Today’s conversation picks up on the discussion of American imperial education from our last episode. I speak with Brianna Lafoon, who researches the education networks that formed within and between the mainland United States and its colonial holdings. We discuss how these networks operated, the practices and ideas they spread, and how an imperial perspective informs the history of mass schooling in the United States.
Brianna Lafoon is a historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and she is a PhD candidate in the History Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to her experience as a researcher, she has ten years of educational experience in New York City – seven years classroom experience as a secondary school teacher and three years as an instructional coach.
Episode Transcript
Michael Donnay
In our last episode, we spoke with two scholars who look at the role that ideas of race and science played in shaping the colonial education system in the Philippines during the American occupation. Today, we’re going to return to the early 20th century to continue that conversation. One idea that we touched on briefly last time was this idea of educational networks, that ideas and people moved between various contexts in the mainland US and the Philippines. I wanted to understand more about how that process worked. So I called up Brianna Lafoon.
Brianna is a PhD candidate in the history department at University of Wisconsin Madison, and a historian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her research looks at the intersection of mass schooling in the mainland United States and imperial education in its colonies. She studies how ideas, practices and people circulated within the American empire and influenced educational systems in Puerto Rico, the Philippines and major US cities like New York. Our conversation today touches on a number of areas that helped me better understand how these educational networks functioned. We discussed the literal movement of people, the emergence of educational statistics in Puerto Rico, the role that expositions played in spreading concepts from colonial education, and connections with Indian boarding schools and industrial schooling for African Americans. Brianna also shared her thoughts on what historians of American education gain from including an imperial perspective in their work. My conversation with Brianna really helped solidify my understanding of imperial networks. I also really enjoyed our discussion, and hope you do too.
Welcome to the podcast. We’re so excited to have you.
Brianna Lafoon
Thank you.
Michael Donnay
When you talk about networks of empire, I think the term you use is networks of Imperial schooling is looking very particularly at primary secondary levels. What does that look like? Are we talking about just ideas moving or money? Are we talking about specific curricula? Or are we talking about actually people moving between mainland education and colonial education?
Brianna Lafoon
Yes, all of that. So it’s definitely a lot of ideas. I’ve kind of found a lot of conferences and papers and publications where people are networking together and sharing ideas. But it’s also been really interesting to trace the physical movement of people across these networks. So you have people who are starting out at American Indian boarding schools, and then go into the Philippines. Or people going from Puerto Rico to Hawaii. There’s all kinds of criss crossing of actual people. And then you even have like artifacts crossing. So one of the things that I talk about is some handicrafts that are produced through vocational education in the Philippines that come and are put on display at fairs in the United States. So you really have ideas, people things are moving at this time
Michael Donnay
And are the people involved, are they conscious of this as sort of a unified or connected experience? Or is that something that we’re looking back on and sort of observing after the fact?
Brianna Lafoon
The Great question, I think it’s kind of a mix of both. Some of them are thinking about it in terms of their individual careers as teachers, and not necessarily the broader imperial networks that I kind of looked back on as a historian. For instance, there is really conscious efforts to bring these people together at places like the Lake Mohonk Conference. The official name is the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of Indians and Dependent Peoples. And they added that phrase “dependent peoples” in the early 20th century to include Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines on purpose. So in that way, we see them consciously making the decision to bring together educators of American Indians who were involved in American imperialism from the beginning, and then bring in this new type of imperialism that are overseas in the early 20th century. Bringing those educators together consciously.
Michael Donnay
One place where you make those connections really clear, is in the use of educational statistics. To our modern year statistics and circulars sound fairly standard. Yet you argue that one of the reasons we think that is because of this process of colonial exchange. You make the case that the use of educational statistics is fairly novel at this point in the early 1910s – at least in the way colonial administrators are using them. Can you explain why this might be and what about statistics being used in this way is so new?
Brianna Lafoon
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s no question that these ideas are around at this time. There’s a lot of people talking about it. This is kind of the beginning of this emphasis on efficiency and education. It just hadn’t been collected or analyzed at a large scale yet. And so nobody had really thought about – or they’ve thought about it, but haven’t succeeded at really collecting and through census, through surveys and things like that. And creating a systematic way of applying that analysis to gauge the efficiency of school systems. And so my argument is that with this top down centralization, and with this need to create quality rather than quantity, administrators in Puerto Rico and the Philippines extensively experimented with this. So they take they’re taking ideas that are not new, they’re not creating these ideas from scratch, but they’re taking them and are able to apply them way more extensively than any of the small localized systems in the US at that time.
