Julia A. Clancy-Smith

Educational systems in Africa and Asia are the products of colonial schooling--or of resistance to educational imperialism--and raise questions about modernity. How did colonial schooling work to promote or block modernity? How did colonial regimes address the contentious matter of women's education? How did education shape colonial states? What implications did the state-school nexus hold for nationalist struggles and post-colonial states? Analyzing the large forces associated with modernities from the viewpoint of families/households rather than top-down, state-centered perspectives yields insights into how some post-colonial state and societies rapidly became modern. This study examines education and schooling in North Africa across three periods--pre-colonial; colonial; independent--from 1830 to about 1970. The comparative question is: why did female education, especially for Muslim girls, achieve limited success in colonial Tunisia (1881-1956), and thrive in post-colonial Tunisia, yet utterly fail in French Algeria (1830-1962), and, to an extent, independent Algeria? The project focuses upon schooling for girls in colonial Tunisia and Algeria because the question of whether colonized women should receive modern education generated the most passionate polemics there--debates that were ensnared in global struggles over the meaning of empire and local conflicts over family structures, hierarchies, religion,identities--over how to become modern.