Analysis: Western Education And The Rise Of An African And Asian Middle Class

To varying degrees and for many of the same reasons as the British in India, all European
colonizers sought to educate the children of African and Asian elite groups in Western-language
schools. The early 19th-century debate over education in India was paralleled, for example, by an
equally hard-fought controversy among French officials and missionaries regarding the proper
schooling for the peoples of Senegal in West Africa. The Dutch did not develop European
language schools for the sons of the Javanese elite until the middle of the 19th century, and many
young Javanese males continued to be educated in the homes of the Dutch residing in the
colonies until the end of the century. Like the British, the French and Dutch needed
administrative assistants and postal clerks, and they could neither recruit enough Europeans to
fill these posts nor afford the wages European employees would have demanded.
One of the chief advantages of having Western-educated African and Asian subordinates - for
they were always below European officials or managers in the office or on the parade ground was that their salaries were considerably lower than what Europeans would have been paid for
doing the same work. The Europeans had no trouble rationalizing this inequity. Africans and
Asians served in their own lands and were thus accustomed to life in the hot, humid, insect- and
disease-ridden tropics. For the Europeans who worked in the colonies, life in these environments
was deemed difficult, even dangerous. Higher pay was thought to compensate them for the
"sacrifices" involved in colonial service. The Europeans also had a higher standard of living than
Africans or Asians, and colonial officials assumed that European employees would be more
hardworking and efficient.
Beyond the need for government functionaries and business assistants, each European colonizer
stressed different objectives in designing Western-language schools for the children of upperclass families. As we have seen, the transmission of Western scientific learning and production
techniques was a high priority for the British in India. Educational policymakers, such as
Macaulay, also sought to teach the Indians Western literature and manners and to instill in them a
Western sense of morality. As Macaulay put it, they hoped that English-language schools would
turn out brown English gentlemen, who would in turn teach their countrymen the ways of the
West.
The French, at least until the end of the 19th century, went even further. They stressed the
importance of Africans and other colonial students mastering the French language and the
subtleties of French culture. When the lessons had been fully absorbed and the students fully
assimilated to French culture, they could become full citizens of France, no matter what their
family origins or the color of their skin. Though only a tiny minority of the population of any
French colony had the opportunity for the sort of schooling that would qualify them for French
citizenship, there were thousands of Senegalese and hundreds of Vietnamese or Tunisians who
could carry French passports, vote in French elections, and even run for seats in the French

Parliament. Other European colonial powers adopted either the British or the French approach to
education and its aims. The Dutch and Germans, for example, followed the British pattern, while
the Portuguese pushed assimilation for even smaller numbers of the elite classes among the
peoples they colonized.
Western education in the colonies succeeded in producing both clerks and railway conductors,
and brown Indian gentlemen and black French citizens. It also had effects that those who shaped
colonial educational policy did not intend, effects that would within a generation or two produce
major challenges to the continuation of European colonial dominance. The population of most
colonized areas was divided into many different ethnic, religious, and language groups with
separate histories and identities. Western language schools gave the sons (and in limited
instances, the daughters) of the leading families a common language in which to communicate.
The schools also inculcated common attitudes and ideas and imparted to the members of diverse
groups a common body of knowledge. In all European colonial societies, Western education led
to similar occupational opportunities - in government service, with Western business firms, or as
professionals (lawyers, doctors, journalists, etc.). Thus, within a generation after their
introduction, Western-language schools had in effect created a new middle class in the colonies
that had no counterpart in precolonial African or Asian societies.
Occupying social strata and economic niches in the middle range between the European
colonizers and the old aristocracy on the one hand, and the peasantry and urban laborers on the
other, Western-educated Africans and Asians within each colony became increasingly aware of
the interests and grievances they had in common. They often found themselves at odds with the
traditional rulers or the landed gentry, who ironically were often their fathers or grandfathers.
Members of the new middle class also felt alienated from the peasantry, whose beliefs and way
of life were so different from those they had learned in Western-language schools. For over a
generation they clung to their European tutors and employers. Eventually, however, they grew
increasingly resentful of their lower salaries, of European competition for scarce jobs, and of
their social segregation from the Europeans, who often made little effort to disguise their
contempt for even the most accomplished of the African or Asian students of Western ways.
Thus, members of the new middle class in the colonies were caught between two worlds: the
traditional ways and teachings of their fathers and the "modern" world of their European masters.
Finding that they would be fully admitted to neither world, they rejected the first and set about
supplanting the Europeans and building their own modern world.
Conclusion: The Pattern Of The Age Of Imperialism
Though the basic patterns of domination in European colonial empires remained similar to those
worked out in Java and India in the early industrial period, the style of colonial rule and patterns
of social interaction between colonizer and colonized changed considerably in the late 19th
century. Racism and social snobbery became pervasive in contacts between the colonizers and

their African and Asian subordinates. The Europeans consciously renounced the ways of
dressing, eating habits, and pastimes that had earlier been borrowed from or shared with the
peoples of the colonies. The colonizers no longer saw themselves simply as the most successful
competitors in a many-sided struggle for political power. They were convinced that they were
inherently superior beings, citizens of the most powerful, civilized, and advanced societies on
earth. Colonial officials in the age of "high imperialism" were much more concerned than earlier
administrators to pull the peasants, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population of
all colonized societies, into the market economy and teach them the value of hard work and
discipline. Colonial educators were determined to impress upon the children of the colonized
elite classes the superiority of Western learning and of everything from political organization to
fashions in clothing.
In striving for these objectives, the European colonizers started with the assumption that it was
their duty to impose their own views and ways of doing things, rather than learn from others - to
remake the world, insofar as the abilities of the "natives" would allow, in the image of industrial
Europe. But in pushing for change within colonized societies that had ancient, deeply rooted
cultures and patterns of civilized life, the Europeans frequently aroused resistance to specific
policies and to colonial rule more generally. Though the colonizers were able to put down protest
movements led by displaced princes and religious prophets, much more enduring and successful
challenges to their rule came, ironically, from the leaders their social reforms and Westernlanguage schools had done much to nurture. These nationalists reworked European ideas and
resurrected those of their own cultures, borrowed European organizational techniques, and made
use of the communications systems and common language the Europeans had introduced into the
colonies to contest European dominance. The overwhelming dependence of the Europeans on the
collaboration of colonized peoples to govern and police their empires rendered the Europeans
particularly vulnerable to these challenges from within.
Questions: Why did the Europeans continue to provide Western-language education for Africans
and Asians once it was clear they were creating a class that might challenge their position of
dominance? What advantages did Western-educated Africans and Asians have as future leaders
of resistance to the European colonial overlords? Do you think the European colonial rule would
have lasted longer if Western-language education had been denied to colonized people?