Michael Donnay
Particularly when you talk about Puerto Rico, you point to two figures as sort of being the leaders of this movement, Roland Falkner and Leonard Ayers. Could you tell us who they are, why they might be the leaders in this and what they’re trying to achieve in Puerto Rico at this point?
Brianna Lafoon
Yeah, absolutely. Roland Falkner’s career was as a statisticias. So before he even got to Puerto Rico, he was a professor of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania. And afterwards, he continued to be a statistics expert, he worked with the United States Immigration Commission, and the Census Bureau doing statistical work. So he actually has little background at all in public education or running a school district or school system or anything like that. So he’s an interesting choice to go to Puerto Rico at that time, but he goes in 1904, and is the Commissioner of Education there. So he really, once he gets there, the tone of the reports, the focus of the central office there really changes because he’s relying on his background. He’s relying on his understanding of statistics to reorient what the Department focuses.
The previous Commissioner, was named Samuel Lindsay, and he’s one of those who’s just constantly trying to expand. So Lindsay’s focus was on how many schools getting them into the rural areas, asking for more money. When Faulkner gets there, he’s the one who I quoted as saying, focusing on quality, not quantity anymore. So he kind of gives up. He doesn’t try as hard to get more funding for expanding schools, and really turns to his use of statistics. And then at the same time that Faulkner is there, a young teacher named Ayers, Leonard Ayers is working and moving his way to the central office. So Leonard Ayers just went straight from college to starting his career in Puerto Rico. And he actually started as an English teacher, he didn’t come over as a school administrator or anything like that. But he was – after reading his letters, he was self described as very ambitious, – and wanted to move up the ladder quickly. And he did, he instantly moved into some supervisory roles and administration roles and then eventually works his way to the central office. And I think under the tutelage of Faulkner, really begins to be involved in learning how to use statistics and gathering them. And so those two are the ones who really start pioneering this use of statistics. It’s really, I think, around 1906, in their annual report, they have hundreds and hundreds of pages of data and statistics and analysis of what that means. And that’s when they start using that language of efficiency. And that’s when they start thinking about how to use these numbers and this quantification to judge how much quality the system in Puerto Rico had.
Michael Donnay
I’d love to turn a little bit to the Philippines now, particularly because you have this wonderful example of the role that expositions play in this exchange. So was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which is a bit of a mouthful, but also seems to be a very important point for the relationship between the Philippines and American educators.
Brianna Lafoon
Yeah, I loved this aspect of my research. Being able to look at these fairs and how they were very influential, I think, in bringing these ideas back. One thing that’s a little bit different that I argue in my dissertation about the Philippines: they definitely are centralized, they are bureaucratic, they’re doing all these similar things. They also are focusing on vocational education heavily in the Philippines. And so this is part of, I think, again, part of this idea of efficiency. Like what type of education we’ll do the most with our limited funding, with reaching as many students as we possibly can. And I actually call it practical education. So there’s actually three parts to it.
Vocational education is part of it. Then we also have agricultural education, and then physical education, so athletics and physical education. So those three things become kind of a highlight of the curriculum in the Philippines. And at this Panama Pacific International Exposition, they bring those and they highlight them at this fair. And this is kind of the venue where they really set up, “Here’s what they’ve been doing for 15 years in the Philippines. And here’s how widespread and successful it is.” And so one interesting thing is, again, these ideas are not new. I don’t I’m not arguing that vocational education was developed in the Philippines. But it was just much more extensive and systematic than anything else that had happened in the US at this time. And so when they bring their display to the exposition in 1915, they’re able to say, “Look how systematic it is, look how centralized we are, and look how far we can spread vocational education in our Philippine system.” So it’s an interesting way that they are able to do that. And in their letters about exhibit talked about how they were displaying their system, that word system just kept coming up again, and again. They wanted to show how these types of curriculum ideas had spread throughout the schools. And not just were piecemeal, but they had created a centralized bureaucracy that helped push practical schooling throughout the system.
