Oceania and the history of education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we offer a survey of histories of education in the region commonly known as ‘Oceania’, which broadly encompasses the subregions today known as Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. The first part of this article addresses ‘the history of education in Oceania’ as a topic of both interest and omission. In the second part of this article, we attend to the question of how Oceania was crucial to the formation of northern and western European systems of scientific knowledge. Overall, we propose that working with ‘Oceania’ as a frame of vision in the history of education has the potential not only to address some big gaps in the literature, but also to productively challenge some of our field’s foundational narratives about progress, land, nations, system-building, and colonialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Oceania
• colonialism
• schooling
• Indigenous knowledge
• history of science
• history

Introduction

So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – to grasp some of her shape, plumage and pain.¹

The history of education is a field that has traditionally been associated with cities, landmasses, national boundaries, and bricks and mortar civic institutions, with somewhere like Western Europe as the normative region of the historian’s imagination. Western Europe and Northern America have become exemplary cases by virtue of their long histories of systematised schooling, their crowded populations and the richness of the academic field that has – in scholarly wave after wave – described and interpreted them. The challenge we take up in this essay is to examine Oceania in relation to the scholarly field, the history of education. We undertake this task even though a field of study called ‘the history of education in Oceania’ does not exist in the way that we would be confident in saying it existed for Europe, or Latin America, to offer two large examples, or for Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, to offer two smaller ones. There is no joined up body of work that announces itself as the history of education in Oceania and few publications in history of education journals or books that are about places in Oceania, other than the ‘first world’ locations, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Hawai‘i. Even more importantly for the purpose of this article, almost no one has taken ‘Oceania’ (or something equivalent by another name) as a regional category of reference on writing history of education. In outlining an agenda for the academic field of Pacific Studies – a field from which we draw some insights for this article – the poet and intellectual Teresia Teaiwa distinguishes between studies that treat places that happen to be in the Pacific and those that work with the Pacific as a concept or frame. Pacific Studies, she argues, ‘must be more than simply an accumulation of national studies’² and this is a distinction we also make for Oceania, starting with a brief discussion about Oceania as a region and as a field of analysis.

This article is a response to an invitation by the editors of the international British-based journal History of Education to contribute to a collection of synoptic pieces that deal with the history of education in several different countries and regions of the world. Our brief was to discuss the state of the field and to consider the future of the field. We were initially allocated the region of ‘Australasia’, but after some discussion we recast this as ‘Oceania’, aware of the overweighting of the region’s wealthiest and largest nation, Australia, in the former term, and of the wider geographic reach and anticolonial genealogy of the latter. While ultimately any regional naming or grouping or boundary drawing is contestable, the call to theorise the region as a ‘sea of islands’ rather than ‘islands in a sea’ has been resonant in writing from Fiji, Hawai‘i and elsewhere, as we note below. The ‘ocean’ in Oceania is distinctive and important. We also note that the identification of schooling and curriculum as sites of anticolonial struggle is a crucial cohering theme in the history of education in the region, whether taking education in the narrower institutional sense, or broader social and cultural meanings.

The first part of this article addresses ‘the history of education in Oceania’ as a topic of both interest and omission, outlining some of the useful work that has been done from within the named field of history of education and also – necessarily – looking beyond it for ideas. We discuss Oceania as a distinctive site for the making and studying of education history and we map the contours of what has been written by academics about its history of education, whether self-identified or not with the named field. In the second part of this article, we attend to the question of how Oceania – far from being the remote place that the gaps in history of education scholarship might suggest, or the vacant recipient of colonial educational impositions – was crucial to the formation of Northern and Western European systems of scientific knowledge as well as ‘modern’ ideas concerning educability and pedagogy. Overall, this article is intended as a call for the exploration of a specific set of fresh perspectives in the scholarly field, the history of education. We propose that working with ‘Oceania’ as a frame of vision in the history of education has the potential not only to address some big gaps in the literature, but also to productively challenge some of our field’s foundational narratives regarding nations and regions, knowledge formation and colonialism. We argue both that more histories of education need to be written for Oceania – of all kinds and at all levels of focus – and that considering Oceania in relation to the field of history of education requires some rethinking of the field itself.

Oceania as a region of interest for the history of education

To begin to understand the history of education in Oceania, we argue that it is necessary to try to grasp its distinctiveness as a place of human settlement, and how its history, geography, politics and ecology upend the kind of balance between land and water that has shaped educational forms and practices on continents where most people live with national borders that are only as wide as a line on a map. The quotation at the top of this article celebrating the size and diversity of the region comes from the classic anticolonial essay, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, published in 1976 by the Samoan author and foundational Pacific Studies scholar Albert Wendt. Wendt’s essay was influential in calling for a ‘new’ ocean-based regional identity during a period when several former colonies in the Pacific were transitioning from overseas administration to forms of self-government or formal independence. (Among the essay’s urgings was a call for educational change; Wendt described colonial schooling systems as ‘whitefication’.³) In the early 1990s, another key thinker and writer, Epeli Hau’ofa, who, among other contributions was founding director of the University of the South Pacific’s Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture, emphasised the distinctiveness of the maritime interconnectedness of the Oceanic region, proposing that Oceania should be considered to be a ‘sea of islands’ rather than ‘islands in a far sea’. This framing was also anticolonial; intended to overturn reductive, developmentalist representations of the region’s islands as tiny, isolated and backward.⁴

More recently the historian Tracey Banivanua Mar placed Oceania at the forefront (‘not lagging in the slipstream’⁵) of global decolonialisation movements, by drawing attention to, as an example, the mobilisation in the 1970s of diverse coalitions of Pacific Indigenous peoples in opposition to nuclear testing in the region. Banivanua Mar is one of several twenty-first-century scholars to distinguish between the formal administrative decolonisation represented by lowering of imperial flags, and the enduring settler colonialism that is a ‘structure, not an event’.⁶ Treating the Pacific ‘as an integrated site of analysis’ rather than a set of discrete nation-states and territories,⁷ she points out that in the nineteenth century the Pacific world ‘was an interlinked, interdependent and highly contingent world of shared markets, trades and desires’.⁸ In the twentieth, decolonisation was ‘a set of ideas, processes and practices, [that] flowed through the region’.⁹ Among her contributions of interest for the history of education is the attention she pays to the strategic, expert and trans-local uses by Indigenous leaders and activists of literacy in global languages and discourses.¹⁰

