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White Views of Black Minds: Schooling in King Leopold's Congo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Barbara A. Yates
Barbara A. Yates*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

Research on the educability of Africans in the past focused narrowly on the learning process: could blacks learn as well as whites? Did they learn in the same manner? More recently attention has turned to broader themes. One recent interpretation of white views about black minds holds that philosophical and psychological preconceptions influenced both the amount and the type of schooling provided for blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other recent works suggest the past psychological focus has obscured the basic question of who should be educated and for what purposes? Thus, one may ask, were white views about black minds only philosophical and psychological guides to pedagogical practice or were they also bulwarks to perpetuate class and caste structures? Moreover, how did such white views serve the self-interests of those who expounded them? This essay examines these questions during the formative years of the educational system in Belgian Africa—the Leopoldian Period (1879–1908). The educational system then established underwent little change until after World War II.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 1980 , pp. 27 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

∗ I wish to thank Professors C. Arnold Anderson, Walter Feinberg, and Alan Peshkin for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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