French colonial education policy embodied internal contradictions that made it self-defeating

Evidence

Equally to blame, however, was the confused program of “adapted” education itself. This approach attempted to reconcile objectives that were, in the end, simply incompatible. This confusion had always been there, but Panty’s reforms brought it out with special clarity. The same school system could not by definition produce French-speaking interpreters and clerks and efficient peasant farmers; nor could it simultaneously introduce the French language and even a limited knowledge of French institutions, and prevent Africans from aspiring to equality with the colonizer. Ponty and Hardy may have recognized the inherent dangers of an instruction based too closely on the metropolitan model; but they still thought in metropolitan terms when they decided to “adapt” French materials to the African environment rather than vice versa. Finally, it made little sense to promote the goal of social mobility and of keeping Africans tied to the land and “manual arts.” In all these instances, Dakar’s educational strategies accurately reflected contradictions in French ideology itself. This ideology embraced a paradoxical combination of practical considerations and idealistic ambitions for social change along the same lines as France. Adapted education, for better or worse, did the same. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 481

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘adapted education’ actually meant as a policy program and why it failed by definition.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”