The region we describe in this paper as Oceania is bounded by Australia to the east and encompasses such island or archipelago nations, sub-regions and territories as Aotearoa New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia and Hawai‘i. It is an extraordinarily vast region – the Pacific Ocean is the largest entity on earth, traversing both the Equator and the International Dateline. It is mainly made up of water and is very sparsely populated in relation to its size. The nation of Kiribati is quite an extreme example of this, comprising more than 30 atolls spread over an area larger than India with an estimated total population of only 115,000.¹¹ The 11 Pacific Island nations that are World Bank members (aid and development agencies are active in the region) have a combined populations of about 2.3 million.¹² Australia, by contrast, has a population of more than 25 million (much of it clustered along the Pacific coast). There is significant ethnic, racial and cultural diversity across the region including thousands¹³ of Indigenous languages, in addition to a plethora of colonial and migrant languages. Oceanic populations have been shaped in complex ways by its histories of colonialism and also by longer histories of exchange and encounter. Human migration has in different places and at different times occurred over smaller or larger distances, been massive, small scale, forced, voluntary, opportunistic, embraced or reluctantly resorted to. Teresia Taiwa describes in the following terms the impossibility of easily summarising the region (even though the boundaries she is drawing – which exclude Australia – differ from our inclusions in Oceania):

In the field I work in, Pacific Studies, it is impossible to know everything about the 1200 distinct cultural groups among 7–10 million people living in and around the world’s largest and oldest ocean, in some of the world’s most vulnerable and precious ecosystems.¹⁴

The naming of places and the setting of territorial or categorical boundaries around and within them is rarely straightforward or neutral. For Oceania, many have drawn attention to the colonialist histories and contested presents of the classificatory practices associated with European (re)namings of this part of the world, such as the racialised origins of a term like ‘Melanesia’, to refer to both a place and its people (as we discuss below).¹⁵ Other past and present attempts to name and categorise parts of Oceania have included ‘the South Seas’ (populated by ‘South Sea Islanders’), Polynesia and Micronesia. Nor do people always imagine the same exclusions and inclusions when using the term Oceania, or any of the other terms that have identified and located this part of the world as a coherent region. As Teresia Teaiwa points out:

The region of the Pacific itself is not consistently defined … it can stretch as far as Timor Leste, or it can stop at Papua New Guinea; anglophone scholars typically neglect francophone territories … Hawai‘i and New Zealand are … often excluded from the realm of Pacific Studies because of their status as First World societies; and a new configuration called ‘Pacific Islander Studies’ transcends national boundaries to follow Pacific people to their farthest migrations.¹⁶

Derek Taira (one of a small handful of education historians who directly addresses ‘Oceania’) proposes that considering Hawai‘i as a part of Oceania rather than as an outpost of the USA offers a rich and different set of connections and comparisons for the study of those islands. Taira describes Hawai‘i (citing Hau’ofa) as ‘a chain of islands deeply connected to the linguistic, cultural, environmental, and geographic histories of the region’s vast “sea of islands”’.¹⁷ Our rationale for including Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand is partly that they have to be put somewhere if they are to belong to a region, but mostly because they are oriented towards the Pacific through their own histories of colonising invasion, concentrations of settlement, indigeneity and through trade, travel, migration and regional diplomatic groupings.¹⁸ We have, however, not included other islands or archipelagos with Pacific coasts – for example Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines – or the western Americas, despite being part of the ‘Pacific Rim’ (a term that, according to Epeli Hau’ofa, causes Oceania to ‘disappear into the black hole of a gigantic pan-Pacific doughnut’).¹⁹

The preparation for the writing of a survey like this for another region – or even just for Australia – would perhaps begin by methodically sorting through a vast number of books and papers that clearly identify themselves as relevant histories of education, including several ‘state of the field’ historiographical essays.²⁰ There is no equivalent for Oceania. The obvious places and pathways do not exist as a body of work that is joined up either by cross-citation, or by identification with the field of history of education.²¹ Any mapping of the topic requires work beyond the current field as defined by such journals as History of Education Review (to name the journal of the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society), History of Education, Paedagogica Historica and so on – or through the kinds of edited books or monographs that might be reviewed in their pages. One recent exception to the scarcity of joint studies brings Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand together – rarely done despite 50 years of a joint history of education society – in an entry in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Education. Craig Campbell and Maxine Stephenson suggest that studying Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand together can further illuminate, among other things, their common yet distinct Indigenous and British colonial histories and the different and common ways that ‘each country regarded itself, especially in the 1880–1920 period, as a progressive social laboratory’.²²

Another project involving Craig Campbell is the 2007 book Going to School in Oceania, co-edited with Geoffrey Sherington. It was ‘the first major effort to write an overview of the history of education in the South West Pacific’²³ and remains the only book length publication to announce itself as a history of education in Oceania. The volume was commissioned by US historians Alan Sadovnik and Susan Semel as editors of a series called ‘The Global School Room’, a project that by mapping the educational world was aimed at understanding schools in their local contexts and de-centring the USA and challenging the ‘ethnocentrism’ of the West.²⁴ Five country histories are included in the book, for Australia, Fiji, Aotearoa New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Samoa, with an overarching discussion of the region provided by the introduction, and a chapter structure that is intended to support comparative reading. Each chapter is organised by time period (nineteenth and twentieth century) and school type (in the sense of primary and secondary schools). Using these locally focused studies to explain the specificity of local and national trajectories and contingencies, the authors reject a more old-fashioned view that modern education in Oceania was simply the result of northern colonisers’ impositions of norms, languages, religions, and economic and political modes of organising. At the same, time patterns do emerge across the five very different places, including the transfer in governance from missionary to secular authorities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and more recent initiatives to support and strengthen Indigenous languages and curricula inside schools. The crucial feature that stands out across the chapters, and across histories of education more broadly, is the remarkable robustness of the classroom-based school as a social institution. The twentieth century saw the school’s increasing dominance over the daily lives of children, young people and families;²⁵ the twenty-first has intensified its influence as the producer of international indices against which national success and modernisation are measured and ranked.²⁶

It would be useful to have more of this kind of reference work – more comprehensive coverage of schools and schooling across more nations, islands and territories, whether in book, chapter or article form, and initiatives like the Australian and New Zealand online Dictionary of the History of Education, DEHANZ, also founded by Craig Campbell.²⁷ We also suggest that there is plenty more work to be done at the transnational level. Few have taken ‘Oceania’ as a regional category of reference on writing history of education, even since the rising awareness of the importance of the transnational in history of education in the twenty-first century and the relatively recent flourishing of new perspectives on empire and colonialism²⁸ and missionaries.²⁹ The history of migrants and migration in relation to education is underdeveloped for Oceania as it is more generally,³⁰ although there is rich potential in studies of transpacific migration that do sometimes consider Oceania.³¹ While the main focus of existing work is usually on the points of departure and arrival on either side of the Pacific Ocean, this literature suggests ways of attending to overlooked histories of the educational experiences of ‘Asians’ in Oceania.³² (The use of quotation marks around ‘Asians’ is intended to signal the term’s complexity and varied and often imprecise use in the region.)

