Racial theory held that education could not transmit civilisation between peoples

Evidence

The national mind was ‘the synthesis of a people’s entire past’, Le Bon explained, and took many generations to evolve. It followed from this that Europe would be unable to introduce modern civilisation, as was being frequently proposed, to other parts of the world simply by education. ‘A negro or a Japanese may easily take a university degree or become a lawyer’, wrote Le Bon in one of his works translated into Arabic. ‘The sort of varnish he thus acquires is however quite superficial, and has no influence on his mental constitution.’ Europe would have to alter not just the level of intelligence of a nation it hoped to modernise, as was then commonly thought, but its psyche. ‘To enable it to bequeath its civilisation to another people, it would be necessary that it should be able to bequeath its soul.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 397

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s interests in colonising knowledge and the politics of education; echoes the previous chapter’s discussion of how education and varnish were seen.
• SEED: Essay angle: the concept of ‘varnish’ — how colonizers framed native education as cosmetic surface, not genuine change, and how that framing persists in debates about DEI-style ‘surface training’.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 397