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16 September 2015, 19th International Academic Conference, Florence ISBN 978-80-87927-15-1 , IISES
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528http://www.iises.net/proceedings/19th-international-academic-conference-florence/front-page
“We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.”
Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History.
“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way ‘it really was.’ It
means to seize hold of a memory in a moment of danger.”
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of History.”
In this presentation, I want to probe deeply into the “tangled historicities” (Clifford, 2012, p.
425) registered in the visual and iconographic domains of a number of schools in the 9-
country international study on “elite schools in globalizing circumstances” that I have been
doing along with colleagues from India, Singapore and Australia and my graduate students
who hail from India, Kenya, Turkey, China and Chile and the United States. It is by giving
attention to what might be by understood as the dead, inert life and objects of school that,
paradoxically, we might in fact see more deeply into the contradictions of the living present
[mention websites here]. In this regard, I look closely at what postcolonial elite schools in
our international study are doing with their historical archives, preserved cultural objects,
architecture, emblems, mottos and their school curricula as they martial these cultural
resources at the crossroads of profound change precipitated by globalization and attendant
neoliberal imperatives. This change is articulated across the whole gamut of global forces,
connections, and aspirations. And, it is in relation to and through these dynamics that
postcolonial elite schools must now position and reposition themselves—acting and
intervening in and responding to new globalizing circumstances that often cut at right
angles to the historical narratives and the very social organization of these educational
institutions linked to England. Globalizing developments have precipitated efforts on the
part of these schools to mobilize their rich heritages and pasts as a material resource and
not simply as a matter of indelible and inviolate tradition. History, then, I maintain in this
context, cannot be reduced to the realm of epiphenomena, of codified narratives,
consolidated pasts and securely linear school chronologies. Instead, drawing on Walter
Benjamin, I look at the way in which postcolonial school histories are “active in the present”
and the way in which schools in India, Barbados and Singapore are adroitly and selectively
managing their school identities in the light of globalization. The results of these
interventions are not guaranteed. They often run up against the revolution of rising
expectations of school youngsters and their parents, the taste for global cultures and global
futures indicative of the global ambitions of the young, and the pressures of alumni and
other stakeholder interests which must be navigated.
This presentation is organized in the following way. I begin with a vignette (distilled from a
photograph) that illustrates the tremendous challenge faced by these elite schools in
navigating the new environment of roiling globalizing ambitions of contemporary school
youngsters. It is this collision of the past and the present that I take up theoretically and
methodologically in the first part of the presentation. Drawing on the work of E.P. Thompson,
Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin I discuss what I am calling the “work of history”;
that is, its activeness in the present as Benjamin maintains and its contradictory and
fracturing nature as Homi Bhabha outlines in his book, The Location of Culture (1994). I
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argue that the poignant setting of the interface of globalization with the school sets up new
material and discursive logics both inside and outside these institutions such that
contradictory and hybrid energies are in brilliant display. Above all, in this section, I seek
to answer the urgent question: What is the history that is postcolonial school history? How
do we understand the work of history in these schools and in these postcolonial colonial
contexts? How does the colonial past linked to Britain work in the present?
The second part of my presentation moves from theoretical overview to the concrete. I
address the matter of the practices of what, after David Cannadine, I am calling the
burnished ornamentalism and the management of school histories in three of our elite
school sites—Old Cloisters of Barbados, Rippon College of India, and Clarence High
School of Singapore—as they are articulated at a flash point of profound change. This
section turns on this fundamental fact: that these schools, which are the products of
societies marked historically by prolonged colonial and imperial encounters, are now driven
forward by new energies associated with marketization, neoliberalism and globalization as
these countries lurch forward unevenly toward the post-developmental era. This turn
towards neoliberal globalization has precipitated radically new needs, interests, desires,
capacities and competitive logics among the aspirant middle class and upwardly-mobile
young and their parents, in each of these societies, that then press powerfully onto these
elite schools. In this section I compare and contrast the work of history in these three
different school settings.
In the third and final section of this presentation, I attempt to answer the question what
does this all mean? Where are these modulations and re-narrations of histories pointing
schools toward in today’s fast changing contexts? I believe based on the data that we have
culled from these postcolonial elite schools settings that these institutions are sites of class
making. The deep colonial pasts that defined the gestation of these schools and their
related contexts have been ruptured in the first place by waves of change linked to national
quests for self-determination and autonomous will formation and the material evolution
toward post-developmental status of these formerly colonial societies in which these
schools are located (Ong, 2006). All of the schools in our “Elite Schools in Globalizing
Circumstances” study are therefore dealing with matters that involve scaling or rescaling
of the past to consolidate their relationships to local and national projects as well as global
imperatives. Just as importantly, and perhaps more insistently, these schools must now
respond to neoliberal economic circumstances that are powerfully articulated in the global
arena that can make the past seem irrelevant or relevant in new ways. But the past persists.
It breaks into the present, which like the Angelus Novus (Paul Klee’s figure of the new angel,
read by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as a portent of the
future buffeted by the past), is overwhelmed by tradition even as it orients to the future.
The present then of these schools is one that is “ruptured” and “fragmented,” as one
geography teacher at Old Cloisters in Barbados told her sixth form students. It is deeply
hybrid. In exploring the nexus between usable histories and globalization, I oppose the idea
of globalization as a kind of technological sublime efficiently suffusing and extending
schools into the world. I argue instead, by exploring the strategically interested action of
these schools as they work on their histories to navigate the present, that globalization is
not simply a set of external processes imposing themselves on local institutions. Reading
the discursive order of these postcolonial elite schools through the prism of the “work of
history,” I maintain that the globalization of elite schools is a productive scenario and an
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arena of volatile actions and meanings—a veritable struggle over the iconography of the
past and the present.
