Abstract
Between the emancipation of slaves in 1833, and 1880, where this study concludes, there were dramatic changes to how education was perceived in both metropolitan and colonial contexts. Increasingly, education was seen as an area for government involvement. However, this did not necessarily translate into increased education for Indigenous children. As attitudes towards race hardened, education was seen as something that should cater to the unique abilities and social positions of different races. This often meant that industrial education was promoted for Indigenous children in the settler colonies. Humanitarian thinking had promoted education as a way for Indigenous children to enter into 'civilised' society. However, hostility towards Indigenous people in the settler colonies, and competition over land and the need for labour, meant that these opportunities were often denied to Indigenous people.
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- 1.
Bishop John William Colenso, ‘On the Efforts of Missionaries among Savages’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, 3 (1865), 248–289, 278.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Ibid., 250.
- 4.
Ibid., 278.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Robert Plant, ‘Minute on Native Education’, in Plant, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education for 1889’, TNA CO 181/28.
- 7.
Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–1908 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 55.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Report of a Commission Appointed by His Excellency the Governor to Inquire into the Treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners of the Crown in This Colony: And Also into Certain Other Matters Relative to Aboriginal Natives (Perth: Government Printer, 1884), 4.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Reports from Bishop Hale and F. Dominguez, in ibid., 17.
- 12.
Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia, 2nd edn (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1992), 6–8.
- 13.
See for example Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2012); Bruce Gilley’s now withdrawn article ‘The Case for Colonialism’, Third World Quarterly (2017).
- 14.
For example, many of the early leaders of the African National Congress in South Africa were second generation Christians, aspiring to middle class ‘white’ values. Natasha Erlank, ‘Gender and Masculinity in South African Nationalist Discourse, 1912–1950’, Feminist Studies, 29 (2003), 653–671, 656.
- 15.
Savo Heleta, ‘Decolonisation of Higher Education: Dismantling Epistemic Violence and Eurocentrism in South Africa’, Transformation in Higher Education, 1 (2016), a9.
- 16.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Nairobi: East African Publishers, 1994).
- 17.
Helen Ludlow, ‘State Schooling and the Cultural Construction of Teacher Identity in the Cape Colony, 1839–1865’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 2011), 5.
- 18.
Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 273–275.
- 19.
António Nóvoa, ‘Empires Overseas and Empires at Home’, Paedagogica Historica, 45 (2009), 817–821, 818.
- 20.
See Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995). Margaret Jacobs and Katherine Ellinghaus both compare Australian and American contexts: Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
- 21.
Haebich, For Their Own Good, 85.
- 22.
Report of the Superintendent of Education for the year ended 30th June, 1908, TNA CO 181/66; Meghan Elisabeth Healy, ‘“To Control Their Destiny”: The Politics of Home and the Feminisation of Schooling in Colonial Natal, 1885–1910’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37 (2011), 247–264, 252.
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Swartz, R. (2019). Conclusion: The ‘Chief Blessing of Civilisation, the Benefit of Education’. In: Education and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_8
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