Another picture of Oceania emerges from studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that view the region as both meeting place and site of concern for internationally minded travellers with different kinds of educational agendas. Kay Whitehead is one of several authors interested in the biographies of career-building travelling women teachers.³³ Others have examined the work of international conferences, for example describing Honolulu as ‘Geneva-in-the-Pacific’.³⁴ In an examination of the records of a 1936 conference held in Honolulu on the topic of the educational provision for the ‘native peoples in the Pacific’, Julie McLeod and Fiona Paisley demonstrate how archival collections such as the extensive papers of this meeting offer insights into the activism of early- and mid-twentieth-century anthropologists and other social scientists as they sought to ‘modernise’ colonial race relations.³⁵ Other work suggests possibilities for further consideration of the relationship between tourism and education, such as Tamson Pietsch’s history of the ‘Floating University’, a 1926–1927 US around-the-world charter cruise, promoted by its sponsors and organisers as combining experiential education with institutional university teaching on board.³⁶

Much of the work cited in this article suggests a substantially broader conceptualising of education than schooling. While it has been many decades since Whiggish historians equated the rise of schooling with both education and enlightenment, there is still significant scope for considering how histories of education might be written for Oceania that do not even have schools – or perhaps even writing – either at their centre or even lurking in the background. In a handbook chapter, ‘Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific’, Adrea Lawrence advises historians of education to:

take seriously the premise that education manifests in many different ways, including those we might not yet recognize. This means in turn that we examine, as texts, that which is performed through ceremony or story or chant, is pictographic, and is written. Learning to interpret such texts requires a curiosity and humility that undergird modes of inquiry that are inclusive of how different communities have come to know the world around them.³⁷

We recommend reading widely in Pacific Studies as well as in new histories, archaeologies, anthropologies and so on, both from within and about Oceania, including studies of knowledge and culture in all its forms. We also note that much of the work in and around the history of education in Oceania comes from outside the region looking in, although this is much less true now than in the heyday of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropological approaches to Pacific cultures. In any case, the final work we mention in this part of the article is a new book by historian and museum curator Leah Lui-Chivizhe, who, citing Greg Dening, writes, ‘In writing this history, I was inspired … to tell a history of Oceania in a double-visioned way, from both sides of the beach’.³⁸ Her book, Masked Histories: Turtle Shell Masks and Torres Strait Islander People, is a ground-breaking study of the Turtle shell masks of the Torres Strait: how they were made, how they were used, and how they are constitutive of the history and present of Islander understandings of and relations with the sea.³⁹ Lui-Chivizhe draws extensively on the detailed records of nineteenth-century British anthropologists and the like, but ‘re-places the turtle shell masks within an Islander’s sense of history, directed through key Islander forms of historical narrative that include story-telling and performance’.⁴⁰

Oceania and the making of modern education

From the overview of tendencies in the history of education in Oceania, we now turn towards the question of how Oceania – far from being a distant curiosity as suggested by the patchiness of scholarship on the history of education in the region, or a pliable repository for colonial educational impositions – was crucial to the formation of Northern and Western European systems of scientific knowledge, and by extension modern education. This extension, as we highlight below at multiple points, is far from incidental: modern knowledge formations like the sciences have asserted themselves in modern curricula (e.g. through schemas of ‘rationality’) and pedagogy (e.g. through narratives of ‘human development’).⁴¹ Hence, in what follows, we shall foreground how modern histories of scientific knowledge formation and education beyond this region – specifically in Europe – are inextricably bound to the histories of knowledge formation and education in this region. The burden of this part of our article is thus to put to bed the idea that somehow the history of education in Oceania is only relevant to those with an explicit personal, practical, political or scholarly concern for it. On the contrary, we suggest that partly because of imperial expansion through colonisation since ‘the long sixteenth century’⁴² – and in this region gradually from European expeditions in that century right up to the imposition of colonial rule in the eighteenth⁴³ – the histories of education globally, especially European (and Euro-American) ones, are incomplete without an account of its entanglement with the histories of Oceania. No history or history of education is strictly circumscribable within the bounds of a geographical or cultural region.

This entanglement is nowhere more apparent than when considering what is commonly considered the crowning jewel of Western European educational history: ‘modern science’, which is often spoken of as synonymous with so-called ‘western science’.⁴⁴ For instance, in his otherwise informative and nuanced book on ‘non-Western educational traditions’, Reagan offers a historical narrative of modern science that while not entirely linear, nonetheless follows a trajectory largely driven by internal debates and development in what he calls the ‘Western educational tradition’. While acknowledging that ‘the western tradition certainly has no monopoly over science’, he nonetheless avers that:

What differentiates the western scientific tradition from others is the gradual evolution of both scientific thought and method over the centuries in a relatively unbroken line, from the ancient Greeks, to medieval Muslim philosophers and scientists, to the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, and to the secular sciences of the modern period.⁴⁵

This ‘unbroken line’ thus includes the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ from the end of the sixteenth century, through the ‘major scientific breakthroughs’ of the nineteenth century including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the professionalisation of science in European universities, all the way to the early twentieth century’s scientific ‘revolutions’ such as particle physics, genetics, plate tectonic geology and so on.⁴⁶ While such a genealogy of modern science features occasionally as apologia for education in the achievements of ‘Western civilisation’,⁴⁷ Reagan’s recounting of it strikes as peculiar because of his reflexive critique of ethnocentrism, as well as his treatment of Indigenous educational thought in Oceania.⁴⁸ Yet as historians of science and of the Pacific region have demonstrated for some time, the conditions through which so-called ‘Western science’ was developed was by no means immanent to Europe. When considering the advancement of biological, environmental, medical, chemical, physical, meteorological and geographical sciences since the eighteenth century, as Palladino and Worboys point out: ‘In every case the imperial context was crucial to the instigation of research, provided the resources used to solve the problem, and shaped the form of the knowledge produced’.⁴⁹ Within this imperial context, the region we have delineated as Oceania has occupied a key – if not a prime – position in the development of scientific knowledge that has come to shape not only what Europe thought of this region, but also of itself and its populations.

As a way of organising this complex entanglement of European and Oceanian histories in what follows – including their respective histories of education – we take as a starting point Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pithy dissection of presumed metonymic terms for the histories of Europe such as ‘Enlightenment’, ‘modernity’, ‘liberalism’, ‘the sciences’ and ‘public education’:

The project of the Enlightenment is often referred to as ‘modernity’ and that project is said to have provided the stimulus for the industrial revolution, the philosophy of liberalism, the development of disciplines in the sciences and the development of public education. Imperialism underpinned and was critical to these developments. Whilst imperialism is often thought of as a system which drew everything back into the centre, it was also a system which distributed materials and ideas outwards.⁵⁰

There is much to unpack in Smith’s quote, not to mention her monumental and compendious corpus dedicated to undoing much of what she describes here. We will draw on her work frequently below. At present, it is useful to note two points from the above-mentioned passage: first, that imperialism underpinned some of the trademark accomplishments that many have come to associate with Europe; and second, that this imperial system involved a double movement of drawing everything back into the centre (i.e. European metropoles), and then distributing materials and ideas outward (i.e. to the colonies). As already foreshadowed, this is no more apparent than in the development of the sciences, including the human sciences that would come to shape educational thought in both imperial metropoles and the colonies. To begin, we will consider what was drawn into those centres from Oceania.