A Vignette
Our Barbados team of researchers at Old Cloisters were invited by the some of the sixth
form students to view an extraordinary transaction of the current students with the past not
only of their school but the island. We were led into the hallowed space of the assembly
hall of Old Cloisters; a space as the school’s historian, Ralph Jemmott (2006) notes, where
the school’s ornamental and cultivated past—its emblems, its plaques listing the names of
the prestigious Barbados Scholarship holders and the portraits of its old white British school
masters going back to 1733—beams down from on high onto the school body comprised
largely of Afro Barbadian youngsters. Picture this layered scene of images latent with
allusions to the colonial past, trophies of the present, and the iconography and high water
marks of the British public school in the postcolonial setting. But look again! This hall
normally reserved for formal gatherings—morning assembly, the hosting of “speech day”
in which the island’s dignitaries, school officials, alumni and the parents congregate to
celebrate the students’ achievements and the continued success of the school—was now
hosting something else. As a sign of the times, it is here that contemporary students chose
to stage a modeling event engaging with their past and the ethnic history of the school in a
form of self-orientalization (Potuog ̆lu-Cook, 2006) as they signal their interests in exotic
futures—modeling over the traditional career paths of lawyering or doctoring! It was a
striking scene of hybridity as the models dressed in traditional costumes of many different
ethnic groups— Chinese, Yoruba, Scottish, Native American— strutted across the dais as
if they were on a catwalk. The student audience made up of their peers responded with a
mixture of delight and orientalist curiosity, seeing their school friends as models of
something alluring. Interestingly, when we asked the “models” about their highly ethnicized
costumes they told us they were representing different ethnic groups that were part of the
Barbados ethnic make up and cultural heritage.
Theorizing the Work of History
Vignettes like this one help to set up our theoretical understanding of the work of history.
In talking about the work of history, I seek to invoke two strands of scholarship that speak
at times at cross purposes regarding the work of tradition and the past and its relevance.
In the first strand, that of the cultural Marxism of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams,
there is a commitment to understanding the importance of the mobilization of structured-
time/present-making history in maintaining a cultural dominant in light of change. The world
does not stand still and the ruling institutional order, such as that represented in the factory
of the nineteenth century, operates in part by regulating control over life’s narrative and the
organization of the rhythm of time and duration of everyday existence. The factory (like the
school), then, in Thompson’s account, structures time and life’s narrative of human agents
transforming from the peasantry into the industrial proletariat. It is the clock and the church
bell (interestingly, these are critical markers in the organization of social aesthetics of
postcolonial elite schools—the bequeaths of a transforming colonial order—see
MacDougall [1999]) that mark the present in relation to the past as a progressive rather
than a circular order. Time, history, for Thompson is malleable. It signifies and can therefore
be recruited to purposes of affiliation, order making and, indeed, struggle against such
order. Yet this world defined by Thompson in the tradition of cultural studies is
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methodologically drawn in the periphery of the metropolitan center precisely at the same
time that British colonial expansion is achieving a very deep, thoroughgoing register in the
third world as Edward Said (1994) argues.
For Williams, history, understood as usable and “selective tradition,” plays a critical role in
the larger project of building hegemony and sustaining the persistence of dominant
institutions (Williams, 1980 p. 39). Hegemony is not to be understood as a one-sided
dominance but as an active process of coordinating, selecting and integrating the different
integuments of cultural form and registers of the past, the traditions of residual groups as
well as emergent and oppositional ones into workable order—what Antonio Gramsci calls
a “historic bloc” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 137). For postcolonial schools, this means that effort
must be made to build legitimacy and carve out paths of access and trajectories of
opportunity into the order of schooling. History then is recruited to the work of the
persistence of group dominance and incorporation of countervailing elements in society
that might seek change (Williams, 1980, p. 41). For Williams, the maintenance of
dominance or hegemony is not guaranteed. The task is to articulate the commonsense of
dominant groups, extending and dispersing influence throughout the whole social field.
History’s role in this sense involves binding and incorporating residual and emergent
traditions and cultural form into the present system of explaining what exists and what is
possible. In many ways, the postcolonial elite schools in our study seek and maintain
hegemonic presence in the educational market. Their persistence is linked to a code of
capacities and characteristics articulated through consolidation of objects, furniture,
remarkable academic success, built on some version of the trivium and the quadrivium—
liberal arts curriculum in high school.
But our second strand on history, derived from postcolonial theorists, speaks to a more
complex and fractured story around the articulation of history and dominant groups in the
third world. It explicitly writes against the methodological nationalism that one finds as an
Achilles heel in British cultural Marxism—Williams and Thompson deeply and besottedly
dripping in it. These postcolonial authors speak adroitly to the expanded theatre of imperial
and colonial historical conjunctures. Postcolonial history then, from gestation, is a trans-
border affair. Postcolonial institutions, such as the elite schools are marked by this sense
of the past. Much of the history that these schools claim to be their own is inherited,
borrowed or imposed, invoking a reservoir of iconography and symbolism that exceeds any
singular ownership or origins claim. Postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said (1994),
Gauri Viswanathan (1989), Homi Bhabha (1994), and Stuart Hall (1996), even metropolitan
historians such as David Cannadine sensitive to the postcolonial context, point to the
ironies of the historical transaction over colonialism. These ironies persist into the present
and the way postcolonial elites both draw on as well as renounce the imperial symbolic.
Hall (1990) for example, brilliantly illustrates this sense of heritage as postcolonial paradox
in his discussion of the politics of popular reception of the Jamaican coat of arms. One of
the prominent features of this national emblem is that of an Amerindian figure holding up a
shield displaying five pineapples. The image is supposed to represent the triumph of the
indigenous over the colonial past. Hall points out that this image drawn from the past that
is supposed to be a symbol of pride and resistance has been met with an ambivalent
reception in contemporary Jamaica. Prominent in response to this national symbol of
endurance of first people was its elite-school educated former prime minister, Edward
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Seaga (Harvard-trained lawyer). Seaga fervently rejected the native figure as representing
too deep a reminder of the “crushed Arawaks” vanquished and defeated by the European
colonizer. He maintained the symbol was inappropriate for portraying “the soaring [national]
spirit of Jamaicans” (p. 235). This disjuncture of the native past and the postcolonial present
is severe. Seaga’s elitist comments remind us of a colonialist attack. It is these
discontinuities as Hall notes that effectively pluralize history, magnifying the links across
groups and accenting the fissures within any given singular narrative of the past as
inheritance—no matter what is articulated in espoused programs of knowledge and
heritage triumphalism.
