Teaching colonialism, learning nationalism: French education and ethnology in Morocco, 1912--1956

This dissertation examines colonial education for Muslims in the French Protectorate as a site of interaction between French colonial administrators and Moroccan Muslims, and as a laboratory for exclusionary ethno-nationalist political ideas, arguing that French and Moroccan concepts of ethnic and national identity developed through a dialectic of political and rhetorical strategies which often centered on education and ethnology. The dissertation situates French Protectorate educational policy, institutions, and doctrines in the context of French colonial ethnology and in the contexts of military, political, and ideological struggles in French West Africa, Morocco, and metropolitan France. It then describes practices and strategies employed by Moroccan Muslims who contested French political and educational agendas, and analyzes the Moroccan nationalist movement's cooptation and subversion of the discourses of cultural essentialism, authenticity, tradition and difference which had been hegemonic in French Protectorate educational, ethnological and political discourse in the 1920s and 1930s.; In the first two decades of the Protectorate, the French educational leadership developed an official pedagogy that was meant to facilitate harmonious Franco-Moroccan relations. Director of Public Instruction Georges Hardy intended this pedagogy to be an adaptation to the particular circumstances of Morocco, but Hardy's work reflects his attempt to fuse the ethnology of Maurice Delafosse, the colonial philosophy of Hubert Lyautey, and metropolitan educational reformism. The result was a narrow view of the psychology of "The Moroccan" and a restrictive curriculum designed to minimize social mobility and cultural change. The resulting educational policies frustrated Muslim ambitions; meanwhile, the doctrines and discourse of the educational system encouraged essentialist ideas of Moroccan ethno-cultural unity and undermined the Protectorate's Berber Policy. In the 1930s, Moroccan nationalists began to invoke the early Protectorate's conservative ethnological and pedagogical principles in their protest against colonial policies which they saw as "assimilationist," most notably the 1930 Berber Dahir. The same principles would later be invoked by supporters of the Vichy regime, by supporters of Arabization in independent Morocco, and by the New Right in France.