French colonial schooling classified African morality as barbaric and replaced offending local norms

Evidence

Like administrators in their courts, teachers in their classrooms were to distinguish between barbaric and acceptable African morality. Examples of false African morality were vices such as vanity, laziness, and lavishness; virtues that the French were to reinforce (or introduce) included development of a conscience, duties to oneself, to one’s family, to other people, to the weak and aged; respect for property and the honor of others. Where parental, community, or religious morality did not offend, schools were to reinforce it; the French did not want the African family disintegrating. When local notions offended, superior French ones were to take their place. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s parallel study of ‘immodesty’ moral panics as class/identity signaling — both show European civilization-defining moral categories. — connects to: Colonial schooling forced Glissant to learn spurious French ancestors. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 46
• DEFINE: Reveals the exact content of colonial ‘moral education’: which local values were tolerated, which supplanted.