The school’s failure lay in its makers’ imaginaries and sabotage, not its subjects’ vanities

Evidence

Retrospectively, Soerabaja’s craft school could be considered unrealistic, utopian, and doomed from the start. But “what happened” to it is less to be found in the events surrounding its openings and closings than in the distorted imaginaries of its visionaries as to the space and subjects they sought to mold. They explained away its failure as the fault of a population blocked by its own false vanities, by refusal to sit at a “carpenter’s bench” rather than a desk. But as we have seen, not everyone agreed. Van Hoëvell’s assessment in the 1850s had been correct. The school was not a “natural” disaster but made a disaster, and was pointedly undermined by state authorities. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 753

Categorization

• XREF: The move of reading an institution’s real ‘what happened’ through distorted imaginaries rather than events parallels the reader’s interest in colonial epistemics and commonsense.