But these contradictions do not only exist at the point of reception. They exist within
postcolonial textual production and the texts themselves that navigate the past into the
present and future. The striking example of another coat of arms in which ambivalence
thrives is that of Rippon College in our study. Rippon College’s coat of arms integrate
heraldic elements (for example, the heraldic tenne suggestive of bhagwa color used on the
Maratha standard, the wings and flames associated with the Pawars, the sun representing
the Suryavanshis and the moon the Chandravanshis and so forth are all referenced in the
Rippon College coat of arms) culled from the banners of the various independent states of
nineteenth century Central India. These depictions were meant to cobble together a
symbolic unity of cultural references generated from the imaginary universes of the different
Central India states and native aristocratic representatives, and drawing upon and
martialing their collective indigenous energies into an enduring symbol of a triumphant and
prosperous Rippon College. This is summarized in the Sanskrit words of the school’s motto,
“Gyanameva Shakti” (knowledge is power), inscribed at the base of the coat of arms. What
is buried and unsaid in the elevation of these symbols as emblematic in Rippon College’s
constant gardening and burnishing of its image is that these celebratory emblems and
standards associated with Central India’s princely kingdoms were actually assigned to
these native constituencies by the British in 1877, a couple decades after the famous Indian
Mutiny in 1857. These symbolic markers of endogenous independence were also banners
of complicity and political settlement facilitating an elaborate projection and spread of
British colonial power into the subcontinent!
This attention to the cunning and ruse of history as it is played out in the periphery
separates postcolonial theorists from most others writing on contemporary society. There
is, then, a difference in thematic emphasis in the writing of cultural Marxists and
postcolonial theorists on history as well. Cultural Marxists foreground class affiliation, the
cultivation and elaboration of a cultural dominant and the making of historical formations
within a national order. Postcolonial theorists underscore the persistence of cultural
imperialism and colonialism within the post-independence era and the ambivalent
relationship of postcolonial subjects to historical objects and historical legacies. Together
these different strands on the work of history present us with important perspectives in our
efforts to understand the ideological work of history in the practices of postcolonial elite
schools especially as they are articulated to current developments around globalization. I
now turn to a discussion of the concrete experiences and uses of history associated with
three of the postcolonial elite schools.
Section Two: The Concrete Working of History
The social world is accumulated history...(Bourdieu, 1986, p. 241)
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For it’s Cloisters, Cloisters, all for Cloisters...
(Old Cloisters’ School Song)
Each of these schools reworks its particular historical heritage in new contexts in which
they and their societies are situated. We must therefore methodologically move between
the past and the present of these schools. Each has evolved out of colonial contexts to be
significant symbols of modernization in their respective national regions and the world.
Nevertheless, scale and capacity and different histories of incorporation into colonialism
and capitalism are worth remarking in the discussion of these schools and their respective
historical contexts. The vastness of India, its rising economic power and influence is also
to be analyzed along with its extraordinary history of endogenous aristocratic elite formation,
its enormous population size, and the intensity of the growth of its new economy. All of this
places the school we are examining in India, Rippon College, in a very specific location.
The Rippon College context is then different from Old Cloisters in Barbados or Straits in
Singapore. As large as India is Barbados is small. Barbados’ location in the center of the
emergence of the British imperial economic development has long since waned, declining
from the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. Yet Barbados is a critical player in the
Caribbean and Latin American region. It is one of the handful of third world nations in this
region listed in UNDP’s high development column of HDI. Straits School as its spanking
new modernist structures indicate is a beacon in a small country that has been one of the
transcendent NICs. It is a third world country that passed into first world status since the
end of last century according to its legendary former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (Yew,
2000). The sense that Singapore is a global player has been absorbed into the sinews of
Straits School. Proud of its past, it seeks to not only spotlight its remarkable achievement
and success but to project its brand into the global arena.
Past Times
Heraldry...is the shorthand of history. (Woodcock and Robinson, 1988, p. xii)
The eagle eye and gryphon strength
They led us to the fore
To reign supreme in every sphere
The sons of Singapore
(Straits School’s Anthem)
In the work of history in the postcolonial elite school, the matter of time itself is a deeply
signified and signifying property. In the context of the postcolonial elite school, time is to be
understood as useable tradition, useable chronology. One powerful sense of time in the
elite schools under examination is endurance, persistence—the longue durée. These
schools have long histories. All of them are over a century and some almost 300 years old!
They all have official histories. These schools are not just proud of their past, they seek to
mobilize the past in the operationalization of the present and their anticipation of the future.
The work of history then can be charted into a strategic periodization of past times, present
times and future times. This strategic periodization is not at all to be understood as a linear
march of time but rather the complex practices associated with martialing the storehouse
of powerful signifying material and cultural residues inherited by the schools. Time in this
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sense is a protean system of meanings that comes to the aid of strategic engagement with
the existential challenges that these schools are now facing. Their accumulated symbolic
power and capital are thus, through periodization, deployed to mark off progress, to mark
status and achievement in relation to others, and to emphasize, above all things, the
shimmering elevation of the postcolonial elite school above all comers.
The principal emblems of each of the schools—Cloisters, Rippon, Straits—recruit nature
and transfer the symbolic moment of the powerful characteristics associated with the kings
of beasts of the land and the air, the lion and the eagle, onto their institutional realm. This
articulation of heraldry blends history into mythology where the line between fact and fiction
disappears into an overwhelming assertion of distinction, distinctiveness and triumphalism.
