American Post-Conflict Educational Reform This page intentionally left blank American Post-Conflict Educational Reform From the Spanish-American War to Iraq Edited by Noah W. Sobe AMERICAN POST-CONFLICT EDUCATIONAL REFORM Copyright © Noah W. Sobe, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61592-2 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37951-4 ISBN 978-0-230-10145-6 (eBook) DOI. 10.1057/9780230101456 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American post-conflict educational reform : from the Spanish- American War to Iraq / edited by Noah W. Sobe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Educational assistance, American. 2. Educational change. 3. Conflict management. I. Sobe, Noah W., 1971– LB2283.A47 2009 379.1Ј290973—dc22 2009014130 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Part I Introduction One American Imperatives, Educational Reconstruction and the Post-Conflict Promise 3 Noah W. Sobe Part II The “American Century” Begins Two Education at the End of a Gun: The Origins of American Imperial Education in the Philippines 19 Benjamin Justice Three “The Path of Progress”: Protestant Missions, Education, and U.S. Hegemony in the “New Cuba,” 1898–1940 53 Jason M. Yaremko Four American Philanthropy and Reconstruction in Europe after World War I: Bringing the West to Serbia 75 Noah W. Sobe Part III Promises of Modernity and Abundance Five “The Appeal to the German Mind”: Educational Reconstruction in the American Zone of Occupation, 1944–49 105 Charles Dorn and Brian Puaca Six Demystifying the Divine State and Rewriting Cultural Identity in the U.S. Occupation of Japan 129 Kentaro Ohkura and Masako Shibata vi Contents Seven German Postwar Educational Reform and the “American Way of Life” 147 Thomas Koinzer Part IV After the Cold War, in the Face of Terror Eight American Academics and Education for Democracy in Post-Communist Europe 169 Laura B. Perry Nine Lost in Translation: Parent Teacher Associations and Reconstruction in Bosnia in the Late 1990s 189 Dana Burde Ten Allah, America, and the Army: U.S. Involvement in South Asia and Pakistan’s Education Policy 207 M. Ayaz Naseem Eleven Corporate Education and “Democracy Promotion” Overseas: The Case of Creative Associates International in Iraq, 2003–4 229 Kenneth J. Saltman Contributors 251 Index 255 PART I Introduction CHAPTER ONE American Imperatives, Educational Reconstruction and the Post-Conflict Promise Noah W. Sobe In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, —Julia Ward Howe, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)1 In one telling of the story, the transatlantic transfer of European civi- lization has created a new kind of democratic people who are haunted by an obligation to bring a similar conversion to other peoples around the world. After observing a review of Union troops in the midst of the American Civil War, the ardent abolitionist Julia Ward Howe penned the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”2 which proposed that the distinc- tive American mission of war was to “to make men free.” Though this notion has not gone unquestioned and though the song itself has been satirized many times—for example, by Mark Twain who in 1901 suggested, “as Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich”3—the ideas it expresses have shown a curious resiliency across American history. The notion that Americans have a messianic duty to make others free recurs as a topic of cultural reflection and regu- larly informs policy and actions. National symbols and national nar- ratives come out in spades in times of war, yet war sometimes also provides moments of clarity and insight into the composition of social imaginaries.4 Howe’s battle hymn provides one crystalline image of 4 Noah W. Sobe the American relationship to military conflict; the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which became the U.S. national anthem in 1931, provides another. When Francis Scott Key, an American lawyer and amateur poet, contemplated the early light on the morning of September 4, 1814, he was aboard a British prisoner-of-war ship and observing the attempted invasion of Baltimore. Key’s verse was set by his brother-in-law to the tune of an old drinking song and by the end of that month had been published in newspapers across the United States. As historian Robert A. Ferguson and others have pointed out, this text makes a strange choice for a national anthem. Its first stanzas feature a series of hesitant questions—“can you see? / does that star-spangled banner yet wave?”— hardly a rousing, self-affirming national hymn on the face of it. In Key’s version, it was in the light of exploding shells that he was able to see the American flag flying over a besieged Fort McHenry. However, the ultimate outcome of the battle is revealed at the end of the second, rarely sung, stanza when the light of day showed that the American flag was still flying. (“Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream”—see figure 1.1). Ferguson argues that this combination of uncertainty and conviction captures in a nutshell the special meaning that the Enlightenment took on in America. The song offers a narrative of origins that symboli- cally places the constitution of America in a moment of violence. The Figure 1.1 Initial two stanzas of the U.S. national anthem as first published. (Published as a broadside under the title “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” September 1814. Reprinted with permis- sion of the Baltimore Historical Society.) American Imperatives 5 anthem also plays on the metaphor of light, which here resolves the uncertain. That knowledge and science could illuminate the unknown was the central Enlightenment metaphor and one particularly suitable for Americans engrossed in settling and expanding across an unfamiliar continent. Ferguson proposes that while the Enlightenment trades in ringing affirmations, “its deepest meanings lie in the uncertain struggle of light against darkness.”5 In the Republican experiment that was the early United States, the struggle between chaos and order took on prac- tical urgency. And, as is well known, public schooling was proposed as one measure which could ensure that reason and reasonableness would be widely distributed across the population, thus helping to guarantee the success of a political order based on self-determination. While there is plenty to suggest that even in the colonial period publicly organized schooling served other social purposes as well, this argument linking the school and American democracy has proven extremely durable. Time and again it has been endorsed with boundless confidence, even as its proponents simultaneously have been haunted by a consuming anxiety about its effectiveness and practical implementation. The U.S. national anthem exhibits a similar anxiety—again, not over what to do or which principles to uphold, but over whether Americans will succeed in their efforts. Accordingly, the moment when the smoke of battle clears and the first rays of the new day illuminate the landscape proves to be a super-charged, revelatory moment. By the dawn’s early light all is renewed and all is possible. I begin this introductory chapter with a discussion of these two pop- ular “national” anthems in order to focus attention on the hope and conviction that in American eyes so commonly accompanies the ces- sation of military conflict. In the American imaginary, the dawn of a post-conflict era is often construed as a moment of opportunity—an opportunity for emancipation from the past, for wide-scale social reen- gineering, and for laying the foundations of a stable, peaceful post- conflict order. It is also a pivotal moment for the enactment of a global civilizing mandate. This volume brings together historians of education and compara- tive education scholars to examine the ways that the reform of school- ing has figured in U.S. post-conflict reconstruction efforts around the globe. While it is not uniquely American to hold that reconstructing education systems is a reliable route to reconstructing societies, educa- tional restructuring has been a core feature of a number of American overseas initiatives, from the Spanish-American War of 1898 through the present. We only examine the reconstruction efforts of a single 6 Noah W. Sobe country in part for the pragmatic reason of presenting a more coher- ent and complete study than would be possible otherwise. However, our primary reason for focusing on U.S. educational reconstruction projects has to do with America’s global prominence in the twentieth century and at the outset of the twenty-first. As discussed at greater length below, this is a period in which American educational initia- tives formed one of the means by which a preeminent or, if you prefer, hegemonic position has been established for the United States.