In Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship, Clif Stratton argues, “American public schools created and situated children along multiple unequal paths to ‘good citizenship.’ These paths both reflected and created broader institutional patterns of subordination and exclusion at work in American society – patterns intimately tied to hierarchies of race and national origin and to US imperial ambitions and practices” (pg. 1). Stratton further argues, “The distension of public schooling for the purpose of crafting degrees of citizenship at home and the proliferation of American economic power through empire-building projects both at home and abroad were more intimately intertwined than is usually recognized” (pg. 2).
Stratton argues, “Together, these three subjects – geography, history, and civics – brought into focus a world in which race and empire were paramount in shaping the contours of national citizenship” (pg. 17). He continues, “Civics then served as a kind of applied social science that extended from the presumed objective nature of geographical and historical study. In more intentional and overt ways, civics celebrated patriotism and national exceptionalism, at times seemingly as ends in themselves” (pg. 19). Further, “like the science of evolution, the imperial desires of myriad Europeans and their far-flung settlers, found on all habitable continents by the nineteenth century, informed geographic explanations of the inequalities of the physical and mental character of races” (pg. 24). Stratton concludes, “Civics emerged in the 1890s as a form of explicit instruction in American loyalty and patriotism designed to transform young citizens into supporters of US imperialism and of the racial and class hierarchies that underscored its logic, execution, and outcomes” (pg. 41). From there, he offers a number of case studies.
Stratton writes of San Francisco schools, “School officials also hoped to actively prepare students for participation in the expansion of American capitalism and empire in the Pacific and Asia, ventures that brought Americans in contact with wildly diverse peoples, languages, religions, and cultures” (pg. 51). Further, “As formal civic institutions that incorporated and reframed local and national social norms, San Francisco’s schools stood at the fore of the twinned projects of nation making and empire building. Administrators and teachers tried to order race, ethnicity, and national origin in order to carve out multiple and uneven paths to American citizenship” (pg. 53). Turning to Hawai‘i, Stratton writes, “Annexationists placed schools at the forefront of this public relations makeover. School officials, newspaper editors, politicians, and other leading haole heralded the territory as a model for racially tolerant communities in which representatives from diverse nations lived, worked, and learned free from the divisive and violent racism in California and elsewhere in the United States” (pg. 88). Additionally, “schooling in territorial Hawai‘i was more about Americanizing natives and immigrants and limiting socioeconomic mobility than it was about acculturating diverse peoples into society on their own terms” (pg. 88). Turning to the South, Stratton writes, “Segregated schools in the South were not an exception to the history of formal education in the United States – easy to dismiss as the vestiges of a backward region and a bygone era of forced labor. Rather, Atlanta’s segregated schools constitute a crucial aspect of US domestic and imperial culture at the turn of the century” (pg. 125).
Stratton writes of New York schools, “The formal education of New York’s new immigrants involved two mutually sustaining processes. The school board’s quest to Americanize the progeny of European immigrants involved assimilation – a kind of welcoming of these outsiders into the American polity, labor force, and cultural mainstream” (pg. 146). He continues, “Moreover, culture and ideology often provided coded, softer substitutes for race. The school board’s commitment to assimilation also meant the remaking of race – of assigning whiteness to southern and eastern Europeans who, according to the prevailing race science of the day, occupied a space of racial inbetweenness” (pg. 147). He continues, “Secondly, Americanization involved the inculcation of and adherence to the demands for loyalty that ascendant US nationalism and imperialism required,” often through tailored curricula designed “to Americanize an increasingly foreign student body of southern and eastern European immigrants” (pg. 147). Looking at the Southwest and Puerto Rico, Stratton writes, “Schools served as vehicles through which to impose racial and colonial status among multiple national groups – Mexicans and Puerto Ricans – bound to the United States in unequal ways, though certainly familiar to the subjects of the previous chapters” (pg. 176). He contrasts this with the colonial subjects’ response, where “Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans began to claim greater and more equal access to the privileges of citizenship at the same time that the forces of immigration restriction and colonialism sought their continued repression” (pg. 176).
Stratton writes primarily in response to Arizona’s HB 2281, which sought to outlaw Mexican studies on the basis of promoting nationalism. ( )