These guiding symbols of the postcolonial elite schools are coiled, pulsing with semiotically
arranged tension and historical reference and significance. Like the coiled and braided
ropes of the “3 Cs of Empire” (the mutually reinforcing projects and powers of capitalism,
colonialism and civilization), these symbols are multidimensional and reinforcing—
recruiting meanings and practices, metaphor and ritual in the consecration of the enduring
dominance of these schools in their respective contexts. These burnished symbols like W.B.
Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium” (2010, pp. 56-7) bespeak of a longing for immortality, a
wish to be primus inter pares, a dream of constant glory, and the codification of the gold
standard that separates these schools from all the rest. The imaginary fervor for affiliation
these densely signifying associations consolidate perfects a religious and moral
righteousness that hums beneath the espoused program of secularism and
cosmopolitanism that these schools articulate. Protestantism in the case of Straits and Old
Cloisters and Hinduism in the case of Rippon are rich aspects of the allusive and imaginary
heritage and universe of these schools that lend warrant to success. Religion is never far
away from school-based triumphalism. But what, above all, these symbols dynamically
introduce is the active nature of tradition and the past in contemporary history making of
these schools. The elaboration and burnishing of these symbols are part of the larger
investment in history and its strategic use.
Such is it with the symbolism associated with the iconographic figure of the lion.
Remarkably, each of these schools, as it is with Eton, foregrounds the lion symbol on their
coat of arms. These lion images tend not to be flat but raised, erect, poised and in the
manner, as we are told in books on heraldry, of signifying and asserting power and
domination (1990). In the case of Rippon College’s coat of arms, the lion image is exalted
above the two princes (Maratha and Rajaput) standing on either side of a shield. We are
like lions, “we are lions” (nous sommes des lions, adapting Barthes Mythologies). Two lions
with paws raised occupy the center of Old Cloisters court of arms. And on the website of
Cloisters’ old scholars association, a photo of a pride of life-like lions appears on which is
scrolled this guiding admonition: “Guardians of our Heritage.” At Straits School the mythical
griffin reins supreme. The griffin combines the king of birds, the eagle, with the king of
beasts, the lion. Again the griffin’s claw is raised. Through these images the schools recruit
the powerful mysterious characteristics of these dominant creatures of the animal world to
their institutions. The lion and the griffin are understood as great protectors of high valued
and precious treasures. The power of these symbols echoes through the ages. The
heritage of the school is not a thing of the past but a force in the present and the future.
These schools project power and accomplishment. It is a compelling aspect of their
marketing and appeal in the present.
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If the lion and the griffin can be seen somehow as the distillation of the postcolonial school’s
identity—the summary and consolidation of its past time and essence of its present and
future will to power—these symbols are not free standing and self-sufficient. They are
articulated to other reinforcing symbols, objects, practices, and iconography that reinforce
the school as triumphant. Emblems, plaques, school motto, school songs flags, bunting,
the architecture of these schools channel the sense of continuity, near permanence, of Old
Cloisters, Strait Schools and Rippon College. The aura of school past is constructed not
given. Photographs, busts, memorial walls, gardens with dedication walls, plaques
celebrating the outstanding achievers of these schools going back to their earliest
beginnings build this sense of the past continuous into the present.
Gates and entrances beckon and lead the visitor to highly orchestrated spaces. Old
Cloisters’ wrought iron gates, for example, lead the visitor from its busy Mahogany Street
entrance into staged and modulated space saturated with evident historical ruins from the
colonial past. Right after the entrance from Mahogany Street, on the north east quarter of
Cloisters school grounds, looking to the left, the visitor’s attention is immediately drawn to
a sand-colored memorial wall rising from a bed of lilac flowers. Emblazoned on this
memorial wall are the names of all the great British headmasters of yesteryear—all of whom
were educated in the citadels of learning in England. The political leaders that the school
has produced over its long history are also foregrounded.
One is struck by a similar codification of the past at Straits School as one enters the main
building passing from its cone like reception canopy which opens up into the school’s main
atrium, one is attracted to the imposing bust of the school’s founder General Straits. Here,
too, one finds plaques and photographs of the school’s great progeny, among whom
prominent leaders of Singapore, preeminent in the school’s illustrious history and
preeminent among world leaders.
In the receiving room in Rippon College’s spectacular main building one is surrounded by
paintings of the earliest board members and benefactors: the Rajputs, Nawabs and
Maharajas of Central India. The building in which this receiving room is housed is itself one
of the most noted examples of the Indo-gothic style of late colonial architecture surviving
in India. In a key source written on Rippon, the main building is described as a “perfect
blend” of “Indian and British heritage.”
If past times, articulated in all consuming images such as the griffin, in celebratory display,
pride and specialness in history books, school magazines, special memorial releases, You
Tube video and flicker and Facebook photos and uploaded files, are a modulated resource
for the burnishing of image and the marketing of these schools—they are also the source
of disavowal, markers of contradiction, at the interface of the past and the present.
Present Times
The present times of these schools bring new terms and new relationships to these
hallowed objects and consecrated pasts. These powerful signifying objects, practices and
rituals are in confluence with a new order of things. When these symbols are put under the
pressure of the postcolonial moment and the momentum of globalization they appear
contradictory. For instance, when faced with the postcolonial questions of relevance,
origins, and the remaking of identities, these great symbols seem at times brittle or out of
place, more mimetic and ironic (as Bhabha points out in his essay, “Of Mimicry and Man”
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[1984]). Why are the symbols linked to Anglo-European and Greco-Roman imperial and
monarchial systems and houses still so enduring in the present day Singapore or India or
Barbados? What particular work do they do in the postcolonial context? How do they relate
to the radical openness of these societies to globalizing energies? These questions bring
us to present times.
