“Destiny Has Thrown the Negro and the Filipino Under the Tutelage of America”: Race and Curriculum in the Age of Empire

Abstract

The article brings together the fields of curriculum studies, history of education, and ethnic studies to chart a transnational history of race, empire, and curriculum. Drawing from a larger study on the history of education in the Philippines under U.S. rule in the early 1900s, it argues that race played a pivotal role in the discursive construction of Filipino/as and that the schooling for African Americans in the U.S. South served as the prevailing template for colonial pedagogy in the archipelago. It employs Michel Foucault's concept of archaeology to trace the racial grammar in popular and official representations, especially in the depiction of colonized Filipino/as as racially Black, and to illustrate its material effects on educational policy and curriculum. The tension between academic and manual-industrial instruction became a site of convergence for Filipino/as and African Americans, with decided implications for the lived trajectories in stratified racialized and colonized communities.

Dissecting Anti‐Asian Racism Through a Historical and Transnational AsianCrit Lens

“…For instance, at the end of the Spanish‐American War in 1898, the Philippines became the U.S. first colony in Asia under the guise of rescuing it from over 300 years of Spanish rule. Filipinos were construed paternalistically as “little brown brothers” who would be ushered into Western modernity, civilization, and eventual self‐governance under U.S. tutelage (Coloma, 2009). During the Cold War, the United States postured itself as the global leader and protector of democracy in the “free world” against the “red scare” of communism (Klein, 2003).…”

Pedagogical Progressivism and Black Education: A Historiographical Review, 1880–1957

“…Studies of educational imperialism in the newly acquired US colonies (Angulo, 2012; Coloma, 2009; Jernigan, 2014) confirmed that educators employed progressive pedagogical rhetoric to provide Indigenous populations of the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico with a segregationist, Hampton-Tuskegee-style industrial curriculum for economic exploitation. Educators employed a similar pedagogy with other non-White populations under their control.…”

How Prominent Discourses in the United States and Finland Guide Early Childhood Education Curriculum

“…Foucault further argues that discourse is used to represent what is considered knowledge and create systems of power, or grammars, that construct how institutions are organized and guide systems of the State (Coloma, 2009). The curricula are one such way in which discourses regarding early childhood education construct these institutions and are then disseminated by the State.…”