Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan

by Malini Johar Schueller

The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation. The pedagogy of recovery—in which schooling was central and natives were forced to accept empire through education—might have shown how Americans could be good occupiers, but it also created projects of Orientalist racial Filipinos had to be educated and civilized, while the Japanese had to be reeducated and “de-civilized.”  In Campaigns of Knowledge, Malini Schueller contrapuntally reads state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, and school textbooks alongside political cartoons, novels, short stories, and films to demonstrate how the U.S. tutelary project was rerouted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted. In doing so, she highlights how schooling was conceived as a process of subjectification, creating particular modes of thought, behaviors, aspirations, and desires that would render the natives docile subjects amenable to American-style colonialism in the Philippines and occupation in Japan.

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Albert Rejas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good book. I just skipped the literary criticism chapters because I find it difficult to relate and to understand. But everything is compelling and informative. A purely scholar and academic book that will evoke interest even to casual readers.


Campaigns of Knowledge comprehensively explores the US pedagogies of colonialism and occupation in Philippines and Japan. Even though these two countries have different socio-political backgrounds and timelines of US occupation (1898 and 1946), the author articulately stitched connections between the two.

In the book, a similar yet versa colonial pedagogies between Philippines and Japan are presented. The US's colonial policies for the Philippines are composed of subjectification of colonial natives (we are treated as savages, primitive, and traditional) into a docile and passive recipients of "superior" American/western culture, behavior, modes of thoughts, and desires under the American capitalist system. They are, for them, "educating" the Filipinos. With the same goal of transforming Japan into passive entities in accordance to their educational policies "success" in the Philippines; America modified their educational colonial policies in accordance to Japan's culture-bounded identities. Thus, America aimed to "re-educate" Japan.

Conclusively, the book can be summarized in this particular—but not limited to—quote: "Filipinos had to be educated while Japanese had to be reeducated, yet both are racialized and gendered as inferiors." This particular quote is expanded and historically dissected in detail but interesting manner. So I never found myself bored reading too much bombarded information.

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My favorite part of this book is the chapter about Camilo Osias. I first heard his name in one of Renato Constantino's book, portrayed as a traitor because of his association with the US's educational policies. I encountered him again in one of Lisandro Claudio's article in Philippine Studies; contradicting Constantino, Claudio puts Osias in a favorable historical limelight as a nationalist/liberal educator. This foreknowledge I learned in Claudio's article is supplemented by Schueller's chapter about Camilo Osias explaining his role in the US's colonial pedagogies in the Philippines. Schueller presented Osias as a nationalist educator under the surveillance of American hegemony by incorporating within the readers a carefully positioned nationalist and radical stance against the colonial government; which even the US left unnoticed. Schueller demonstrated this form of hidden nationalism of Osias in a detailed investigation of his published "The Philippine Readers" textbook. A bold yet covert move.


Honestly, the book's information and historical scope is not that lengthy. But the author details carefully the necessary trivial historical information in order to fully understand this particular topic. Kudos!