While these schools revel in the selective traditions of the past times, they work as well to
navigate the past into the present as they contend with the new challenges and orientations
within the school body itself, the needs and aspirations of parents and students, that
present times bring. Present times of the postcolonial school are not so much a marker of
the period of the now or the new, as they are a concatenation of structures, experiences,
practices, the active crosscurrents of needs and competitive interests and orientations in
the navigation of the existential circumstances of the postcolonial context. Present times
are generated from contradictions within the school as well as from new dynamics taking
place in the world outside as the roiling processes of globalization put these schools under
the pressure of new circumstances. Present times then are times of change, precipitating
repurposing and reorientation.
One thing these schools must contend with is the fact that they are not the only option for
youngsters and their parents. In this context, the past can be a weight upon the present.
This often leads to reorientation. Take Old Cloisters in Barbados for example. Historically
founded on the British public school model, with deep emphasis on the quadrivium and the
trivium, Old Cloisters built its reputation around the classics—the study of Greek and
Roman literature and history. One of its early headmasters, a Mr. Lawless, was famous for
his publication of the Elements of Euclid in 1892 while he was headmaster at Old Cloisters!
But the great point of fruition of the classics was around late 1930s when the school was
beginning to open up to and knit a black lower middle class into its school body. It is from
this more integrated Cloisters that a celebrated group of brilliant students called the rolls
royces were known for the speed at which they could translate Livy and Vergil into English
(Jemmott, 2006). These students were largely Afro-Barbadian, part of a generation that
would become the political leadership in the country. At one point in the 1960s one of the
rolls royces was Prime Minster and his former classmate would become his deputy. Both
distinguished themselves as rolls-royce translators of Greek and Latin. Right until the
1980s Old Cloisters sent some of its major talent in the classics to Oxford and Cambridge.
The roll royces represented the long-held desire of the colonial and postcolonial child to
seek final achievement and cultural finishing in England.
By the turn of the new century, that began to change. Old Cloisters’ students have retreated
from the classics emphasis opting instead now for the sciences and business. Out of some
six curricular tracks for the sixth formers at Old Cloisters five are designated for science
and technology. Only one track is in arts and languages. Moreover, students have voted
with their feet for business, accounts and law pursuing these subjects outside of Old
Cloisters as the school does not offer them as courses of study. The new rambunctious
entrepreneurial desires and imaginations for exotic career futures within the contemporary
youth communities now exceed the capacities of the school. This has resulted in strategic
action on the part of students reflected in new curricular choices (the shift towards business,
law, economics, accounts, communications studies, digital media and entrepreneurship,
etc.) parked alongside the old liberal arts emphasis in the humanities that constitutes the
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historical bequeath to these schools. Indeed, in the last two decades, Cloisters has
abandoned the old Oxford and Cambridge GCE examinations for a examinations
administered by the Caribbean Examination Council
i
. Deputy principal, Stuart Calmley,
spoke of reorientation of the curriculum toward globalization and the school’s commitment
to reproducing global citizens and global leaders:
The world has now become like a village. You know, before, we saw ourselves in the
context of Barbados and what we can achieve and so on. But the reality is that today, and
I think this is one of the things of all education here at Old Cloisters. We are not just
preparing students to go into the Barbadian workforce but we are preparing them really for
globally…basically… to be able to go into jobs anywhere in the world because we have
been saying to them that now … globalization has taken place or is a continuing situation
or issue. (Stuart Calmley, Deputy Principal of Old Cloisters)
Perhaps even more driven by the goal of martialing history in efforts to retool is Rippon
College. Founded as a school to provide British education to the sons of Central India’s
indigenous aristocracy, Rippon College has felt the pressure to open up to a wider cross
section of social groups, particularly the new commercial classes of Rippon City and its
surroundings and to elements of the lower order. Like Cloisters and Straits, the invocation
of the meritocratic principle is a fundamental feature in the reframing of the historical
narrative of the school. The administrators, teachers and the students at each of these
schools reject as well as embrace different aspects of the early history of eliteness
associated with their institutions. They reject any notion of social snobbishness or the
retention of any notion of exclusion by class, ethnicity or religion. They, nevertheless, retain
this notion of separateness, of distinctiveness, built on achievement but enabled by the
symbolic weight and furniture of cultural form, heraldry, architecture etc. that help to define
their school as the institution of excellence in their given setting. Each of these schools is
affected by an aggressive context of competition for students and standing. In Barbados,
Old Cloisters competes with 9 other older grammar school and the Barbados Community
College for students and standing. Singapore’s Straits School dominates a field in which
others such as Chang Lee and Naples compete for outstanding students and notoriety.
But Rippon now operates in an environment where the competitive pressure is quite
extraordinary. New schools committed to twenty-first century skills are being built everyday
in India. Rippon is having to compete with schools that are being founded by the business
and commercial classes such as the Mercedes Benz International School (http://mbis.org/),
in Rajeev Ghandi Infotech Park in Hinjewadi, Pune, India. As one of us has reported
elsewhere (Rizvi, 2014), there is a growing belief that the older, long-established schools
that emerged in the colonial era might not be up to the task of sustaining excellence in the
present. Rippon, like Straights and Old Cloisters have accepted this challenge and have
enhanced their infrastructure, curricula and website and online representation and
reworked their image. Official and unofficial videos, sometimes with very high quality
production values can be found on online video sharing websites like YouTube, Facebook,
etc. They generate what Pierre Bourdieu (1993, p. 115) calls a “restricted” economy or
peer-driven universe promoting the postcolonial elite school’s image. For Rippon College,
a particularly prominent and insistent theme across all of these venues of publicity and
representation is the theme of internationalism. Rippon is presented not only as a
participant in a new global era but as a leader and coordinator in global education, a host
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for pivotal events (Such as the “Make a Difference,” Young Round Square Conference of
2011) and international students. In an online documentary on the school, this theme of
internationalism is very prominent. Rippon is presented as an international harbor, a place
for those who care about their fellow human beings across world and the ecology and
survival of the planet. Within this narrative, Rippon is depicted as a transformative place
that builds on its rich cultural history to promote a multiculturalism and openness to all. As
one student maintains in the video: “I grew up in a very small town ...and then I came to
Rippon College...because I knew, I knew, I wanted to experience the entire world.” The
video stresses the vigorousness and openness of the curriculum. Students can pursue
national exams CBSE (Central Board Secondary Education) or the CIE, the Cambridge
International Exam. Rippon’s extraordinary qualities make it a world leader in secondary
education, according to the school principal. The online video refers to Rippon College as
“a diverse, multicultural oasis in the heart of India.” Signifying markers such as the idea of
the open cosmopolitan campus fused to distinctive but accessible customs that can be
shared by all, profound commitment to ecology, to individual expression, experimentalism
and debate all underscore the specialness of Rippon College. Rippon College is both a
distinctive institution, one of the few schools anywhere with its play of architectural heritage,
as well as one that appeals to everyone. Here, the rhythm and duration of everyday life as
depicted in the video reminds one of a cosmopolitan college that could be in England or
the US.
