Colonial administrators deliberately denied Eurasian children the education that might raise their status

Evidence

The Indies’ “home-grown” Europeans were targets of reform, discipline, and domestication. But they were also envisaged as important actors in a future racial order that would buttress the colony’s stability as it fostered a move to the modern. Some imagined a modernized technology manned by Inlandsche kinderen as subordinate technicians within industry. Others sought to provide limited practical training but not the analytic knowledge and advanced education that proper industrial schools would allow. Over and again, colonial authorities warned one another against schools that might prompt “illusions about the future.” In short, this was a population that was to provide the amenities and comforts of a European bourgeois lifestyle for a growing colonial community that they themselves, reared in austere institutional environments, would never want to attain, or expect to afford. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 726

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the structure of colonial education policy described elsewhere in work on epistemic hierarchies in colonial archives.
• SEED: Essay angle: how ‘illusions about the future’ functioned as an explicit administrative rationale in colonial schooling policy.