A Trans-colonial Education: Boarding Schools in French and British Asia

Abstract

Anglophone scholars working in the history of education have devoted much attention to the British imperial system of boarding schools. In their (often metropole-centric) approach, boarding offered a solution to the dangers that British youth might encounter should they become too well integrated into colonial milieux. Relocating children from colonies to the metropole to become boarders reflected and reinforced essentialist ideas of race and social segregation. In the period studied at this conference, age segregation was also becoming a salient feature of modernisation and bureaucratic rationalization, and boarding in the British model was certainly influential. British pedagogical processes and networks informed knowledge and norms in global circulation as they threaded across multiple empires and colonial contexts. But this model did not go unchallenged, even within British Empire places. Taking the example of colonial Asia, this paper explores ways in which Europeans defied elite orthodoxy and utilized their own networks to launch campaigns redefining boarding on their own terms. Commercial elites questioned the value of a dry, theoretical French secondary education in the metropole and sent their children to nearby colonies to board. Colonial administrators in Hanoi, such as G. Brachet, Head of Public Education, packed their sons off to board at school in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, children in Hong Kong made the return journey to board in Dalat in the highlands of French Indochina where new lycées opened in the interwar years. Moving trans-colonially, European, Eurasian and Asian children encountered boarding cultures inspired by a variety of ambitions and aspirations. In Hong Kong children acquired commercial acumen parents believed would fit them better for success in the world of business. In Dalat they participated in efforts to harness racial-ethnic ‘hybridity’ and create ‘child colonisers’ as a potentially invigorative force. These projects threw into question already unstable visions of childhood across imperial cultures defined relationally and inflected by anxieties over nation, race and class. By bringing them to light this paper seeks to place boarding schools and experiences of them within a broader history of global entanglements in an era of sharpening criticism of the colonial record. It highlights children’s perceptions of institutionalization and the ideological roles they were expected to play. And it also focuses on cases where children’s actions in boarding schools appeared to jeopardize imperial power in the Tropics, sparking interventions at the highest levels of colonial states.