours that each subject was to be taught in each grade. Even the teachers who taught these subjects were usually the products of a state education. The government usually managed teachers’ colleges, also known as normal schools, as well as the schools that hired the teachers once they graduated. At the center of this system were ministries of education, which orchestrated this national educational system. These features are a part of school systems in all modern societies.

Focusing not just on modern schools but on modern primary schools helped to further delineate this book’s archive. In primary school, children were subjected to largely similar curricular requirements, despite some differences in the curricula for boys and girls or the occasional presence of optional subjects in an otherwise mandatory curriculum. In secondary school, on the other hand, the curricula began to splinter as pupils specialized in literary or scientific fields. Primary schools provided globally analogous sites with a well-circumscribed archive. Their sources made it easier to put the voices of a global group of educators in dialogue with one another. Whatever their geographic origins, all these teachers taught similar subjects and discussed many of the same topics.

The primary school may seem like a strange choice for a focus on aesthetic education. Aesthetics, after all, is usually associated with artists and art schools rather than with primary schools. The advantage of primary schools is that they offer a broader stage on which the uses of aesthetic education can be plotted. For professional artists and art schools, aesthetics has always been omnipresent. Indeed, aesthetics was central to the very concept of art as it was formulated in the modern era and taught in modern art schools. When modern primary schools were first founded, however, they did not teach aesthetics. Yet by around 1950, the end point of this study, they taught music and drawing as art and, for a brief moment in Japan, calligraphy as an artistic practice. In other words, modern primary schools make it possible to trace the birth and trajectory of aesthetic education in a modern institution in ways that art school or the world of professional artists could not.

Primary schools and the modern educational systems that encompass them were global. They produced largely the same types of sources in Japan, Egypt, France, Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. At the same time, however, these educational systems were deeply embedded in national history. In many ways, they are part of the history of the modern nation-state and of its position on the global stage. The melody of “Old Lang Syne,” for example, meant something different in Great Britain, where it was a Scottish melody, from what it meant in Japan, where it was copied from an American textbook and considered a Western tune. While the sources of this study are global, in the sense that they are analogous and available everywhere, their interpretation requires that they be contextualized within the particularities of national history.

This chapter places educational sources within their respective national contexts while, at the same time, comparing them among themselves. Teaching manuals were the most important source because they often contained in-depth discussions of how and why teachers should teach each subject. Curricula complemented the teaching manuals by revealing the priorities of ministries of education and showing the importance of individual subjects as measured by the number of hours they were taught each week. Textbooks provided visual materials, lyrics, musical notes, and a general insight into the books that lay on the desks of primary school children. Other sources complemented teaching manuals, curricula, and textbooks. They included educational journals, monographs, newspapers, magazines, conference records, laws, records of government meetings, collections of children’s drawings, statistical compendiums, school examinations, classroom aids, musical scores, autobiographies, yearbooks, and photographs. These various sources have been used both to dive into the universe of national education in each society and to compare and connect these universes with each other.

Although this book’s sources are drawn from the world of education, its topic is aesthetics. The educators who populate it frequently spoke of children’s hearts, their freedom, and the need to protect them from evil. They were vocal commentators on the role of aesthetics in the modern world. Before entering the world of aesthetic education, however, this chapter will seek to contextualize the sources in this book within the history of education. It will first look at the structure of educational institutions before turning to the content of the curricula and, finally, the global context that inflected both. In this case, the focus will be on the two central cases of this book, Japan and Egypt, and sometimes also on Great Britain, France, and the United States. This chapter is therefore first and foremost an institutional history of education in Japan and Egypt. Unlike most such histories, however, it is comparative. It seeks not only to describe the national contexts of education in Japan and Egypt but to show the parallels and differences between them.

Institutions

In Europe and the Americas, as well as Egypt and Japan, the institutional history of the modern school starts during the nineteenth century. In Egypt, a modern system of schools was first established by the Ottoman governor of Egypt Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1805–1848), who rose to power after the departure of Napoleon’s army. In 1837 he created the Department of Schools (Dīwān al-Madāris) to oversee about fifty newly founded primary schools and one preparatory school, as well as a series of training colleges in medicine, engineering, languages, infantry, artillery, and other fields related to his army.1 All these schools were intended to feed into Muḥammad ʿAlī’s army and bureaucracy. In 1841, however, the intervention of the European powers brought an end to Muḥammad ʿAlī’s military ambitions. His army was reduced to less than one-tenth of its former size, and he was stripped of his colonial conquests and state monopolies. Among the casualties were the primary schools established in the 1830s. They were closed in the 1840s, and the Department of Schools was eventually abolished in 1854.2

