French schooling produced African elites who rejected colonial discipline

Evidence

The failure of the policy of assimilation became flagrant the day we noticed, among those natives trained in our schools and abruptly separated from their environment, a different frame of mind and a marked tendency to elude the discipline, which an evolved society has the right to expect of its members. Undoubtedly, in West Africa, some elite subjects have avoided the normal consequences of this kind of displacement, but the aspirations of the majority are directed toward different objectives from those that the colonizer intended for them, in their own best interest, of course. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 574

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Article angle: the ‘mission to civilize’ as a self-defeating program - colonial education created precisely the class who dismantled the colonizer’s assumptions. Merlin’s admission that educated Africans ‘elude the discipline’ is the confession at the heart of assimilation’s failure.

Related

• French officials condemned educated Africans as unruly products of assimilation (similarity 0.88)
• French schooling created a rootless, rebellious African educated elite. (similarity 0.88)
• Adapted colonial education still rested on French cultural superiority premises. (similarity 0.85)
• French-educated African clerks became colonial critics, not loyal servants (similarity 0.85)
• West African colonial education aimed at loyalty to individual Frenchmen (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial schools trained African teachers as cheap agents of French rural influence. (similarity 0.83)
• French colonial adapted education defined African futures only negatively at first (similarity 0.83)
• French republicanism deliberately leveled African aristocracies by schooling all social classes together. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial schools selectively reinforced African morality while replacing it where it clashed (similarity 0.82)
• Belief in French superiority shaped how colonial administrators governed. (similarity 0.82)
• French education transformed native chiefly authority from force-based to value-based. (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar French colonial doctrine shifted in response to African resistance. (similarity 0.81)
• French civilizing doctrine rejected both assimilation and nonintervention, favoring supervised African evolution (similarity 0.81)
• French colonial policy in West Africa was republican, not assimilationist or associationist (similarity 0.81)
• French rule after 1918 shifted from assimilation to associating African elites. (similarity 0.81)