the education of the elites and common people.
Closely associated with polity building and societal change, the issue of the cultural and ethnic plurality of some of the new countries should also be taken into consideration. Many of the new polities faced the challenge of populations widely differentiated along ethnic, social or other lines. Post-colonial elites acted with a sense of urgency, launching ambitious programs of political and cultural homogenization in which education once again occupied a central role. While colonial rule had often privileged certain ethnic groups over others, the aspiration of the new political order was to re-shape collective identities under the new imperative of the “people”. In the beginning an educational optimism dominated, and the redemption of certain groups within the new polities by means of the universal remedy of education was repeatedly propounded.
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Although there is a consensus that post-colonial educational systems followed a path of institutionalization that in many ways resembled the Western and colonial approaches to schooling,8 transformations in post-colonial education were by no means insignificant.
The noticeable focus on mass literacy was not the only aspect to constitute a qualitatively different approach from the more ambivalent strategies of colonial regimes.9 Changes in curriculum content were considerable10 as well as the re-arrangement of links between ethnic groups and schooling.11 Moreover, the orientation of many post-colonial polities towards the socialist countries promoted changes in structure and prioritization that clearly marked breaks with colonial policies. The combination of new policies and new orientations also motivated a shift of perspectives on educational cooperation and aid on behalf of the former metropoles12. Most importantly, it attracted the attention of new actors such as the United States, which began to take a keen interest in gaining ←11 | 12→influence in the education of the new post-colonial elites.13 Their educational choices were invariably informed by an anti-colonial impetus and, at the same time, influenced – either by deliberate choice or necessity – by outside influences. After the Second World War, the Cold war served as a powerful force in this regard but international organizations like UNESCO equally provided an (in itself politically contested) international yardstick.14
Surely the timespan of decolonization is too long, the range of the problems too broad, and the geographical and political settings too different to capture all the richness of these different transformations in the present volume?15 What the contributions collected in this book do instead, is to offer a novel and panoramic view on the multi-faceted role of education in decolonization processes over two centuries.
Filling a gap, advancing an agenda? The contributions
The contributions in this volume provide a diachronic perspective on decolonization and education spanning the 19th and 20th 18 centuries. They assemble local histories from places as varied as Argentina and India, Hong Kong and Mozambique and place them in their broader historical context. Connecting the local and the global, the contributions highlight the manifold transnational interactions that characterize educational discourses against the background of decolonization. Accordingly, decolonization in this volume features not as a concrete moment in time but rather as a process in which the quest to establish new cultural and political norms constitutes a common denominator in both time and space. The book addresses decolonizations, in a plural form, in order to grasp the diversity of historical situations in which the political and cultural dynamics of the nexus between education and the invention of new polities became apparent.16 We argue that these processes were invariably complex and ←12 | 13→far-reaching – going beyond the mere delegitimization of foreign rule.17 At the very least, by highlighting these attempts to create new men and new polities by means of educational reform, a process that reaches well into our own time, the articles in this volume open a window to the present.
All contributions point to the complexity of decolonization, exposing the tension between a fundamental break with the past and the continuities transcending the transfer of power. They emphasize various shades of transformation, adaptation and resilience enacted in these processes. They also capture both internal and external contexts when addressing education as a means of construction and renewal of polities and men. Beyond these common traits, some of the contributions look particularly at the entanglements between the colonial and the post-colonial, whereas a second group puts more attention on specific meanings and strategies used by particular actors. We briefly introduce the individual contributions following a chronological approach.
In his contribution about the discourse on ‘colonial education’ in 19th century Latin America, Marcelo Caruso shows the legitimizing role of the question of educational heritance in the decades after independence from Spanish colonial rule. In this earliest process of de-colonization, ‘colonial education’ became a common thread in public discourse in which at least two types of arguments were advanced. First, colonial education was added to the long list of colonial grievances that, in the view of the Latin Americans, made independence necessary and legitimate. Second, colonial education became a consistent argument when discussing why the new independent polities found such serious difficulties in consolidating a new political order. He concludes that this referencing to the educational past became a feature of scholarly and political discourses.
Certainly, the roots of decolonial projects reach far back to the colonial policies and experiences, as two contributions on India show. Parimala Rao analyses the strong links between the colonial and the post-colonial in her analysis of the history of nationalist educational proposals. In her account, the emergence of the first nationalist educational discourses – particularly from Bal Gangadhar Tilak – appear as a re-elaboration of an ‘imperial idea’ that critically continued ←13 | 14→the practice of establishing modern education along the lines of class and gender hierarchization. The author shows that its underlying aim was the (re)construction of an imagined pre-colonial social order disrupted by British colonial rule. Moreover, Gandhi’s famous educational proposals represented the spiritualization of this very imperial idea and did not pose an emancipatory alternative with regard to the questions of hierarchy and discrimination. Rao’s contribution points to many key aspects of post-colonial education. It highlights its character as an elite project. Her argument about continuity directs our attention to the fact that anti-colonial movements as modern political forces partly resulted from the very educational schemes of colonial rule. Education constituted a primary tool in the fabric of independence and liberation. But this tool was still, following her reasoning, both imperial and socially conservative in outlook and purpose.
Catriona Ellis’ contribution in turn addresses strategies and attached meanings in late colonial schooling through the lens of the autobiographical accounts of three different Southern Indian authors. Her analytical approach highlights the potential of autobiographical sources in recovering marginalized voices. Without ignoring the problematic side of this type of source, Ellis shows how self-testimonies, beyond simplistic concepts of authenticity, can help to open a ‘ground-level’ dimension of liberation struggles and decolonization. Within her sample of auto-biographies, Ellis’ careful analysis brings to light common traits as well as differences: the experience of late colonial schooling, including questions of discrimination, as well as the dichotomization of time - between ‘those days’ and the present - all appear as resources used by the authors to strategically