Science: from Oceania to Europe

Since at least the early sixteenth century, the areas of the southern Pacific that we have labelled Oceania have been a crucial testing ground for emergent European sciences – a place that many Europeans imagined as ‘an isolated and pristine laboratory where the development of plants, animals, and people could be subject to scientific study’.⁵¹ It would come to inform subsequent Enlightenment debates in Europe over human nature, importantly on whether human societies could be understood to progress through stages of development (i.e. stadial theory),⁵² and whether humankind was one (monogenic) or many races (polygenic).⁵³ With regard to the former, for instance, it was such expeditions as Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s 1766–1769 French imperial-sponsored journey to the southern Pacific that fired the debates in Europe over the relationship between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ humanity, which would feed the formulations of French philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose imprint on ‘progressive’ educational thought remains visible.⁵⁴ While it is well known that Bougainville’s perceptions of Tahitians as ‘good savages’ recounted in Voyage autour du monde (1771) was informed by Rousseau’s conception of the ‘State of Nature’ as a counterpoint to eighteenth-century Europe, it is perhaps less well known how the ‘Pacific craze’ that gripped Europe in the mid- to late eighteenth century based on accounts of French and British explorers, scientists and sailors was the cultural context that amplified Rousseau’s ‘primitivist’ theories concerning the ‘natural goodness’ of human beings well after his death in 1778.⁵⁵ Even less known – and this is most pertinent for educational researchers – is the lineage from the philosophical primitivism buttressed by European explorers to the southern Pacific regions like Bougainville to progressive education centrepieces like ‘child-centred pedagogy’, which continues to be informed by the idea that ‘teachers should nourish a child’s natural and instinctual curiosity’.⁵⁶

Not all ‘savages’, however, were regarded as similarly ‘noble’ in their prelapsarian state. Another legacy of the French expeditions in the wake of Bougainville was the racialised mapping and tripartite segmenting of Oceania into Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia by French navigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie in 1832. The people of Polynesia, in his reckoning, were characterised by societies of law and monarchic order that made them racially proximate to White Europeans; the people of Melanesia – the term itself meant to denote the Blackness of its inhabitants with reference to European discourses on race – were described as ‘organised into tribes or clans of varying size, but very seldom into nations, and their institutions are far from attaining the degree of refinement that can sometimes be found among people of the copper-skinned race’.⁵⁷ This schema for geographically and culturally distinguishing Polynesia and Micronesia from the ‘Oceanic Negroes’ of Melanesia – which for d’Urville included the original inhabitants of Australia – was formative in shaping European and Euro-American knowledge about this region into the twentieth century.⁵⁸ It also contributed to the broader Atlantic discourses on anti-Blackness that served the dual function of informing debates over ‘Black educability’,⁵⁹ as well as fortifying the supremacy of White Europeans and justifying the enslavement of Black bodies more broadly.⁶⁰

Across the channel, imperial Britain was not to be outdone, dispatching Captain James Cook to lead a combined Royal Society and Royal Navy expedition in 1768 ostensibly to observe the transit of Venus across the sun. It is difficult to deny the importance of this region in the formation of European sciences stemming from this first voyage of Cook on HMS Endeavour. On board the ship – which was lavishly kitted out with the best of scientific equipment to the tune of £13,000 in crown funding⁶¹ – were the now feted figures of history books like the Royal Society novitiate botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, watchmaker and surgeon Hermann Spöring, the astronomer Charles Green, botanical artist Sydney Parkinson and landscape artist Alexander Buchan. Only more recently recognised are the contributions of Raiatean high priest and warrior Tupaia, who joined the Endeavour from 1769 as an indispensable navigator and ‘cultural intermediary’ between the ship’s crew and local peoples.⁶² Their collective expertise, together with Cook’s honed marine surveying and cartographic skills,⁶³ was not only put to use for the calculation of the solar parallax. HMS Endeavour’s secret instructions from its Royal Navy co-sponsors, contained in a sealed letter to Cook to be executed after their astronomical mission was completed, were to sail southward to quest for ‘the Discovery of the Southern Continent’, upon which Cook was instructed:

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.⁶⁴

Cook’s imperial ‘discovery’ of Aotearoa New Zealand on this journey, his (murderous) encounter with Aboriginal peoples on the eastern coast of what will come to later be ‘discovered’ as Australia, and the impact of his voyages to the southern Pacific have been well documented.⁶⁵ What we wish to focus on here is the significance of this first voyage to the region and the contribution it made to the science of natural history based on the sheer immensity of biological, zoological and botanical material collected.⁶⁶ This had two far-reaching implications for Euro-American education. First and most obviously, the materials and observations collected by the HMS Endeavour expedition and those that followed in its wake were a necessary condition for the development of many modern sciences such as oceanography, geology, anthropology and biology. They altered what Europeans thought to be knowable: ‘Dramatic contrasts – in plants, rain forests to lichens; in animals, iguanas to birds of paradise; in geological formations, high islands to coral atolls – were formative to Atlantic theories of nature’.⁶⁷ This is perhaps why the label of ‘Western science’ both does too much for what Reagan as cited earlier calls the ‘western educational tradition’, and too little for Oceania by obscuring its interdependence on the places, peoples, plants and non-human animals of this region.

Consider, as a prime example, how these scientific expeditions to the southern Pacific would in time inspire the budding naturalist Charles Darwin to also make forays into this region on HMS Beagle⁶⁸ – a turning point for (so-called) western science. For after Darwin the Pacific would become, for Europeans, ‘a vast resource of evidence upon which geological and biological theories could draw and a seemingly limitless natural laboratory in which propositions about organic evolution could be tested’.⁶⁹ Based on Darwin’s initial faunal and geological observations, for instance, his collaborator Alfred Wallace would come to draw his famous line separating Southeast Asia from Australia and the Pacific – a line with both biogeographical and cultural significance in its separation of Malays from Papuans, which shaped the geographical, medical and human sciences in Europe.⁷⁰ Darwin’s sojourn in the southern Pacific and his observations there would also seed the ideas that would ripen with his 1859 magnum opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which would tip the scales of scientific consensus decisively towards his monogenic view of human origins.⁷¹ The essential tenets of evolutionary theory have long since been taken as foundational in science education,⁷² and even as controversies continue to arise over its teaching,⁷³ this connection with Oceania has been elided even amongst those who argue for a ‘natural history perspective’ in favour of ‘static’ conceptual frames in science education.⁷⁴

