Egalitarian Ideals and Exclusionary Practices: U.S. Pedagogy in the Colonial Philippines

Abstract

This essay examines U.S. colonial education in the early 20th-century Philippines, focusing on the ways in which the teachers recruited from the U.S. derailed the colonial administrators’ earnest if ingenuous attempt to dismantle the indigenous structure of privilege in the new possession vie a system of free primary schooling. The approach breaks with the notion of the state as the ultimate locus of force and attends instead to the study of local sites and ordinary, everyday practices of social regulation. In so doing, it argues that the U.S. teachers in the field transformed the directives handed down to them into a pedagogy that came to have its own subverting tactics, mechanisms and trajectory within the wider colonial polity.