Non-State Origins of State Education: Evidence from British Burma

• In Event: How the State Shapes Society: Comparative Education Politics

Abstract

What factors explain education's transformation from a mostly non-state function to predominantly a state's function? Existing literature has offered numerous important explanations for this question, emphasizing the role of political regimes, violent conflict, elite politics, and local development, among many others. However, it also highlights two areas for improvement. First, education's key purpose appears either as a tool to generate economic benefits or to forge a collective identity for the state. Thus, it remains unclear how these two roles evolved in relative importance over time. Second, there still needs a clearer understanding of how state education development responds to a varying presence of pre-existing providers, leaving to question the conditions under which state education co-opts existing providers or replaces them with new modes of provision.

This paper provides new contributions to the two areas in the context of colonial education in British Burma. Like other contexts across Asia, education under British Burma showed an important feature: colonial policy change from the early support for indigenous religious providers to their later replacement by government-led secular schools. Based on existing theories on education development in colonial and non-colonial contexts, I build a theory that emphasizes the role of pre-colonial education levels and anti-colonial resistance. The theory argues that when anti-colonial resistance is low, the colonial government prefers supporting indigenous providers because economic benefits from relying on indigenous providers are available without significantly risking anti-colonial resistance. Under these conditions, colonial education's main purpose is economic: to produce skilled individuals to expand the colonial economy. However, when anti-colonial resistance is high, the government prefers replacing indigenous providers with state-led schools because potential anti-colonial resistance driven by indigenous providers necessitate their replacement with more controllable, state-sponsored education. Under these conditions, education's purpose is ideological: to create a collective identity to demobilize the indigenous population from turning against the state.

To evaluate empirical support for the theory, I manually constructed a panel dataset on colonial education, anti-colonial resistance, and other aspects of the colonial state from colonial gazetteers and censuses in 38 districts (second-level administrative unit) of British Burma over twenty years, from 1901 to 1920. The findings show support for the theory; pre-colonial Buddhist literacy rates alone, driven by monastic schools, do not predict colonial enrolment levels. However, its interaction with anti-colonial resistance, measured by the total number of riots since colonization, significantly and positively predicts colonial enrolment levels across primary and secondary levels. The interaction however predicts a reduction in technical education enrollments, suggesting an ideological focus under strong anti-colonial resistance. I also found one piece of valuable additional evidence; the interaction predicts even stronger increases in female enrolment across primary and secondary levels, which implies an increase in state involvement because monastic schools did not generally admit women. Further robustness checks also suggest that those predicted coefficients are not due to the differences in population, local geography, soil fertility, pre-colonial population, or spatial correlation.

The overall findings yield two implications that interact with existing research: (1) state education development may build on a varying landscape of non-state education providers, and (2) indigenous resistance against the state may shift the latter's use of education from a source of economic benefits to an important tool to create loyal citizens under a collective national identity.

Author

• Htet Thiha Zaw, University of Michigan