Colonial educational reform rhetoric cycled through romance narratives across seventy years

Evidence

What is striking in these conflicting and confused arguments over this seventy-year period is how much they changed. Ambacht schools, heralded in the 1860s, were seen as badly misguided twenty years later. By the 1880s both the artisanal and industrial romances had been largely abandoned, only to resurface at the turn of the century in revised form. But by then the size of the poor European and Indo population had grown even more. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 754

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The author’s term ‘romance’ for successive colonial reform narratives — artisanal, industrial, rural — each beloved then abandoned as ‘badly misguided,’ reads almost like the cycle of ideological enthusiasm in a settler novel: each generation’s fixation disowned wholesale by the next.