Educating the Empire

 “All empires must come to an end, and the American one is no exception.”

 Japanese-American author Robert Toru Kiyosaki

 

In the March 2021 Journal of American History, former IUN colleague Roberta Wollons reviewed “Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines” by Sarah Steinbock-Pratt. Following the conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century in the wake of the Spanish-American War, American teachers were recruited, in Wollons’ words, “to bring education, Americanization, and pacification to the Filipino people.” How that worked out, Steinbock-Pratt concluded, was a mixed bag and had unintended consequences both for the colonizers and their subjects.

American administrators in charge of public instruction for Filipinos mandated English-only instruction and designed a curriculum based largely on contemporary practices at such schools as Carlisle Indian Industrial School and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, that is, focusing on vocational and manual training. This was especially true for non-Christian Filipinos in rural areas. Not only white males recruited but African Americans and white women. Some circumvented or disregarded colonial policy and empowered students and alumni to strive for leadership roles in their communities. It was not uncommon for male teachers to wed Filipino women, binding them closer to the communities they served.  In time student protests erupted against racist remarks by some teachers, and Filipino teachers gradually replaced Americans.

Reading Wollons’ review and others on Google, I perceived parallels between the American-designed Philippine schools and those in early Gary under School Superintendent Willian A. Wirt, intended in part to Americanize immigrant children and introduce them to a “work-study-play” curriculum that included industrial arts.  The Wirt Plan became world famous and attracted instructors motivated, in some cases, by an almost missionary zeal; but critics claimed that the Gary schools were turning out compliant future mill workers. When New York City prepared to implement elements of the Wirt Plan, the upshot were angry protests, especially by Jewish immigrants who sought a vigorous academic curriculum for their offspring.

        When historians Ronald Cohen and Raymond Mohl began research on their book “The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban schooling” (1979), they discovered that virtually everyone they interviewed who had attended Wirt’s unit schools praised its features, especially the emphasis on auditorium, which included public speaking, debate, music, and theatrical presentations.  Not only was the academic curriculum rigorous, at the onset of the Great depression Superintendent Wirt launched Gary College, an inexpensive two-year associate degree program for students otherwise unable to pursue higher education. Though Wirt was pro-business and feared that the New Deal was too socialist-leaning, in matters of education he was forward-looking and not beholden to United States Steel corporate officials.