And you also have vocational education being used in American Indian boarding schools. So that type of vocational education is without question an influence in the Philippines. So very racialized understanding of how this schooling is going to prepare rural subjects to stay on the land or stay in their economic position, and not necessarily challenge any type of economic hierarchy that’s in place. Whether in the South of the United States or in the Philippines. But one thing that’s a little bit interesting is, again, this kind of added other parts to the Filipino-type of practical education. So you have the kind of industrial education which is like machine working, handicrafts and things like that. And then you have the agricultural education for rural areas. And then you have the physical education that really is kind of oriented toward assimilation. Getting students to understand American values and things like that, and hard work in this practical education sense. And so it’s just much more expansive, in it’s ideas in the Philippines and then hits almost all the students that are in this huge school system. So at one point, there’s a source that talks about about 90% of the students were involved in athletics in the Philippines during this time period, which is way more than were involved in athletics in the US at that point.
And so as these ideas get expanded in the Philippines, and then returned to something like the fair in 1915, people are interested in how can these ideas now become more mainstream or widespread in US education. So there was a lot of conversation at this time – and we’re talking about the 1910s – about moving vocational education into more mainstream school practices in the US. And eventually, you get ideas like the Cardinal Principles of Education, which talk about vocational-izing, education by 1917 and 1918. And these are major points of debate and become central to the expansion of schooling in the US. And what I believe my research shows is that they are looking to this expansion of vocational education in the Philippines at this time as a model.
Michael Donnay
I’d love to turn maybe a bit more to the historiographical end of things. You’ve mentioned it but how this sort of imperial perspective, understanding the interconnections between what’s happening in the mainland US and in the colonial possessions really helps understand both better. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about sort of what you think that perspective offers the history of education broadly, or more specifically, the research that you’re interested in?
Brianna Lafoon
Yeah, that’s a really great question. It’s interesting to bring these two fields together. I think one of my main interventions – there’s two parts to it. So there’s the side of history of education, and then the side of just American history in general. But one thing that I just kept noting, as I started my research and started my studies of empire in education is just how separated the two were. So we have we have a lot of great literature on American schooling in the Philippines or Puerto Rico. And then we have a lot of great literature on what was going on during the early 20th century in the US and it’s the start of the mass schooling for US systems of education during this time. But they never came together. And so I just I couldn’t believe that there was no way that these two things didn’t have a connection. And thinking about it – again, really the purpose of imperial schooling – and connecting that to some of the ideas and the purpose of practices that were developed for US schooling, they’re very similar. So we have the way certain populations are being brought into American values, ideals, citizenship or not citizenship, with education being used in similar ways.
And so bringing together how the same thought process of American imperialism connects to mass schooling in the US, I think, is a critical intervention here. And to say that the American schooling that’s happening in other places, overseas is part of the history of US education. So not pushing it off to the side or making it completely separated, but making sure that it’s integral to how we talk about US education. And that goes backwards and forwards with the history of US education. And so that would mean also bringing in other types of American imperial schooling into how we talk about the history of education in the US. Going back to the earliest days of Indigenous education before Columbus, for instance, and then moving through current issues of different populations of students. So kind of bridging that long history of US education, and thinking about the ways that imperialism has impacted that throughout is a critical intervention, I think.
Michael Donnay
Yeah, and I’m curious how much of that divide has to do with this concept of those national histories? Is it that those histories of Philippine and Puerto Rican schooling live in like a “Philippine history” as opposed to a “United States history”? Or is there another issue that sort of creates that divide that that needs to be bridged?
Brianna Lafoon
No, I think that’s a huge part of it. Number one, I think, again, we have a lot of great scholarship that’s from kind of those national histories. I think, like I mentioned, the other side of it is a mainstream history intervention, which is that the history of American Empire is not always incorporated well into mainstream American history. And so I think that’s where the other side of it is. Instead of looking at all these places separately, as things that happened over there, saying, “No, this was a systematic event happening at this time, it was projecting itself overseas.” And so it’s striking that in 1898, we have Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, all being brought in. And Hawaii in a different way, but all being brought in at the same time. And so what I wanted to do is step back from that and see the systematic way empire was used, and how those educational networks developed at that time. So I think that bigger problem is – and it’s getting better, there’s definitely more movement toward acknowledging American empire, but it’s taken a while to get there. And so I think the first step is acknowledging American empire didn’t just happen piecemeal, it was systematic. And then bringing in the educational elements to that and thinking about how it informed the development of history of education in the US all together.
Michael Donnay
Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate our conversation and everything you have to share.
Brianna Lafoon
Yeah, it was fantastic. Thank you so much.
Michael Donnay
Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society UK. Our social media manager is Elena Rossi, and our executive producer is Heather Ellis. This episode was written and produced by me Michael Donnay . You can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.