Analysis: Western Education And The Rise Of An African And Asian Middle Class

To varying degrees and for many of the same reasons as the British in India, all European colonizers sought to educate the children of African and Asian elite groups in Western-language schools. The early 19th-century debate over education in India was paralleled, for example, by an equally hard-fought controversy among French officials and missionaries regarding the proper schooling for the peoples of Senegal in West Africa. The Dutch did not develop European language schools for the sons of the Javanese elite until the middle of the 19th century, and many young Javanese males continued to be educated in the homes of the Dutch residing in the colonies until the end of the century. Like the British, the French and Dutch needed administrative assistants and postal clerks, and they could neither recruit enough Europeans to fill these posts nor afford the wages European employees would have demanded.

One of the chief advantages of having Western-educated African and Asian subordinates - for they were always below European officials or managers in the office or on the parade ground - was that their salaries were considerably lower than what Europeans would have been paid for doing the same work. The Europeans had no trouble rationalizing this inequity. Africans and Asians served in their own lands and were thus accustomed to life in the hot, humid, insect- and disease-ridden tropics. For the Europeans who worked in the colonies, life in these environments was deemed difficult, even dangerous. Higher pay was thought to compensate them for the "sacrifices" involved in colonial service. The Europeans also had a higher standard of living than Africans or Asians, and colonial officials assumed that European employees would be more hardworking and efficient.

Beyond the need for government functionaries and business assistants, each European colonizer stressed different objectives in designing Western-language schools for the children of upper-class families. As we have seen, the transmission of Western scientific learning and production techniques was a high priority for the British in India. Educational policymakers, such as Macaulay, also sought to teach the Indians Western literature and manners and to instill in them a Western sense of morality. As Macaulay put it, they hoped that English-language schools would turn out brown English gentlemen, who would in turn teach their countrymen the ways of the West.

The French, at least until the end of the 19th century, went even further. They stressed the importance of Africans and other colonial students mastering the French language and the subtleties of French culture. When the lessons had been fully absorbed and the students fully assimilated to French culture, they could become full citizens of France, no matter what their family origins or the color of their skin. Though only a tiny minority of the population of any French colony had the opportunity for the sort of schooling that would qualify them for French citizenship, there were thousands of Senegalese and hundreds of Vietnamese or Tunisians who could carry French passports, vote in French elections, and even run for seats in the French Parliament. Other European colonial powers adopted either the British or the French approach to education and its aims. The Dutch and Germans, for example, followed the British pattern, while the Portuguese pushed assimilation for even smaller numbers of the elite classes among the peoples they colonized.

Western education in the colonies succeeded in producing both clerks and railway conductors, and brown Indian gentlemen and black French citizens. It also had effects that those who shaped colonial educational policy did not intend, effects that would within a generation or two produce major challenges to the continuation of European colonial dominance. The population of most colonized areas was divided into many different ethnic, religious, and language groups with separate histories and identities. Western language schools gave the sons (and in limited instances, the daughters) of the leading families a common language in which to communicate. The schools also inculcated common attitudes and ideas and imparted to the members of diverse groups a common body of knowledge. In all European colonial societies, Western education led to similar occupational opportunities - in government service, with Western business firms, or as professionals (lawyers, doctors, journalists, etc.). Thus, within a generation after their introduction, Western-language schools had in effect created a new middle class in the colonies that had no counterpart in precolonial African or Asian societies.

Occupying social strata and economic niches in the middle range between the European colonizers and the old aristocracy on the one hand, and the peasantry and urban laborers on the other, Western-educated Africans and Asians within each colony became increasingly aware of the interests and grievances they had in common. They often found themselves at odds with the traditional rulers or the landed gentry, who ironically were often their fathers or grandfathers. Members of the new middle class also felt alienated from the peasantry, whose beliefs and way of life were so different from those they had learned in Western-language schools. For over a generation they clung to their European tutors and employers. Eventually, however, they grew increasingly resentful of their lower salaries, of European competition for scarce jobs, and of their social segregation from the Europeans, who often made little effort to disguise their contempt for even the most accomplished of the African or Asian students of Western ways. Thus, members of the new middle class in the colonies were caught between two worlds: the traditional ways and teachings of their fathers and the "modern" world of their European masters. Finding that they would be fully admitted to neither world, they rejected the first and set about supplanting the Europeans and building their own modern world.

Conclusion: The Pattern Of The Age Of Imperialism

Though the basic patterns of domination in European colonial empires remained similar to those worked out in Java and India in the early industrial period, the style of colonial rule and patterns of social interaction between colonizer and colonized changed considerably in the late 19th century. Racism and social snobbery became pervasive in contacts between the colonizers and their African and Asian subordinates. The Europeans consciously renounced the ways of dressing, eating habits, and pastimes that had earlier been borrowed from or shared with the peoples of the colonies. The colonizers no longer saw themselves simply as the most successful competitors in a many-sided struggle for political power. They were convinced that they were inherently superior beings, citizens of the most powerful, civilized, and advanced societies on earth. Colonial officials in the age of "high imperialism" were much more concerned than earlier administrators to pull the peasants, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population of all colonized societies, into the market economy and teach them the value of hard work and discipline. Colonial educators were determined to impress upon the children of the colonized elite classes the superiority of Western learning and of everything from political organization to fashions in clothing.

In striving for these objectives, the European colonizers started with the assumption that it was their duty to impose their own views and ways of doing things, rather than learn from others - to remake the world, insofar as the abilities of the "natives" would allow, in the image of industrial Europe. But in pushing for change within colonized societies that had ancient, deeply rooted cultures and patterns of civilized life, the Europeans frequently aroused resistance to specific policies and to colonial rule more generally. Though the colonizers were able to put down protest movements led by displaced princes and religious prophets, much more enduring and successful challenges to their rule came, ironically, from the leaders their social reforms and Western-language schools had done much to nurture. These nationalists reworked European ideas and resurrected those of their own cultures, borrowed European organizational techniques, and made use of the communications systems and common language the Europeans had introduced into the colonies to contest European dominance. The overwhelming dependence of the Europeans on the collaboration of colonized peoples to govern and police their empires rendered the Europeans particularly vulnerable to these challenges from within.