Colonial education aimed to create a domestic serving class barred from its own comforts

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: This caste-like design — workers who render bourgeois comfort but never expect it — parallels the Burakumin/untouchable logics and echoes the extractive racial labor orders described in other colonial studies.

Related

• Colonial administrators deliberately denied Eurasian children the education that might raise their status (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial authorities adapted European discipline institutions to perceived local sensitivities (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial education aimed to limit indigenous aspirations rather than expand them (similarity 0.82)
• Vocational schools meant for orphans served comfortable European families instead (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial elites envisioned orphan colonies as instruments of racial improvement (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial industrial policy imagined class-making from the mixed-blood poor (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial craft training served the desires of a fantasized European elite (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial education policy deliberately aimed to avoid creating nationalist intellectuals (similarity 0.79)