The second implication of this Oceanian ‘laboratory’ for education in Europe is in the ways in which humans (including remains), non-human animals, plants, artefacts, minerals and so on were frenetically collected – or from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, stolen – for examination and display in imperial ‘centers of calculation’.⁷⁵ These served the accumulation and circulation of information that contributed to knowledge production in the sciences. A prime example is Banks’s enormous home library and herbarium in London’s Soho Square that housed hundreds of species of plants and illustrations of life previously unknown to European natural history, which he made available to the public after the Endeavour expedition.⁷⁶ This was enormously influential for the advancement of the sciences in the Atlantic – and for Banks’s social standing – as details from his collection were circulated in a diversity of publications.⁷⁷ These centres of collection, calculation and display also served a pedagogical function in the formation of European subjectivities. For instance, the opening of the British Museum to the public in 1759 – the first public national museum in the world – sought to showcase to the masses the ‘discoveries’ of the Enlightenment concerning new knowledge and ideas, as well as displays from the ‘new’ lands, peoples and cultures.⁷⁸ Such eighteenth-century natural history museums sought to define a European self and world as distinct from its others – all organised into encyclopaedic classificatory systems that sought to organise the influx of new information coming in from expeditions.⁷⁹ By the time evolutionary theory had gained the ascendancy over polygenetic accounts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, museums would rearrange their displays to represent ‘primitive peoples’ and their artefacts as instances of ‘arrested development’ – ‘examples of an earlier stage of species development which Western civilizations had long ago surpassed’.⁸⁰ The pedagogical purpose of this was, in the machinations of progressive liberals of the late Victorian era, responding to the extension of suffrage to working-class men,⁸¹ to act on their subjectivity so as to install there a regulated capacity for evolutionary self-development appropriate to their civilisational status.⁸²

Ideology: from Europe to Oceania

For all the ‘discoveries’ made by ‘European Man’ about himself and the world from Oceania, the debt was repaid with conquest and brutality. The very sciences built on the people, places, plants, non-human animals and minerals of this region were returned to it in the form of ideology used as a justification for colonial rule. By ideology in this context, we denote those discursive forms through which one group tries to institute itself on others by foreclosure, the non-recognition of differences – ‘a will to “totality” of any totalizing discourse’.⁸³ And this was exemplified in the nineteenth century, as Smith points out, when ‘colonialism not only meant the imposition of Western authority over indigenous lands, indigenous modes of production and indigenous law and government, but the imposition of Western authority over all aspects of indigenous knowledges, languages and cultures’.⁸⁴ What European Man knew of himself, others and the world was forcibly imposed as ‘reality’ itself.

Take so-called ‘Social Darwinism’, for instance. While it is often assumed that this came as a subsequent bastardisation of Darwin’s carefully articulated biological theory of evolution, there have been sufficient historical re-readings in recent times to cast doubt about this sanitised story, situating the Origin’s notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ within a broader milieu of nascent European thought on population statistics and the ‘struggle for existence’ propounded by the likes of Thomas Malthus.⁸⁵ The rub of this for education historians (and science educators) is that not only did this region serve as a field for collecting data, it was also the testing ground for a Darwin-esque ‘science of race’ that came with it – yoked with imperial interests and colonial power.⁸⁶ As such ‘scientific’ perspectives were applied in various ways through colonial administrations across Oceania – in both what Wolfe categorises as settler-colonies (for example Australia, New Caledonia, Aotearoa New Zealand) and franchise colonies (for example Fiji, New Guinea, Tahiti, Tonga, Vanuatu)⁸⁷ – local peoples were re-presented to themselves as ‘uncivilised’ and lacking in full humanity, hence requiring the rule of Europeans.⁸⁸ Across these different Oceanian settings, a key apparatus for this ideology of rule was colonial education, which came in two forms: ‘missionary or religious schooling (which was often residential) followed later by public and secular schooling’.⁸⁹ However, unlike the narratives of modernity that held (and still hold) sway in the imperial metropoles, neither the spatial distinction between the religious and secular, nor the temporal succession of science over faith, held up in the colonial peripheries. Missionaries were avid procurers of data for the natural sciences and its pedagogues to Indigenous peoples; and scientists like Banks who made their fame upon return could become both President of the Royal Society and a patron of the London Missionary Society.⁹⁰ And the history of education across Oceania demonstrates how both were entangled in the colonial enterprise.⁹¹ Hence, it is no surprise that while progressive historical narratives of education in the Global North and Western Europe may be styled as what Taylor calls ‘subtraction stories’ of modernity where secular knowledge liberated people from the confining horizons of religion,⁹² from the perspective of Indigenous peoples of Oceania the ascendancy of the secular sciences meant a continuation – indeed arguably an intensification through a range of emergent specialist sciences⁹³ – of education for subordination.

Decolonisation: prospects and challenges

We do not wish to dwell at length in this section on the well-documented, brutal consequences of colonial education in the Oceania region, lest we perpetuate what Tuck calls ‘damage-centred’ research that ‘looks to historical exploitation, domination, and colonization to explain contemporary brokenness’, implying ‘a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community’.⁹⁴ What we wish to underline is Smith’s point that there were indeed long histories of education in Oceania prior to colonisation, involving the production of, and induction into, diverse forms of knowledge – knowledges that European explorers and scientists were heavily reliant upon⁹⁵ – all borne by an equally diverse linguistic landscape.⁹⁶ This highlights one of the pernicious consequences of colonialism in the region, and one that uniquely implicates institutional education from missionary establishments to its secular successors: language loss and the resultant degradation of Indigenous knowledges in Oceania.⁹⁷ It is the recovery of local languages and knowledges (including their underappreciated contribution to the modern sciences), as well as the challenges and complications facing such efforts in the wake of European imperial history, that characterises the nascent scholarly movement to ‘decolonise education’ in different parts of Oceania.⁹⁸ As Smith points out: ‘Coming to know the past has been part of the critical pedagogy of decolonization. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges.’ Yet this ‘does not mean that we do not understand or employ multiple discourses, or act in incredibly contradictory ways, or exercise power ourselves in multiple ways’.⁹⁹

This double character of retrieval and complication that marks efforts at decolonising education can be detected in writings from across Oceania. For instance, many point to the simultaneous promises and challenges of prioritising of historically local languages as a vehicle for revitalising Indigenous knowledges in education, especially in a global context where English is perceived to be the lingua franca for socioeconomic advancement individually and nationally.¹⁰⁰ This is in turn linked to the cultural and economic power exerted in the region by its two largest settler-colonies – Australia and New Zealand – most evidently through their aid programmes.¹⁰¹

Another layer of complexity facing efforts towards the decolonisation of education in the region is the place of migrants who are neither the descendants of European settlers and colonisers nor seen as ‘Native’¹⁰² – a historical legacy first of European imperialism’s movement of indentured labour between its colonies,¹⁰³ then from subsequent waves of economic and humanitarian migrants.¹⁰⁴ Symptomatic of this complication are the ways in which educational discourses on Indigenous languages and knowledges – whether in policy or scholarship – tend to be treated apart from those focused on culturally minoritised and racialised migrants. This is evident in discussions regarding, say, bilingual or multilingual education, racism and racialisation in education, and educational ‘success’ and ‘failure’ – with the exceptions to this demonstrating a keen historicising sensibility in their analyses of such issues by situating these issues within the longer arc of colonialism and its long afterlives.¹⁰⁵ These latter point towards an emergent ‘triangular’ analytic, which offers a dual promise: they are attuned to the ways in which present-day educational systems – whether settler-colonial or post-/neo-colonial – are sustained through the perpetuation of historical tendencies of imperialism and White supremacy from the Global North; and they gesture towards productive possibilities that move beyond the simultaneous binaries of settler/Native and Native/migrant towards the decolonisation of education in Oceania.

