Colonial education aimed to starve desires, not merely discipline them

Evidence

Cultivating spare needs addressed a third shortcoming of the earlier craft-based efforts. If their “haughtiness” and insolence (which “excessive” education was thought to encourage) would stand in the students’ way, here was an organic antidote to it built on an artful plan. The agricultural colonies were to curb frustrations by curbing desires; these were to provide environments that neither animated those sensibilities nor prompted youth to think of themselves as deserving parity with “full” Europeans. This was more than a project in harnessing the passions; it was a project designed to starve the growth of those desires and remove the conditions for their production. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 775

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between curing desires and removing the conditions for their production is a dense analytical move — a colonial project aimed at the very possibility of certain subjectivities, resonant far beyond this case.
• XREF: connects to: US colonial education reforms aimed to Americanize Puerto Rican students — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 929; Boarding schools aimed to extinguish native culture by manufacturing consumer desires — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1198