Saving the Backward, Unhygienic Bodies Through Schooling: A Rereading of Paul Monroe's Sympathetic Internationalism In-Between Christian and Hygienic Civilizationism

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality of Educational Knowledge and Discourse: Health and Education (Table 1)

Abstract

As the forgotten forefather of American comparative and international Education (CIE), Paul Monroe’s maverick career started to draw some academic attention in recent decades. Current research on Monroe and his years as the director of the International Institute (II) at Teacher College, Columbia University, revealed the implicit Americentrism embodied in his renowned international scholarship and leadership, which in turn reflected the particular American approach to empire-building through cultural-educational expansion from the early 20th century on (Bu, 1997; 2003; 2012; 2019; in press; Takayama, 2018). Focusing on Monroe’s idea of “sympathetic internationalism” – that cultural understanding and educational assistance should replace militaristic or isolationist foreign policies, this research discusses the largely ignored “historical-epistemological” conditions of its emergence (Foucault, 2002; Daston & Galison, 2007/2010/2021). By tracing the impacts of Christian and hygienic civilizationism in Monroe’s ideal of “sympathetic internationalism”, this research argues that Monroe’s paradoxical approach to international educational assistance as empire building (and vice versa) could be seen as a historical-epistemological product of the Progressive-Era American social gospel movement travelling/expanding transnationally.

By re-reading Monroe’s explicitly anti-racist and implicitly culturalist reformulations of race/racial difference, I posit that Monroe, as other Progressive-Era cultural, political, and religious elites, shared a culturalist re-definition of racial hierarchy as civilizational distance in an evolutionary sense (Gilkeson, 1991; Proctor, 1991; Schuller, 2018; Yellin, 2003). One the one hand, this culturalist re-interpretation of race refuted the hard-core biological-determinist conceptions of race representative in Eugenic reasoning, embracing the desirability and possibility of racial uplifting through environment-building and control (Schuller, 2018; Yellin, 2003). On the other hand, the humanitarian aid to building the modern, civilized environment like school for the racial uplifting of the children of “backward” peoples, re-solidified the civilizational hierarchy between the Christian white and the uncivilized races of the world. Reflected in Monroe’s thinking on assisting the culturally backward children of the world was his great emphasis on schooling as manufacturing a civilized, hygienic environment for the evolution of their uncivilized, unhygienic bodies (1922; 1925). It alludes to the converging bio-political and religious interests/concerns of the rising American empire to save the “health” of the backward children of the world through modern Western schooling, especially through subjects like moral and hygienic Education (Monroe, 1927, p. 132).

Situated in-between Christian and hygienic civlizationism, Monroe’s humanitarian and international assistance to the schooling of the culturally backward children of the world represented the historically-epistemologically specific Progressive-Era American social gospel of a sympathetic but also white-centric understanding and management of racial difference. It re-imagined and re-legitimized a particular colonial/imperial relationship between the Anglo-American cultural-religious elites and the so-called “culturally backward” races of the world, positioning the former as the benevolent facilitators and rational mentors to supervise, monitor and regulate the hygienic-civilizational transformation of the latter through schooling. This re-visitation into Mornoe’s international scholarship and leadership provides a great case study of how a culturally-historically specific discourse and technology of race becoming global and universal, carrying “both the seed of emancipation and the seed of regulation and oppression” (Mignolo, 2007 p. 459).

Author

• Feiran Dong, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author