Straits School official online video also proceeds by calling attention to its long history of
distinction. Its distinctiveness is “forged in gryphon fire.” The reference to Prometheus and
the notion of receptivity to change and creativity are the defining themes of this carefully
produced video. “To be at Straits School is really magical,” says one of the eager student
representative. Yet another proclaims, “I myself am in the Straits Academy of History. It is
a kind of higher history.” There is the sense of elevated purpose and mission that is
expressed by the Straits students—a sense that history making is a continuous feature of
school life. Straits’ great history is recruited to the present where its creativity and
excellence, we are told, allow it to build alliances to peer like institutions in the G20 Schools
and throughout the world.
“We are the oldest school in Singapore. We are a hundred and ninety years old.... And I
think anyone who has actually travelled to Singapore would have heard of Straits,” notes
the principal in an online interview also published on the web as she invokes Straits’ status
of primus inter pares—as the model for other institutions. In this sense Straits school is
both the oldest and the most modern school in Singapore at the same time. And Straits
understands itself as a model not just for Singapore but for schools around the world. It
sees itself at the apogee of experimentation and as a world player par excellence. It is to
be noted that the Straits “brand,” as the principal notes, now is circulating around the world.
One area in which the brand is foregrounded is experimentation in teaching and classroom
pedagogy. In an interview available on the YouTube video sharing website, the principal
(Pseudonym necessary) talks about the Straits approach to technological innovation and
diffusion among her teaching faculty. “We want to allow our teachers to customize
according to their needs,” the principal maintains. “Customization” is actually central to the
school’s strategy of constantly improving its stock of human capital and its vantage point in
the educational universe. This customization is facilitated by Straits’ approach to diffusing
technology and integrating it classroom. This is done in the form of hot housing pedagogical
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innovation in a high tech, experimental lab called the “Discovery Studio.” Here
experimentation with simulation, video games, touch sensitive smart screens ergonomic
mechanical chairs for students outfitted with interactive technology, the use of Popplet for
visualizing ideas, webbing and brain storming all represent a very sophisticated and
elevated investment in technology. The “Discovery Studio” is like a hatchery for the
gestation and trying out of pedagogical ideas that can later be introduced into the
classroom and disseminated abroad as Principal Xxxx (Need pseudonym) underscores in
an online interview that took place at a conference on technology in the capital of one of
the Asian tigers cities.
It is to be noted that Straits participates in the larger Singapore educational excellence
branding effort. The Singapore approach to teaching mathematics for example has now
been adopted in school districts in the US. Another material feature that is part of the
school’s narrative is the history making fact that Straits has now usurped all the British elite
schools, most notably Eton, as the top feeder school to Oxford and Cambridge universities.
In a striking sense, Straits stands out even from the sample of schools we are studying in
our “elite schools in globalizing circumstances” research project, in that it is projecting its
forms of knowledge making into the metropolitan countries. No other school in our sample
lays claim to this audacity of school narrative, this audacity of projection of school identity
into the world. No other school projects this sense of confidence not simply as a world
player but as a world shaper of educational practice as a universalist ambition:
The eagle eye and gryphon strength
They led us to the fore
To reign supreme in ev'ry sphere
The sons of Singapore.
The present times of these postcolonial elite schools are brimful of propulsive competitive
desires and ambitions. There is a yearning not only for continuity of educational and social
dominance in their respective local, national and regional contexts but there is the greater
desire to expand into the global arena. In all three of these cases, school leaders, students
and stakeholders seek to assert their past achievements and distinctions, and to
consolidate their hold on the narrative of their schools as triumphantly efficacious
institutions in the present day. Past time and present times then stretch into future times.
As these schools gear themselves for the future, they seek the measure of the new times.
The world that that centered England as the chief benefactor and beneficiary and point of
transacting and finishing the talent from the former colonies now has been significantly
decentered or displaced. The ambitions of students are more and more grounded in a
neoliberal framework in which personal calculations, personal choice rule the day. School
institutions are playing catch up with this transformed context and attempting to stay ahead
of the game. School histories are being translated by students into personal histories of
choice, pursuit of opportunity and openings for personal success. These postcolonial elite
schools are responding to the new global imaginary universe. At Old Cloisters, some of it
teachers and administrators are the driving force behind an International College Fair that
brings representatives from Europe’s and North America’s leading universities to Barbados
every November. They come in pursuit of recruiting academic talent from Cloisters and
other leading elite school in the island. At Straits School, whose resources seem
boundlessly deep, there are structural innovations, pedagogical and technological
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experimentation, new emphasis on co-curricular activity, and planned facilitation of student
tours to elite colleges in US and Europe and China. At Rippon College, the school is being
repositioned as a player in the international arena with its leadership role in Round Square.
