Colonists framed parental grief as the core grievance

Evidence

On Sunday the twenty-first, the day before the public gathering, Van Hoëvell made a last effort to articulate the nature of the discontent to the Governor-General, “to neutralize any biased and false rumors Your Excellency might have heard.” Again he stated that the cause of their collective disquiet was “the backward state of education in the Indies which has made it absolutely necessary for those Europeans born here to separate themselves from their children at a tender age and forever break the bond between parents and their offspring.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 479

Categorization

• QUESTION: Did the emotional register of ‘broken parent-child bonds’ prove rhetorically effective specifically because it matched Dutch domestic norms about family? Worth tracing how metropolitan sentimental discourse licensed colonial petition claims.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how ‘the education question’ operated in colonial contexts as a socially legitimate channel for what were effectively proto-political autonomy claims — parallels with contemporary school-board politics.