Roume’s 1903 education policy explicitly rejected assimilation in favor of adapted local schooling.

Evidence

In 1903, shortly after his arrival, Roume made the education of all France’s African subjects an official civilizing objective of his administration. This policy sheds light on two aspects of France’s mission civilisatrice, as interpreted in West Africa after 1895, which French judicial policy and the attack on slavery will also illuminate. The first aspect was a belief that Africans had to evolve within their own cultures rather than that of France. In the educational realm, this belief was evident in Roume’s repeated axiom that metropolitan curriculum had to be “adapted” to the special needs of the African peoples. This notion marked a conscious departure from the founding principles of the only French schools extant at the time of the creation of the Government General, those of the Four Communes in Senegal, which were based upon assimilation. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 256

Categorization

• SHARE: Could share with anyone studying colonial education policy — the 1903 date and the ‘adapted curriculum’ axiom anchor the shift.