But most insistent of the future time is the work of the imagination of the students. Here the
care of the self often replaces the care of the school.
Future Times
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (T.S. Eliot, 1943, p. 13)
“Today we say we are Indian citizens. Tomorrow we will say we are world citizens.”
(Student council interview, Rippon College).
Joanna Latimer and Beverley Skeggs (2011) make the point that the imagination is a way
of thinking about the world that is always embedded in material purposes, practices and
actions. It is a way of “ordering” time and space (p. 397). Postcolonial elite schools such
as Straits or Cloisters are challenged all the time to order the narrative of their pasts and
their ambitions for the future. This can often be a contested affair. For administrators and
stakeholders invested in the continuity of excellence and the future success and prosperity
of their schools, they must sit at the crossroads of strong currents and waves of interests,
needs and desires that challenge the organized capacities of the schools. Schools are not
simply concrete buildings, spaces and personnel. They live perhaps most relentlessly in
private and public memories, representation and the imagination. Imagination is not unitary.
It is a plural set of investments and impulses that transpire into specific actions, practices,
special events, new buildings, new programs, broad strategic planning and programmatic
direction and re-direction. As administrators plan for the future, they must exercise
custodianship over the past. Nowhere is this double tug of the past and the future more
experienced than in the postcolonial school, where the past seems so all pervasively
present in the visual domain and in the rhythm, duration and organization of everyday life
and where the future is so insistently the path forward and the only guarantor of continuity
and persistence: “hope for a better age” (Straits’ motto).
Straits School is one such site of this tremendous play of energies. It is almost at the point
of celebration of its bicentennial of existence. It has for almost two centuries established
an enviable record of elite school achievement. And, according to its principal, there are
those actors in China, in the United States, in Malaysia and throughout the world who want
to copy its model. For the principal and the alumni, the model and its future success have
been and must be built upon a continuous sense of the past. This relationship must be
elaborated into projects and programs. One such program that reflects this duality, the
deep investment in the past and the wish to project a burnished image of the school into
the future, is a multipurpose archival project—part time machine, part museum, part
botanical garden. In the school’s old block, a designated place has been marked out for
the construction of a museum. The school actually hired a consultant, an archeologist, to
design and set up this contemporary Straits heritage project. At the same time, there has
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been a donation drive called “Museum and Artifact Donative Drive” organized, inviting
alumni, seniors and relatives to donate artifacts to the museum. The principal describes
the multipurpose heritage project this way:
And the heritage... [For our] anniversary, we have a series of things lined up. And one of
them is called the ‘Teacher Time Machine’ as well as a project to bring back a lot of the
artifacts and Old Boys momentos, things that they had, we are trying to get them to donate
them back to the school. We have also brought back a lot of artefacts that we leant out to
the national library. Over 200 of them. So we have moved one of the staff rooms to Level
2 and that whole place is now empty – so it is now going to be part of our archives and
heritage. It is going to be an interactive space. Not a museum where you go in, look and
come out. It is just classroom space but it will be surrounded by stories of the beginning of
the institution in tandem with the history of Singapore. And we have also done some garden
behind. It is empty right now. But we will be planting plants that were part of the original
botanic gardens and then we will have some of the history of the gardens. (Xxxx, Principal
of Straits School, Singapore).
The museum is a future project that will be built to showcase the past. The teachers’ interest
in a time machine echoes science fiction and the dual wish to preserve the past and for
their present-day pedagogy to be preserved for the future. The planned Straits School
Museum gardens are based on the splendid botanical gardens of Singapore City but they
also reflect the strong contemporary wish to be ecological, to build green oases in suburban
spaces.
But future times are best or most strongly articulated in student aspirations, in school
strategy and projections, their continued but changing investment in noblese oblige and
strategic social service, in the fraught engagement with technology, in the larger
conversation about globalization and knowledge economy that suffuses the educational
context of all these settings, and the relentless embracement of entrepreneurism. The
speed and intensity of aspiration that the students carry forward often bring them in collision
even with the schools and the narratives they so extol and in whose identities they are so
invested. Future times constitute the making of history, the modulation of history,
adjustments and the gleeful push that young people are making into the brave new world.
Future times are therefore a form of history making through repositioning, self-investment
and boosterism. Students perceptions of how the school’s past and present play into their
narrative of future—future life beyond the school, future professional life, future life of
settling down—often place strain on the official story. School history fades into personal
history, personal desire, personal interest.
At the first student council interviews at Rippon College, students expressed great pride in
the school’s past, its history, its teachers and staff but they still found Rippon wanting. They
felt that despite its investment in programs such as Round Square, that the school did not
prepare them for a global future. The problem wasn’t the school it was the “Indian
educational system,” one student, maintained (“I’m not into Indian education because ... if
I want to go outside...I need some knowledge of there too,” Saba, first round interview,
Rippon College). They felt too that the school had placed blocks to their use of technology
and their participation in the online world (“I don’t see any reason why Facebook is
banned...” Student 4, focus group 2 interview, Rippon College). For them globalization was
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best expressed with access to online communities, access to friends around the world
beyond India:
C.M. And the people who are your friends are they mostly within India or outside India?
Student 1: Outside India maximum.
CM: So most of your friends are outside India? So you’re getting your information—your
connections from.....
Student 1: Outside
CM: Outside of India. So it’s not only the exchange that is keeping you globally connected
but also the technology.
Student 1: Yes the technology.....
CM: Right so Facebook is a very important vehicle for kids to stay connected with the
world?
Student 5: Facebook and Skype. (Student focus group 2, Rippon College)
Many in this group dreamt of professional futures that would be in commerce. None of them
identified with the aristocratic classes that were the benefactors and students at the Rippon
College in its early years.
