British colonial education policy: a synonym for cultural imperialism?

In the late 1930s W. K. (later Sir Keith) Hancock warned historians to steer clear of the term ‘Imperialism’ because the emotional echoes it aroused were too violent and too contradictory and it had no precise meaning. ¹ His warning has gone unheeded, especially among contemporary neo-Marxist revisionist writers, who rarely use the term cultural imperalism in other than a pejorative sense — the conscious and deliberate imposition of alien cultural values and beliefs on hapless indigenous peoples. One can, of course, argue that most colonial schooling was conducted initially by missionaries who were primarily concerned with religious conversion. That inevitably led them to attempt to reform some of the more objectionable aspects of indigenous cultures like polygamy, female circumcision and the power of witchcraft. In that sense the schools were culturally imperialistic, i.e. they encouraged the adoption of Christian (European) moral ideals, but an important distinction needs to be drawn between the missions’ motives, which were largely dictated by a desire to improve the quality of human life, and those attributed to colonial governments by neo-Marxists who argue that colonial education policies were expressly designed to perpetuate European cultural and political hegemony. It is the latter interpretation of the term cultural imperialism, implying an obvious negative value judgement, which is questioned in this chapter.