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Title Comparing Colonial Education Discourses in the French and Portuguese African Empires: An Essay in Hybridization
Full text http://hdl.handle.net/10451/7155
Date 2009
Author(s) Madeira, Ana Isabel
Abstract This essay proposes to go beyond a "traditional" vision of educational change, i.e. a concept based on the analysis of influences, forces or relations of cause-effect about the political aspect of education. In contrast with the perspectives, which consider the colonies as homogenous cultural identities, as extensions of the metropolitan ideas and practices, we tend to emphasise the symbiotic relations, which developed between the Empires and the metropolis. This position contradicts a representation of colonialism as a coherent and consistent process and defines the colonial scenario as a context of conflict between colonizers and colonised, in which the ideas and practices about the processes associated to the civilisation of Africans are open to negotiation and restructuring of different kind. This methodological choice aims at exploring two possibilities, which have been of interest to the scientific community within the frame of historical-comparative research in education. On the one hand, to analyse the lack of continuities between the official ideological concepts about education (incorporated in the discourses which originated in the metropolis or even locally) and the strategies of school expansion put in practice in the colonial contexts; on the other hand, to map the circulation of discourses about education at the level of colonial peripheries, highlighting the processes of transfer and of selective taking up which go across the colonies themselves. The chapter centres, firstly, on the discussion of systems of government and educational policies and, secondly, on educational rhetoric and the construction of the Empire in Portugal and France.
Subject(s) Comparative Education; History of Education
Language eng
Publisher Springer
Type of publication bookPart
Rights restrictedAccess
Identifier Madeira, Ana Isabel (2009). Comparing Colonial Education Discourses in the French and Portuguese African Empires: An Essay in Hybridization.In Cowen, R. and Kazamias. M. (eds). International Handbook of Comparative Education, 1st Edition, vol 22. London and New York: Springer, pp.181-194.; 978-1-4020-6402-9
Repository Lissabon - University of Lissabon
Added to C-A: 2014-06-16;15:44:47