Colonial school hierarchies converted bureaucratic geography into national pilgrimage

Evidence

Uniform textbooks, standardized diplomas and teaching certificates, a strictly regulated gradation of age-groups, classes and instructional materials, in themselves created a self-contained, coherent universe of experience. But no less important was the hierarchy’s geography. Standardized elementary schools came to be scattered about in villages and small townships of the colony; junior and senior middle-schools in larger towns and provincial centres; while tertiary education (the pyramid’s apex) was confined to the colonial capital of Batavia and the Dutch-built city of Bandung, 100 miles south-west in the cool Priangan highlands. Thus the twentieth-century colonial school-system brought into being pilgrimages which paralleled longer-established functionary journeys. The Rome of these pilgrimages was Batavia: not Singapore, not Manila, not Rangoon, not even the old Javanese royal capitals of Jogjakarta and Surakarta. From all over the vast colony, but from nowhere outside it, the tender pilgrims made their inward, upward way, meeting fellow-pilgrims from different, perhaps once hostile, villages in primary school; from different ethnolinguistic groups in middle-school; and from every part of the realm in the tertiary institutions of the capital. And they knew that from wherever they had come they still had read the same books and done the same sums. They also knew, even if they never got so far – and most did not – that Rome was Batavia, and that all these journeyings derived their ‘sense’ from the capital, in effect explaining why ‘we’ are ‘here’ ‘together.’ — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 462

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘trees as infrastructure’ article’s grafting metaphor parallels this ‘grafted’ school-system where a centralized curriculum roots a colony-wide identity — the school pyramid as an infrastructure that binds scattered populations.
• XREF: connects to: Educational and administrative pilgrimages built national imagined communities — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 604

Related

• Educational and administrative pilgrimages built national imagined communities (similarity 0.83)
• Shared bureaucratic pilgrimage transforms colonial states into national states (similarity 0.82)
• An imagined community only solidifies when educational and administrative pilgrimages coincide (similarity 0.79)