Conclusion

There is a quarter of this planet which is often forgotten in the histories that are told in the West. This quarter is an oceanic one, pulsating with winds and waves, tides and coastlines, and islands and beaches.¹⁰⁶

We conclude this article with a gnawing sense of how inadequate it is – both as a survey of the history of education in Oceania as a topic of interest and relative neglect, and as an account of how Oceania was crucial to the formation of Northern and Western European systems of scientific knowledge and education. This is not to mention the other interpretive avenues that we could have taken in shaping it, say, by offering a survey of deep histories of Oceania and the development of cultures within specific ecological niches,¹⁰⁷ which inevitably entail complex forms of social learning. Relatedly, we might also have dived more deeply into the environmental and multispecies histories of the region and the effects of the different educational regimes on these ecological relations – a particularly urgent task given the acute impacts of climate change on Oceania.¹⁰⁸ It is perhaps apt to see what we have done here as a prolegomenon to further thought executed in two moves: first, by drawing attention to the histories of education that have been told in this part of the planet that Sivasundaram calls the ‘forgotten quarter’ from the perspective of the Global North, and gesturing towards those that still need to be told; and second, by challenging, from the perspective of Oceania, the pernicious and tenacious notion that the peaks of knowledge and education were scaled in the isolated laboratories, museums, universities and classrooms of Northern and Western Europe, then brought down south over the waters. If this article can offer some impetus for the proliferation of more stories of how education has been done in times and places not often considered, and some displacement of the dominance of Northern and Western Europe in the histories we tell of modern education, then for all its limitations it will have done its job.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Remy Low

Remy Low is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Sydney’s School of Education and Social Work. He is committed to cultivating culturally responsive educators who can work in diverse contexts, which informs his research in the history and philosophy of education. He is the author of The Mind and Teachers in the Classroom: Exploring Definitions of Mindfulness (2021) and Learning to Stop: Mindfulness Meditation as Anti-Violence Pedagogy (2023).

Helen Proctor

Helen Proctor is a Professor of Education History at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in how schools shape social life beyond the school gate. Her publications include A History of Australian Schooling (Campbell and Proctor, 2014) and the 2022 Griffith Review essay, ‘Climbing the Opportunity Ladder’.

Notes

¹ Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review 1, no. 1 (1976): 49.

² Teresia K. Teaiwa, ‘For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda?: Specifying Pacific Studies’, in Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning across Asia and the Pacific, ed. Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 115.

³ Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 55.

⁴ Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993), 2–16; Teaiwa, ‘For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda?’, 110–24.

⁵ Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3.

⁶ Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

⁷ Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 224–5.

⁸ Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 2.

⁹ Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific, 224–5.

¹⁰ See also Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (New York: Routledge, 2014).

¹¹ ‘The World Bank in Pacific Islands: Overview; Strategy’, World Bank, last modified October 17, 2021, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/pacificislands/overview#2; ‘Kiribati Country Brief’, Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/kiribati/kiribati-country-brief.

¹² ‘World Bank in Pacific Islands’, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/pacificislands.

¹³ See for example Alexander Mawyer, ‘Linguistic Diversity and Plurality in Oceania and the Pacific’, in International Encyclopaedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ed. James Stanlaw (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020), 1–7.

¹⁴ Teresia K. Teaiwa, ‘The Classroom as a Metaphorical Canoe: Cooperative Learning in Pacific Studies’, WINHEC: International Journal of Indigenous Education Scholarship 1 (2005): 38.

¹⁵ See for example Stephanie Lawson, ‘“Melanesia”: The History and Politics of an Idea’, Journal of Pacific History 48, no. 1 (2013): 1–22; and Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, ‘Re-Presenting Melanesia: Ignoble Savages and Melanesian Alter-Natives’, Contemporary Pacific 27, no. 1 (2015): 110–45.

¹⁶ Teaiwa, ‘For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda?’, 111.

¹⁷ Derek Taira, ‘“We Are Our History”: Reviewing the History of Education in Hawai‘i and Oceania’, History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2020): 643.

¹⁸ See for example Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 340–55.

¹⁹ Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 393.

²⁰ See for example Marjorie Theobald, ‘Educational History’, in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 206–8; Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington, ‘History of Education: The Possibility of Survival’, Change: Transformations in Education 5, no. 1 (2002): 46–64; Tom O’Donoghue, ‘History of Education Research in Australia: Some Current Trends and Possible Directions for the Future’, Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014): 805–12.

²¹ Although for Hawai‘i see Taira, ‘“We Are Our History”’.

²² Craig Campbell and Maxine Stephenson, ‘National Education Systems: Australia and New Zealand’, in The [Oxford] Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 14; Kay Whitehead, ‘Histories of Teachers in Australia and New Zealand from the 1970s to the Present’, History of Education Review 48, no. 2 (2019): 242–58.

²³ Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington, Going to School in Oceania (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1.

²⁴ Alan Sadovnik and Susan Semel, foreword to Campbell and Sherington, Going to School in Oceania, vii–ix.

²⁵ See also Helen Proctor and Heather Weaver, ‘Family, Community and Sociability: 1920–Present’, in A Cultural History of Education in the Modern Age, vol. 6, ed. Judith Harford and Tom A. O’Donoghue (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 81–98.

²⁶ See also Christian Ydesen, The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education: The Formation of a Global Governing Complex (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2019).

²⁷ DEHANZ, https://dehanz.net.au.

²⁸ See for example Kevin Myers, ‘Citizenship, Curricula, and Mass Schooling’, in Handbook of Historical Studies in Education: Debates, Tensions, and Directions, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 475–93; Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014); Stephen Jackson, ‘Mass Education and the British Empire’, History Compass 20, no. 1 (2022): e12709, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12709; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

²⁹ See for example Kim Christiaens, Idesbald Goddeeris and Pieter Verstraete, eds., Missionary Education: Historical Approaches and Global Perspectives (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021); Helen May, Baljit Kaur and Larry Prochner, eds., Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (London: Routledge, 2016).

³⁰ On histories of migration and education see Remy Low, Eve Mayes and Helen Proctor, ‘Tracing the Radical, the Migrant, and the Secular in the History of Australian Schooling: Contrapuntal Historiographies’, History of Education Review 48, no. 2 (2019): 137–41; Kevin Myers, Paul J. Ramsey and Helen Proctor, ‘Rethinking Borders and Boundaries for a Mobile History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 6 (2018): 677–90.

³¹ Lon Kurashige, Madeline Y. Hsu and Yujin Yaguchi, ‘Introduction: Conversations on Transpacific History’, Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 2 (2012): 183–8.

³² For indicative educational histories of ‘Asian’ migrants in Oceania, albeit from single-nation rather than regional studies, see Carmen M. White, ‘Historicizing Educational Disparity: Colonial Policy and Fijian Educational Attainment’, History of Education 32, no. 4 (2003): 345–65; Helen Proctor and Arathi Sriprakash, ‘Race and Legitimacy: Historical Formations of Academically Selective Schooling in Australia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43, no. 14 (2017): 2378–92.

