Ambivalent histories: education, ‘race’, and the modernisation of settler/colonial governance in Australasia and the Pacific, 1900s–1960s

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Acknowledgements

This Introduction and the development of the Special Issue was undertaken as part of an Australian Research Council grant: DP200100728, ‘Progressive Education and Race: A Transnational History of Indigenous Education in Australia and Oceania, 1920s–1950s, Julie McLeod, Fiona Paisley, Sana Nakata, Tony Ballantyne.

Notes

¹ Joost J. Coté, ‘Colonial Education’, in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald, Springer International Handbooks of Education (Singapore: Springer, 2020), 259–76; Peter Kallaway, ‘Science and Policy: Anthropology and Education in British Colonial Africa during the Inter-War Years’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 3 (2012): 411–30; Rebecca Swartz and Peter Kallaway, ‘Editorial: Imperial, Global and Local in Histories of Colonial Education’, History of Education 47, no. 3 (2018): 362–7.

² Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

³ Tony Ballantyne, ed., The Making and Remaking of Australasia: Mobility, Texts and ‘Southern Circulations’ (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022); Remy Low and Helen Proctor, ‘Oceania and the History of Education,’ History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 201–19.

⁴ Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, new ed. (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2005); Fiona Paisley, ‘Applied Anthropology and Interwar Internationalism: Felix and Marie Keesing and the (White) Future of the “Native” Pan-Pacific’, Journal of Pacific History 50, no. 3 (2015): 304–21.

⁵ Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). See also Julie McLeod and Katie Wright, ‘Educating for “World-Mindedness”: Cosmopolitanism, Localism and Schooling the Adolescent Citizen in Interwar Australia’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 44, no. 4 (2012): 339–59; Fiona Paisley, ‘The Aboriginal Australians and the League of Coloured Peoples in London’, History Australia (forthcoming): https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2023.2203727; Judith A. Simon, ‘Anthropology, “Native Schooling” and Māori: The Politics of “Cultural Adaptation” Policies’, Oceania 69, no. 1 (1998): 61–78.

⁶ Ballantyne, Making and Remaking of Australasia. Further, Pan-Pacific internationalisms that emerged in the region in the interwar decades included education on their reform agendas and advocated forms of Indigenous self-representation, even as they reinvested in hierarchical notions of racial advancement. See Joyce Goodman, ‘Education, Internationalism and Empire at the 1928 and 1930 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conferences’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 46, no. 2 (2014): 145–59; Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific; Tomoko Akami, Internationalising the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–1945 (London: Routledge, 2002).

⁷ Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, eds., The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

⁸ Roland Sintos Coloma, ‘Empire: An Analytical Category for Educational Research’, Educational Theory 63, no. 6 (2013): 639–58; Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch and William Richardson, ‘“Empires Overseas” and “Empires at Home”: Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives on Social Change in the History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 695–706; Peter Kallaway, The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa : Education, Science and Development (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2020); Rebecca Swartz, ‘Histories of Empire and Histories of Education’, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 442–61; Swartz and Kallaway, ‘Editorial’; Charles Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1858–1983 (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

⁹ Elizabeth McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds., Handbook of Indigenous Education (Singapore: Springer, 2019); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, eds., Indigenous and Decolonising Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View (New York: Routledge, 2019).

¹⁰ Progressive Education and Race: A Transnational History of Indigenous Education in Australia and Oceania, 1920s-1950s: Julie McLeod (University of Melbourne), Fiona Paisley (Griffith University), Sana Nakata (James Cook University) with Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago), Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, DP200100728.

¹¹ Kevin J. Brehony, ‘From the Particular to the General, the Continuous to the Discontinuous: Progressive Education Revisited’, History of Education 30, no. 5 (2001): 413–32; John Howlett, Progressive Education: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Julie McLeod and Katie Wright, ‘Education for Citizenship: Transnational Expertise, Curriculum Reform and Psychological Knowledge in 1930s Australia’, History of Education Review 42, no. 2 (2013): 170–84.

¹² An important contribution to this emerging field has been made by Thomas D. Fallace, who has explored the relations between race and progressive education in the United States: Thomas D. Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880–1929 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015).

¹³ For example, Julie McLeod and Fiona Paisley, ‘The Modernization of Colonialism and the Educability of the “Native”: Transpacific Knowledge Networks and Education in the Interwar Years’, History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2016): 473–502; Paisley, ‘Applied Anthropology and Interwar Internationalism’.

¹⁴ Jeannie Herbert, ‘“Ceaselessly Circling the Centre”: Historical Contextualization of Indigenous Education within Australia’, History of Education Review 41, no. 2 (2012): 91–103; Beth Marsden, ‘“The System of Compulsory Education Is Failing”: Assimilation, Mobility and Aboriginal Students in Victorian State Schools, 1961–1968’, History of Education Review 47, no. 2 (1 October 2018): 143–54; Archie Thomas, ‘Bilingual Education, Aboriginal Self-Determination and Yolŋu Control at Shepherdson College, 1972–1983’, History of Education Review 50, no. 2 (2020): 196–211; Greg Vass et al., eds., The Relationality of Race in Education Research (London: Routledge, 2018).

¹⁵ Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994); Thomas S. Popkewitz, ed., Rethinking the History of Education: Transnational Perspectives on Its Questions, Methods, And Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

¹⁶ Peter Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation I: Schools’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 24 (2014): 5–28; Lake, Progressive New World.

¹⁷ Felicity Jensz, Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022); Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

¹⁸ As labour conditions dominated discussions, education as a site of reform was mostly overlooked. See Fiona Paisley, ‘Looking with Their Eyes and Feeling with Their Hearts: The Permanent Mandates Commission and Reform in the Mandates’, in League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact, ed. Joy Damousi and Patricia O’Brien (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), 214–36; Susan Pedersen, ‘Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 188–207.

¹⁹ Patricia O’Brien, Tautai: Sāmoa, World History and the Life of Tai’isi O. F. Nelson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017).

²⁰ See for example, Peter Kallaway, ‘William Bryant Mumford 1900–1951: Entrepreneur in Colonial Education’, History of Education (forthcoming): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0046760X.2023.2193812.

²¹ Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire : Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2012); Tony Ballantyne, ‘Empires, Modernisation and Modernities’, International Journal for History Culture and Modernity 2, no. 1 (2014): 25–42; Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn, 2014); Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Swartz, ‘Histories of Empire and Histories of Education’.

²² Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76–100; Sana Nakata, Childhood Citizenship, Governance and Policy: The Politics of Becoming (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Julie McLeod and Katie Wright, ‘The Promise of the New: Genealogies of Youth, Nation and Educational Reform in Australia’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 44, no. 4 (2012): 283–93.

²³ Fuchs and Roldán Vera, The Transnational in the History of Education; Kate Darian-Smith, Julie McLeod and Glenda Sluga, ‘Philanthropy and Public Culture: The Carnegie Corporation of New York in Australia’, workshop report, Academy of Social Sciences in Australia Newsletter (2010).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP200100728). Progressive Education and Race: A Transnational History of Indigenous Education in Australia and Oceania, 1920s–1950s