Indies child-reform schemes deliberately calibrated youth to racial subordination, not uplift

Evidence

Where utopian and colonial visionaries differed was in how they conceived of the moral and cultural training of the young, where it should occur, under whose aegis, and at what age. In the Indies, children’s agricultural colonies, industrial schools, nurseries, and various apprenticeship programs were envisioned as sites for learning one’s proper racialized place; self-discipline, limited expectations, and spartan conditions of labor and living would serve those ends. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 792

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s guiding question about how colonial commonsense manages epistemic anxieties, showing that the very object of ‘improvement’ is a racialized hierarchy rather than individual betterment.