UC Berkeley

Abstract

Colonial Articulations: English Instruction and the `Benevolence' of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898-1916

By

Funie Hsu

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Daniel Perlstein, Chair

Even though historians are increasingly pointing to the importance of colonialism in U.S. history, an investigation of the role of colonialism in the shaping of American public schooling has been largely unexamined in education. This dissertation focuses on the colonial legacy as it pertains to English instruction, highlighting the case of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. This project provides a close examination of Philippine Public Law 74, the colonial education policy that mandated English as the language of instruction, and investigates the social and political conditions that motivated the policy. Employing a historical methods approach, this study examines how the U.S. education policy of English instruction organized both the school system and the broader project of American colonialism. Moreover, this dissertation examines the process by which the history of U.S. overseas conquest in the Philippines has been forgotten.

This dissertation demonstrates that a gendered and racialized discourse of education was central to efforts in reconciling the contradiction that U.S. colonialism posed to American democracy. It illuminates the manner in which gendered constructions of the American English teachers as feminine and nurturing-- as juxtaposed with the image of the aggressive male soldier--enabled the institution of American colonial education in to create a domesticating illusion of peace. Through the mechanism of English instruction, American officials were able to articulate their presence as "benevolent tutelage" rather than imperial expansion, thereby erasing the violence of colonialism and instructing the forgetting of U.S. overseas conquest. In other words, English instruction provided an ideological justification and institutional method to literally rewrite the history of U.S. empire. This study highlights the political role of English instruction in U.S. colonial expansion; and it examines the manner in which notions of gender, domesticity, and race were embedded in the ideology and implementation of U.S. colonial English instruction.