Governing is educating (even for settlers): Julie McLeod, Fiona Paisley, ‘Ambivalent histories: education, “race”, and the modernisation of settler/colonial governance in Australasia and the Pacific, 1900s–1960s’, History of Education, 52, 5, 2023, pp. 687-696 | settler colonial studies blog

Governing is educating (even for settlers): Julie McLeod, Fiona Paisley, ‘Ambivalent histories: education, “race”, and the modernisation of settler/colonial governance in Australasia and the Pacific, 1900s–1960s’, History of Education, 52, 5, 2023, pp. 687-696

30Sep23

Excerpt: The history of colonialism and the history of education have tended to be regarded as separate spheres of governance and scholarship. Our focus here, however, is on understanding the ways in which they are deeply connected, seeing them as sharing the goal of modernity that sought to transform individuals, states and society, including the modernisation of colonial relations. This special issue thus seeks to bring history of education and the history of colonialism into closer dialogue to show the ways in which ‘education’ has been directly imbricated in liberal, progressive, ‘protective’ and humanitarian responses to the conditions of settler-colonialism in this period. It explores how efforts towards ‘native education’ in this region contributed to new forms of settler governance as well as to contestations and/or mobilisations of this, not least as seen by Indigenous people. While Africa and India have featured in histories of colonial education that have been largely framed in the context of British Empire, the Pacific offers an exceptional opportunity to study interactions between British and American imperial and colonial modes of governance and their various articulations. This encompasses a focus from ‘international’ expertise and exchange, to the ambivalent circulations between ‘universal’ and local contexts and practices. Australasia and Oceania have not been sufficiently recognised as key sites in international and inter-imperial exchanges concerning the future of colonised subjects in the era of liberal, international and humanitarian imperialism that characterised the early twentieth century. This is reflective of the relative lack of attention to Oceania in terms of histories of education in general and, we argue, it is also reflective of insufficient recognition of the social sciences in settler/colonial rule.

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