³³ See for example Kay Whitehead, ‘Women Educators’ Sojourns around the British Empire from the Interwar Years to the Mid-Twentieth Century’, in Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World, ed. Christine Mayer and Adelina Arredondo (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 223–48; Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Archives of Memory and Memories of Archive: CMS Women’s Letters and Diaries, 1823–35’, History of Education 34, no. 6 (2005): 657–74.

³⁴ 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.

³⁵ 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.

³⁶ Tamson Pietsch, ‘Learning at Sea: Education Aboard the 1926–27 Floating University’, in Shipboard Literary Cultures: Reading, Writing, and Performing at Sea, ed. Susann Liebich and Laurence Publicover (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 239–61.

³⁷ Adrea Lawrence, ‘Precolonial Indigenous Education in the Western Hemisphere and Pacific’, in Rury and Tamura, The [Oxford] Handbook of the History of Education, 14.

³⁸ Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Masked Histories: Turtle Shell Masks and Torres Strait Islander People (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2022), e27; Greg Dening, ‘Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay’, History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 41, no. 1 (2002): 1–24.

³⁹ Lui-Chivizhe, Masked Histories.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 35.

⁴¹ Thomas S. Popkewitz, ‘The Production of Reason and Power: Curriculum History and Intellectual Traditions’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 29, no. 2 (1997): 131–64.

⁴² Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

⁴³ María Cruz Berrocal and Christophe Sand, ‘A Question of Impact: Did We Underestimate the Consequences of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Period of Early European Exploration in the Pacific?’, Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 16, no. 2–4 (2020): 1–30.

⁴⁴ Marwa Elshakry, ‘When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections’, Isis 101, no. 1 (2010): 98–109.

⁴⁵ Timothy Reagan, Non-Western Educational Traditions: Local Approaches to Thought and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2017), 39.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 41.

⁴⁷ See for example Martin Davies, ‘Three Cheers for the Ramsay Centre’, Australian Universities’ Review 61, no. 2 (2019): 59–64.

⁴⁸ Reagan, Non-Western Educational Traditions, 4–9, 321–46.

⁴⁹ Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, ‘Science and Imperialism’, Isis 84, no. 1 (1993): 97.

⁵⁰ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 117.

⁵¹ Tony Ballantyne, ‘Introduction’, in Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific, ed. Tony Ballantyne (New York: Routledge, 2018), xv.

⁵² Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, ‘Nature, Knowledge, and Civilisation: Connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds in the Enlightenment’, Itinerario 41, no. 1 (2017): 93–107.

⁵³ John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 123.

⁵⁴ William J. Reese, ‘The Origins of Progressive Education’, History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2001): 1–24.

⁵⁵ See Glyndwr Williams, ‘“Savages Noble and Ignoble”: European Attitudes towards the Wider World before 1800’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 6, no. 3 (1978): 300–13; Robert Nicole, The Word, the Pen, and the Pistol: Literature and Power in Tahiti (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

⁵⁶ Thomas Fallace, ‘The Savage Origins of Child-Centered Pedagogy, 1871–1913’, American Educational Research Journal 52, no. 1 (2015): 98.

⁵⁷ Cited in Kabutaulaka, ‘Re-Presenting Melanesia’, 114.

⁵⁸ Nicholas Thomas, ‘The Force of Ethnology: Origins and Significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia Division’, Current Anthropology 30, no. 1 (1989): 27–34.

⁵⁹ Thomas D. Fallace, ‘Educators Confront the “Science” of Racism, 1898–1925’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 48, no. 2 (2016): 252–70.

⁶⁰ Maile Arvin, ‘Polynesia Is a Project, Not a Place: Polynesian Proximities to Whiteness in Cloud Atlas and Beyond’, in Beyond Ethnicity, ed. Camilla Fojas, Rudy P. Guevarra and Nitasha Tamar Sharma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018), 25–9.

⁶¹ Richard Sorrenson, ‘The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century’, Osiris 11 (1996): 224.

⁶² Vanessa Smith, ‘Joseph Banks’s Intermediaries: Rethinking Global Cultural Exchange’, in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 92–9.

⁶³ Sheila Johnson Kindred, ‘James Cook: Cartographer in the Making, 1758–1762’, Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 12 (2009): 54–81.

⁶⁴ Secret Instructions to Captain Cook, June 30, 1768, https://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/resources/transcripts/nsw1_doc_1768.pdf.

⁶⁵ For example Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

⁶⁶ William T. Stearn, ‘A Royal Society Appointment with Venus in 1769: The Voyage of Cook and Banks in the Endeavour in 1768–1771 and Its Botanical Results’, in Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific, ed. Tony Ballantyne (New York: Routledge, 2018), 103–15.

⁶⁷ Roy M. MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock, ‘Introduction’, in Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific, ed. Roy M. MacLeod and Philip F. Rehbock (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 5.

⁶⁸ Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (London: Icon Books, 2003), 95.

⁶⁹ MacLeod and Rehbock, Darwin’s Laboratory, ix.

⁷⁰ See Jane Rouder Camerini, ‘Darwin, Wallace, and Maps’ (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987), 106–91; Fenneke Sysling, ‘The Human Wallace Line: Racial Science and Political Afterlife’, Medical History 63, no. 3 (2019): 314–29.

⁷¹ See F. W. Nicholas and J. M. Nicholas, Charles Darwin in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

⁷² Ute Harms and Michael J. Reiss, ‘The Present Status of Evolution Education’, in Evolution Education Re-Considered: Understanding What Works, ed. Ute Harms and Michael J. Reiss (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 1–19.

⁷³ Graeme Gooday and others, ‘Does Science Education Need the History of Science?’, Isis 99, no. 2 (2008): 327–9.

⁷⁴ Esther M. van Dijk and Ulrich Kattmann, ‘Teaching Evolution with Historical Narratives’, Evolution: Education and Outreach 2, no. 3 (2009): 480.

⁷⁵ David Philip Miller, ‘Joseph Banks, Empire, and “Centers of Calculation” in Late Hanoverian London’, in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21–37.

⁷⁶ Edwin D. Rose, ‘From the South Seas to Soho Square: Joseph Banks’s Library, Collection and Kingdom of Natural History’, Notes and Records 73, no. 4 (2019): 499–526.

⁷⁷ Stearn, ‘Royal Society Appointment’, 117.

⁷⁸ May, Kaur and Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods, 10.

⁷⁹ Charles W. J. Withers, ‘Geography, Natural History and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment: Putting the World in Place’, History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 136–63.

⁸⁰ Tony Bennett, Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 42.

⁸¹ As Bennett points out, the implication is that, for women, the museum offered a different kind of possibility for the performative realisation of evolutionary narratives: ‘Within the museum’s “backtelling” structure, European woman encountered herself as both advanced and backward, ahead of her “savage” brothers and sisters but behind the European male’. Bennett, Museums, Power, Knowledge, 133.

⁸² Tony Bennett, Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004), 8.

⁸³ Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 92.

⁸⁴ Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 126.

