ABSTRACT
This essay proceeds through a comparative analysis of two strategically disparate texts separated by gulfs of time and space. What makes the comparison viable is how these texts are resonant due to their capacities to express the power and limits of the educational apparatus in an imperial context. Those texts are 1) a published 1933 “lesson plan for ethical reading” by an elementary school teacher in Baguio City in the U.S. colony of the Philippines, and 2) a late twentieth-century Asian American/Pacific Islander literary text that dramatizes a punishing failure by the indigenous to abide by those ethical, and imperialist, demands.