This theme of reworking the narrative of schooling and futures that had been inherited, was
also strongly present in the discourse of students at Cloisters. The generational gap over
the future and past times was emphasized (“Our school is perhaps the archetype of failing
to keep up with the times,” Blaise Pascal, round 2 student interview, Old Cloisters).
Teachers were noting that this crop of students were not like students in the past. Their
investment in schooling was more means-ends rational, less qua academic and more
instrumental. Students at Cloisters as at all the schools put their future in extra school
lessons. Students felt that they needed a particular profile and a broader menu of courses
than their school was offering. It was not unusual for some students to be pursuing, totally
on their own, piano or music certification with the Royal Academy of Music, mixing this with
courses in law at the Barbados Community College or University or a course in Economics
at Ardent Arbors, a rival school that offered economics in their curriculum. This meant in
reality a hybrid curriculum distilled through habits of personal choice and careerist block
building (“Well I do management of business, economics and literatures of English. When
I got into sixth form I chose…I want to work at a Magazine and eventually own my own. So,
then I chose business to go with that and… literatures in English,” Ginger, round 1 student
interview, Old Cloisters). Old Cloisters students approached their curriculum as Bernstein
maintains as a “collection code” (Bernstein, 1977, p. 14) in their aggressive anticipation of
tertiary education and professional life in North America.
Working through pastime, present times and future times, Old Cloisters, Straits and Rippon
institutions reveal themselves to be astute re-inventers of their identities grounding their
reinvention in change that preserves the past. The practical effect is that these schools
continue to dominate the educational environments in which they exist (“Cause it’s a top
school in Singapore and then like later when I go to University or want to find a job in the
future when they ask which school are you from? Then when you say like I’m from Straits
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then they like know that immediately that excellence is from Straits School. It’s a way for
us to work around the world” Amber, Straits School, round 1 student interview).
Section Three: Concluding Remarks
History itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes" (Marx quoted in
Bauer, 2003, p. 175 New York: W.W. Norton)
Joanna Latimer and Beverly Skegg (2011) caution twenty-first century social analysts
against a too easy coupling of imagination and geography, a too easy delimiting of
imagination via territorialization. “We want to question,” these authors go on to assert, “the
ways in which imagination is always already tamed and ordered by our being enrolled in
one tradition rather than another” (2011, p. 395). Drawing upon this argument, what I have
sought to foreground in our discussion of postcolonial elite schools in this presentation is
precisely the radical untaming of the imagination in these school settings. The deployment
of imagination at Rippon, Cloisters and Straits results in a coupling not so much with
geography but with history. I have followed the nostrum declared by Arjun Appadurai in
The Future as Cultural Fact that “histories make geographies” (2013, p. 61). I have sought
to show how much these schools work on burnishing their school heritages, traditions and
narrative (school histories) in order to navigate the challenging present. They work on their
school histories precisely as the context of schooling is not now exhausted at the point of
local geography but is indeed ever expanding into the global arena.
What then is the meaning of the work of history that the postcolonial elite schools conduct?
What is the sense of the historical here?
I have defined the historical in this presentation as not simply a matter of chronology. Infact,
I have sought to prise the historical away from linear accounting and periodization. Instead,
I have sought to show how marked histories (past times, present times, future times) are
really storehouses of accumulated and invented cultural references, memories, socially
produced meanings attached to objects, practices and programs of action. History then is
the illuminated evidence of human beings working on their material environments and
universes of meaning. I have defined the historical (along the lines of Williams, Benjamin
and Thompson) as the everyday strategic mobilization and deployment of material and
symbolic resources (ritual, tradition, emblems, architecture, heritage, heraldry) of given
institutions in projects of competitive human interests, identity formation, control over
institutional narrative and the tussle over marketability and economic viability. For the
postcolonial elite schools in this account, history takes on special significance since these
institutions have been shaped by the weight of the past nexus into British imperial relations.
They are, after all, the products, outcrop and markers of colonial transactions. Their
eliteness was founded in particular relations of class formation and loyalty of indigenous
elites to Britishness. Yet, the story of these schools does not stop there.
These schools have been critical beacons of accomplishment in their own settings and
have started to chart paths as global players. They continued their storied success well
after British direct colonial domination ceased and their respective countries have become
independent. Yet the story of the work of history in the postcolonial elite school is not one
of transcendence of that colonial past after independence. It is instead the studied selection
of tradition, the strategic burnishing of the socially produced memories and traditions as
well as the new pathways that have been grafted of necessity onto the image making of
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Cloisters, Straits and Rippon. It is also the full play of contradictions that such specific
history constantly gestates. A particular challenge that these schools face is to bring their
school narratives into line with present student ambition for global futures and their
generational shift into the digital age.
All considered then, postcolonial elite schools in the globalizing context are attempting to
marshal their histories at the crossroads of profound change. Schools such as Straits,
Rippon and Cloisters are therefore dealing with matters that involve scaling or rescaling of
the past to consolidate these schools’ relationships to local and national projects as well
as global imperatives. Just as importantly, and perhaps more insistently, these schools
must now respond, and are responding, to neoliberal economic circumstances that are
powerfully articulated not simply “out there” in the global arena but in the very personalized
and customized desires of their students seeking careerist futures with furious energy and
investment (“Today we say we are Indian citizens. Tomorrow we will say we are world
citizens,” Student council interview, Rippon College).
i
Kent Greene, principal of Ardent Arbors, rival school to Old Cloisters in Barbados, maintained
in our interview with him that Old Cloisters was “dragged kicking screaming” into changing
their examinations from Cambridge to the Caribbean Examinations Council. Indeed, according
to him, for the first few years the percentage of passes for Old Cloisters’ students in these
regional/national exams slipped when compared to their extraordinary success in the GCE
Cambridge exams of previous years.
16 September 2015, 19th International Academic Conference, Florence ISBN 978-80-87927-15-1 , IISES
545http://www.iises.net/proceedings/19th-international-academic-conference-florence/front-page
