Miseducation

Schooling used as an instrument of conquest rather than as a failure of teaching. The claim is not that the American colonial school system taught badly. It is that it worked, and that what it was working on was the pupil’s relationship to his own country.

The mechanism named in the argument is the medium of instruction. Teaching in English, from American materials, produced a population fluent in someone else’s frame of reference and estranged from its own history. That is also why the term belongs next to the colonial mentality research: instruction reaches people early enough for a preference to become automatic rather than considered.

Source: Renato Constantino (1966), “The Miseducation of the Filipino.” Constantino argued that American colonial public education was a weapon of conquest, that English as the medium of instruction taught Filipinos to see the world through American eyes, and that the result was a population cut off from its own past. Widely reproduced and free, for example https://www.academia.edu/71176825/The_Miseducation_of_the_Filipino_by_Renato_Constantino . The essay is an argument rather than a study, and the course uses it as the named origin claim it is.

First used in: 2.5 · The reflex underneath the opinion