Colonial child-rearing policy aimed to standardize European children’s emotions of belonging

Evidence

In the nineteenth-century Indies, preoccupation with the making of virtuous selves prompted recurrent debates over where the cultivation of those selves should take place and who should be charged with responsibility for it: in state institutions or in families; at isolated hill-station boarding schools or carefully guarded urban orphanages; with European parents (however impoverished or ill-educated) or surrogate providers; residence in the colonies or in Europe; via proximity to parents or through removal from the home. Policymakers, parents, doctors, and teachers stumbled repeatedly over the same question, whether what it took to be European required the instilling of specific formal knowledge or less tangible ways of being and feeling about the (Javanese) worlds they did not know, and feelings of belonging in the European milieus in which they lived. For nearly a century, between the 1830s and 1930s, Dutch authorities called on experienced counsel and expert knowledge to determine how best to provide European children in the Indies with a sense of national belonging and racial affiliation and to gauge to what extent an education of the sentiments could be mobilized for both purposes. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 414

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader work on colonial common sense and how affect/emotional education was a tool of rule — parallels arguments in Stoler’s related scholarship.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘education of the sentiments’ raised as a deliberate policy tool is worth chasing — what specific curricula and techniques did Dutch authorities devise to cultivate feelings of racial affiliation in children?