Educating the Empire

This book examines how education contributed to the creation of US empire in the Philippines by focusing on American teachers and the Filipinos with whom they lived and worked. While education was located at the heart of the imperial project, used to justify empire, the implementation of schooling in the islands deviated from the expectations of the colonial state. American teachers at times upheld, adapted, circumvented, or entirely disregarded colonial policy. Despite the language of white masculinity that imbued imperial discourse, the appointment of white women and black men as teachers allowed them to claim roles and identities that transformed understandings of gender and race. Filipinos also used the American educational system to articulate their own understandings of empire. In this context, schools were a microcosm for the colonial state, with contestations over education often standing in for the colonial relationship itself.

'In Educating the Empire, Steinbock-Pratt carefully details the collaborations, conflicts, and dashed expectations that shaped the US colonial state's public education program in the Philippines. Rich in original research, Educating the Empire is an important contribution to histories of US colonialism in the Philippines.' Colleen Woods, University of Maryland, 'In this definitive and unique book, Steinbock-Pratt illuminates the experiences of the American men and women, both African-American and white, who traveled to the Philippines to educate, endure, and endorse the empire. In so doing, she tells a gripping tale about gender, race and power in the everyday institutions of imperialism; and the hopes, complexities, and limits of American empire.' Julian Go, Boston University, 'An impressively researched account of US teachers in the Philippines from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s.' Kristin Lee Hoganson, University of Illinois, 'Educating the Empire should be standard reading for anybody seeking to understand the cultural history of US colonialism in the Philippines.' Oliver Charbonneau, American Historical Review

Sarah Steinbock-Pratt is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama.