Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education by Nicolas Harrison (review)

Harrison's book places the educational ideals of the French colonial project in dialogue with contemporary models of education. It begins with a return to the mission civilisatrice that accompanied French education overseas and, subsequently, asks where in today's educational projects we can find the residue of that mission. Harrison states in his introduction that the title of the book was designed to underscore current anxieties (whether conscious or unconscious) among university educators––i.e., as an educator, how do I repeat or renew the sites of violence that accompanied a colonial education I condemn? I believe he is correct in his theory that higher education language, literature, and cultural studies educators entertain this question regularly and cringe at the possibility of a connection between their contemporary vocation and the decades (if not centuries) of pain it inflicted on the colonial student. Thus, I found Harrison's book noteworthy on at least three registers: 1. The personal, as I am an educator of French and Francophone studies who contemplates the relationship between her profession and the historical foundation upon which it rests; 2. The professional, as we contemplate the future of Humanities fields in light of contemporary "crises"; 3. The academic, as scholars and students across postcolonial fields stand to gain from Harrison's astute insights into the history of French colonial education and contemporary manifestations of its legacy. Chapter one examines what Harrison refers to as a "paradigmatic" example of his argument: educators since Edward Said demonstrate equal commitment to and doubt about the value of their work. In chapter two, Harrison pivots to a broad view of education in colonial Algeria. He undermines the myth that educators of the colonial era all subscribed to a monolithic mission. To accomplish this, he provides the reader with a sampling of the variety of social and political values that accompanied colonial education. Chapters three through five make up the book's metaphorical meat and potatoes. Here, Harrison turns to the literature authored by a well-known set of French-Algerians who are or were products of the educational environment he previously describes. The chapters each take up a nuanced account of the Algerian classroom and include the voices of Mouloud Feraoun, Assia Djebar, and Jean Amrouche, among others. Chapter three is dedicated to the role of the French colonial classroom during the Algerian War of Independence. Harrison then divides chapter four in two to cover both the disorientation felt by the "native" pupil in French classrooms and the politicization of those same students by concepts that are particularly French, such as secularism. Finally, in chapter five, Harrison covers colonial education from the pupils' perspective, especially as it concerns the acquisition of the French language and studying of French canonical texts in Djebar's work. In the conclusion, Harrison returns to Said and to the arguments for a Humanities education as they are found across his book.