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As most educators will readily attest, it is often difficult to tell whether lessons taught in school are, in fact, learned or whether the explicit or implicit aims of education have their desired effect. In an imperial context, questions about the “effects” of education become more complex, mediated as they are by differences of political, economic, and military power as well as differences of race, language, and cultural identity. The essays in this section shed light on the role that education—and specifically schools—played in structuring, negotiating, and setting the discursive terms of the United States’ colonial project in Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate not only the ways in which schools in the United States set a course for policies carried out in the colonies but also the ways in which the colonies sometimes served as “crucibles” for educational policies in the United States. Thus education, broadly construed, became a two-way process of both teaching and learning in the American imperial state. To start, Solsirée del Moral examines how teachers in Puerto Rico, anticipating the possibility of Puerto Rican independence, or in some cases the crafting of a Puerto Rican national space within the context of the American empire, reframed colonial schools’ Americanization programs to promote “an alternate nationalist project.” Elite teachers cast themselves as “the primary actors who would lead the island through a process of physical and intellectual evolution, racial regeneration, and national progress.”Yet, as intermediaries between Puerto Rican families and colonial authorities, elite teachers’ primary goal was not “to liberate the working class and rural poor” but rather “to consolidate their authority and status within the colonial social hierarchy.” Del Moral’s research brings to light not only the impact that U.S. colonialism had on subsequent 131 introduction adam nelson Puerto Rican education but also the role that educators played in creating an anticolonial, that is, nationalist or autonomist, movement. The role of educators in the construction of Puerto Rican nationalism is a central theme in Amílcar Antonio Barreto’s essay, which confirms that Americanization policies ultimately produced a countermovement in the form of Puerto Rican cultural nationalism. “In time,” Barreto notes, “Americanization fueled resentment—particularly on the part of teachers hired to implement this policy.” By the 1930s and 1940s, these teachers formed the heart of a nationalist movement built on an oppositional narrative of cultural identity. Teachers’ role in this nationalist movement is intriguing if, as Barreto argues, many Catholic schoolteachers in Puerto Rico participated “eagerly” in Americanization programs, including English-language instruction; meanwhile, on the U.S. mainland, Catholic schools that had challenged Americanization programs for immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century had come to embrace such efforts in the changed geopolitical context of the 1930s and 1940s. Barreto’s analysis raises important questions about the church’s changing role in education in Puerto Rico (and elsewhere) over time. Of course, the meaning of education is always “negotiated” between teachers and students, and Glenn May’s essay on industrial education in the Philippines offers a case in point. Industrial education was not unique to the colonies nor was it always limited to marginalized populations. In the early twentieth century, so-called progressive educators in the United States believed that “hands-on learning” could benefit students of all social backgrounds even if it was targeted most often at racial minorities and the poor. What distinguished manual education in the Philippines from contemporary efforts on the mainland was the sheer scale of the colonial enterprise: more than a million students in the Philippines participated in farming, gardening, embroidery, and other industrial education programs during the period of American imperial rule. The ostensible goal of these industrial programs was to make money. The education bureau chief in the Philippines hoped “to operate every trade school and every school farm on a business basis.” Booker T. Washington had described his Tuskegee Institute in similar terms, but the “business” of manual training in the Philippines operated on a much larger scale.1 May calculates that most industrial education programs in the colonial Philippines were spectacularly unprofitable , but in both colonial and metropolitan settings these programs served other purposes beyond profit. For example, the Philippines “corn campaigns,” with their corn-growing and corn-cooking contests, had roots in mainland efforts such as 4-H clubs...

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