Muḥammad ʿAlī’s grandson Khedive Ismāʿīl (r. 1863–1879) reestablished the Department of Schools in 1863 and promulgated the organic law of Egypt’s modern school system known as the Law of 10th Rajab 1284 (November 7, 1867). This law established a modern school system, which, in its simplest form, spawned an educated population that either directly fed into the state bureaucracy or supported its modernizing projects in other ways. The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter makes this clear. School reforms were for “educating the people,” but the ultimate goal of doing so was to provide “support and service to their nation.”3 The Law of 10th Rajab 1284 brought to fruition what Muḥammad ʿAlī had attempted three decades earlier. It built an educational system for training the workforce of a modern nation-state.

Although the first modern institutions in Japan were founded half a century after those in Egypt, greater political stability and less foreign interference allowed them to continue uninterrupted. Three years after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbushō) was established.4 In 1872 it promulgated the Fundamental Code (Gakusei) which, like the Law of 10th Rajab 1284 in Egypt, became the foundation of the modern school system and famously proclaimed: “From now on, common people, nobles, samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants, and women shall never be without education and there shall be no home with an illiterate person.”5 As in Egypt, it created an educational system focused on training an educated workforce that would support the projects of the modern Japanese nation-state.

The Fundamental Code was the beginning of the modern Japanese state’s effort to build a new school system on the ruins of the heterogeneous and decentralized collection of schools that had preceded it. The modern state abolished all existing schools, requiring them to apply to the Ministry of Education before reopening. The criterion for their reopening was that they conform to the newly coined definition of a school. A “school” was to be a state-regulated public institution that taught children a series of state-approved subjects in a dedicated space where they were divided by grade and instructed by a “teacher,” who was defined as the graduate of a state-certified teachers’ college. This redefinition effectively replaced the existing decentralized and plural understanding of schooling with a unified, state-controlled system with common curricula, textbooks, and training for teachers.6

The structure of this newly established school system was typical of modern school systems everywhere. It consisted of a pyramidal system that aimed to provide a minimum education to the entire population and fed into increasingly specialized forms of more advanced education. In Japan a child was initially required to attend both a lower primary school (katō shōgaku) and a higher primary school (jōtō shōgaku) in order to fulfill the mandatory eight years of schooling. The number of years was soon recognized to be too ambitious, and from 1881 mandatory schooling was reduced to three or four years. Beyond this, children with time, money, and ability could pursue two, three, or four years of advanced study in higher primary schools, followed by middle schools (chūgakkō) for boys and, starting in 1892, higher girls’ schools (kōtō jōgakkō) for girls or any number of professional training schools. To provide these different levels of education, the Fundamental Code instituted a grid-like system of 8 university districts encompassing 32 middle school districts, which in turn encompassed 210 primary school districts. In general, this framework survives to this day, not only in Japan but in other modern societies.

Like Japan, Egypt had a large number of early modern schooling establishments. While Japan’s Fundamental Law sought to transform the entire educational system in one stroke, Egypt’s Law of 10th Rajab allowed most existing schools to continue while establishing a parallel system of modern education. To do so it created a four-tier system of primary education. The first two tiers consisted of elite government primary schools (al-madāris al-ibtidāʾiyya al-amīriyya) funded by the central government, and municipal primary schools (al-madāris al-markaziyya) funded by municipal governments. Both were modeled on Western educational systems and were intended for children of the more affluent elite. The third and fourth tiers (al-makātib al-ahliyya and al-katātīb al-ahliyya) left in place the large number of premodern kuttāb schools, which were funded by charitable trusts (awqāf, sing. waqf) and other private sources, while exerting various degrees of control over them.7 These schools were in continuity with premodern indigenous forms of education, linked to the Islamic sciences, taught by graduates of mosque universities, and intended for children of less affluent and often rural backgrounds.

While the first two tiers conformed to the modern definition of a school, the third and fourth tiers largely perpetuated the early modern understanding of schooling, teaching children to read, write, and memorize by copying and reciting the Quran. The difference between the first two and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Note on Names
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Modern School as a Global Archive
• I. Music, Calligraphy, and the Education of the Inner Self
• II. From Mimesis to Art: Drawing Education and the Rise of the Independent Subject
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Series List