Introduction: Social Class and Mass Preschool Education in Fiji

Abstract

One morning as I sat cross-legged on the floor of a kindergarten in Suva, Fiji, waiting for the morning prayer, the five-year-old girls clustered around me began explaining the ethnicity of their classmates. In the five weeks that I had observed this kindergarten, the children had rarely mentioned ethnicity in the “multiracial” class comprising roughly equal numbers of children from Fiji’s two major ethnic groups, indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijian descendants of indentured laborers brought to Fiji in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a smattering of children from other groups. But that day they decided to explain things to me. “This one, she’s a kai India (literally: person of India),” volunteered one girl, “and I’m a kai Viti (person of Fiji).”