⁸⁵ See Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Gregory Claeys, ‘The “Survival of the Fittest” and the Origins of Social Darwinism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 2 (2000): 223–40.

⁸⁶ Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940 (Canberra, Australia: ANU E Press, 2008).

⁸⁷ Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 1.

⁸⁸ Lester-Irabinna Rigney, ‘A First Perspective of Indigenous Australian Participation in Science: Framing Indigenous Research towards Indigenous Australian Intellectual Sovereignty’, Kaurna Higher Education Journal 7 (2001): 3.

⁸⁹ Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 127.

⁹⁰ Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.

⁹¹ In Australia, see Elizabeth Jackson-Barrett and Libby Lee-Hammond, ‘Education for Assimilation: A Brief History of Aboriginal Education in Western Australia’, in Sámi Educational History in a Comparative International Perspective, ed. Otso Kortekangas and others (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 299–316; Nigel Parbury, ‘A History of Aboriginal Education’, in Teaching Aboriginal Studies, ed. Rhonda Craven (London: Routledge, 2020), 132–52. In Aotearoa New Zealand, see Ranginui Walker, ‘Reclaiming Māori Education’, in Decolonisation in Aotearoa: Education, Research and Practice, ed. Jessica Hutchings and Jenny Lee-Morgan (Wellington, NZ: NZCER Press, 2016), 19–38; Kuni Jenkins and Kay Morris Matthews, ‘Knowing Their Place: The Political Socialisation of Maori Women in New Zealand through Schooling Policy and Practice, 1867–1969’, Women’s History Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 85–105. In New Caledonia, see David Small, ‘The Politics of Colonial Education in New Caledonia’ (PhD diss., University of Canterbury, 1994), 78–89. In the Cook Islands, see Aue Te Ava, ‘Initiating a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Historical Shifts in Health and Physical Education in the Cook Islands’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Australian Association for Research and Education, Brisbane, Australia, 2014), https://www.aare.edu.au/data/2014_Conference/Full_papers/Aue_Te_Ava_14.pdf. In Fiji, see Akanisi Kedrayate, ‘Why Non-Formal Education in Fiji?’, Directions: Journal of Educational Studies 23, no. 1 (2001): 75–96. In Papua New Guinea, see Thomas A. O’Donoghue and David Austin, ‘The Evolution of a National System of Teacher Education in the Developing World: The Case of Papua New Guinea’, History of Education 23, no. 3 (1994): 301–15. In the Solomon Islands, see Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo and David Welchman Gegeo, ‘Schooling, Knowledge, and Power: Social Transformation in the Solomon Islands’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1992): 10–29.

⁹² Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22.

⁹³ See Lester-Irabinna Rigney, ‘Internationalisation of an Indigenous Anti-Colonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles’, Research and Development in Higher Education: Advancing International Perspectives 20 (1997), 629–36; Martin N. Nakata, Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007); Quentin Beresford, ‘Separate and Unequal: An Outline of Aboriginal Education, 1900–1996’, in Reform and Resistance in Aboriginal Education, ed. Quentin Beresford, Gary Partington and Graeme Gower, rev. ed. (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2012), 85–119.

⁹⁴ Eve Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’, Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (2009): 413.

⁹⁵ See Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam, eds., Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives (Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2015); Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow, eds., Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory (Acton, Australia: ANU Press, 2016).

⁹⁶ See Alexander Mawyer, ‘Linguistic Diversity and Plurality in Oceania and the Pacific’, International Encyclopaedia of Linguistic Anthropology (2020): 1–7; Peter Mühlhäusler, Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region (London: Routledge, 2002). On the role of educational institutions in perpetuating language loss, see Rachael Ka’ai-Mahuta, ‘The Impact of Colonisation on Te Reo Māori: A Critical Review of the State Education System’, Te Kaharoa 4, no. 1 (2011): 195–225; Eve Coxon and others, Literature Review on Pacific Education Issues (Auckland: University of Auckland, 2002).

⁹⁷ Jane Simpson and Gillian Wigglesworth, ‘Language Diversity in Indigenous Australia in the 21st Century’, Current Issues in Language Planning 20, no. 1 (2019): 67–80; Ka’ai-Mahuta, ‘Impact of Colonisation on Te Reo Māori’; Coxon, Literature Review on Pacific Education Issues.

⁹⁸ Rebecca Spratt and Eve Coxon, ‘Decolonising “Context” in Comparative Education: The Potential of Oceanian Theories of Relationality’, Beijing International Review of Education 2, no. 4 (2020): 519–36.

⁹⁹ Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 81.

¹⁰⁰ For how this tension is navigated in the Cook Islands, see Aue Te Ava and others, ‘Akaoraora’ia te peu ‘ā to ‘ui tūpuna: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for Cook Islands Secondary School Physical Education’, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 42, no. 1 (2013): 32–43. In Fiji, see Heather Lotherington, ‘Language Choices and Social Reality: Education in Post-Colonial Fiji’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 19, no. 1 (1998): 57–67. In Kiribati, see Greg Burnett, ‘Language Games and Schooling: Discourses of Colonialism in Kiribati Education’, Asia Pacific Journal of Education 25, no. 1 (2005): 93–106. In Vanuatu, see Robert Early, ‘Double Trouble, and Three Is a Crowd: Languages in Education and Official Languages in Vanuatu’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 20, no. 1 (1999): 13–33. In Nauru, see Xavier Barker, ‘English Language as Bully in the Republic of Nauru’, in English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures, ed. Vaughan Rapatahana and Pauline Bunce (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2012): 18–36.

¹⁰¹ See for example Barker, ‘English Language as Bully’; Eve Coxon, ‘From Patronage to Profiteering? New Zealand’s Educational Relationship with the Small States of Oceania’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 34, no. 1 (2002): 57–75.

¹⁰² Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

¹⁰³ Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labour Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Brij V. Lal, ‘Understanding the Indian Indenture Experience’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 21, no. s1 (1998): 215–37.

¹⁰⁴ Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, ‘Placing Movers: An Overview of the Asian-Pacific Migration System’, Contemporary Pacific 12, no. 2 (2000): 385–414.

¹⁰⁵ For example in the politics of Maori language in Aotearoa New Zealand, see Richard A. Benton, ‘The Maori Language in New Zealand Education’, Language, Culture and Curriculum 1, no. 2 (1988): 75–83. In the cultural politics of academically selective schooling in Australia, see Proctor and Sriprakash, ‘Race and Legitimacy’. On the contention over affirmative action policies in Fiji, see Priscilla Qolisaya Puamau, ‘A Post-Colonial Reading of Affirmative Action in Education in Fiji’, Race Ethnicity and Education 4, no. 2 (2001): 109–23.

¹⁰⁶ Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 1.

¹⁰⁷ For example see Paul D’Arcy, The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 2006.

¹⁰⁸ For example see Timote Masima Vaioleti and Sandra L. Morrison, ‘The Value of Indigenous Knowledge to Education for Sustainable Development and Climate Change Education in the Pacific’, in Handbook of Indigenous Education, ed. Elizabeth Ann McKinley and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 651–70.