Colonial schooling was designed to train labor while instilling French democratic principles

Evidence

What French West Africa needed, Roume reiterated, was not metropolitan education, but schools “adapted” to local conditions. … The point of education was to introduce mechanical arts and “give to these essentially malleable populations a respect for the grand principles that together constitute, so to speak, the patrimony of modern democracy.” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 269

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mise en valeur (economic development) defined as the 1903 educational reform goal.
• SEED: Article angle: how “adapted” colonial education in French West Africa used manual/vocational training as a vehicle for ideological indoctrination in republican values.