Education for Empire brings together topics in American history often treated separately: schools, race, immigration, and empire building. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American imperial ambitions abroad expanded as the country's public school system grew. How did this imperialism affect public education? School officials, teachers, and textbook authors used public education to place children, both native and foreign-born, on multiple uneven paths to citizenship. Using case studies from around the country, Clif Stratton deftly shows that public schooling and colonialism were intimately intertwined. This book reveals how students—from Asians in the U.S. West and Hawai‘i to blacks in the South, Mexicans in the Southwest, and Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean and New York City—grappled with the expectations of citizenship imposed by nationalist professionals at the helm of curriculum and policy. Students of American history, American studies, and the history of education will find Education for Empire an eminently valuable book.

This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality.

This book is about education and American imperialism from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror. Very little coordinated or sustained research has been devoted to the broader contours of America, education, and empire. And third, this volume seeks to inspire new directions in the study of American educational history.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire considers how teachers took up this task, first at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, and then in a school system set up amid an ongoing rebellion launched by Filipinos. Drawing upon the records of fifty-five teachers at Carlisle and thirty-three sent to the Philippines—including five who worked in both locations—the book reveals the challenges of translating imperial policy into practice, even for those most dedicated to the imperial mission. These educators, who worked on behalf of the US government, sought to meet the expectations of bureaucrats and supervisors while contending with leadership crises on the ground. In their stories, Elisabeth Eittreim finds the problems common to all classrooms—how to manage students and convey knowledge—complicated by their unique circumstances, particularly the military conflict in the Philippines. Eittreim’s research shows the dilemma presented by these schools’ imperial goal: “pouring in” knowledge that purposefully dismissed and undermined the values, desires, and protests of those being taught. To varying degrees these stories demonstrate both the complexity and fragility of implementing US imperial education and the importance of teachers’ own perspectives. Entangled in US ambitions, racist norms, and gendered assumptions, teachers nonetheless exhibited significant agency, wielding their authority with students and the institutions they worked for and negotiating their roles as powerful purveyors of cultural knowledge, often reinforcing but rarely challenging the then-dominant understanding of “civilization.” Examining these teachers’ attitudes and performances, close-up and in-depth over the years of Carlisle’s operation, Eittreim’s comparative study offers rare insight into the personal, institutional, and cultural implications of education deployed in the service of US expansion—with consequences that reach well beyond the imperial classrooms of the time.

"The barbarian rules by force; the cultivated conqueror teaches." This maxim form the age of empire hints at the usually hidden connections between education and conquest. In Learning to Divide the World, John Willinsky brings these correlations to light, offering a balanced, humane, and beautifully written account of the ways that imperialism's educational legacy continues to separate us into black and white, east and west, primitive and civilized.

In vivid prose, the author recovers the world of American teachers who followed the flag of an expanding American empire from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to Manilla, American teachers at the turn of the twentieth century in search of work, adventure, and meaning.