Table Of ContentAmerican Post-Conflict Educational Reform
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American Post-Conflict
Educational Reform
From the Spanish-American War to Iraq
Edited by
Noah W. Sobe
AMERICAN POST-CONFLICT EDUCATIONAL REFORM
Copyright © Noah W. Sobe, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61592-2
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37951-4 ISBN 978-0-230-10145-6 (eBook)
DOI. 10.1057/9780230101456
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American post-conflict educational reform : from the Spanish-
American War to Iraq / edited by Noah W. Sobe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Educational assistance, American. 2. Educational change.
3. Conflict management. I. Sobe, Noah W., 1971–
LB2283.A47 2009
379.1(cid:2)290973—dc22 2009014130
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C O N T E N T S
Part I Introduction
One American Imperatives, Educational Reconstruction
and the Post-Conflict Promise 3
Noah W. Sobe
Part II The “American Century” Begins
Two Education at the End of a Gun: The Origins of
American Imperial Education in the Philippines 19
Benjamin Justice
Three “The Path of Progress”: Protestant Missions,
Education, and U.S. Hegemony in
the “New Cuba,” 1898–1940 53
Jason M. Yaremko
Four American Philanthropy and Reconstruction in
Europe after World War I: Bringing the West to Serbia 75
Noah W. Sobe
Part III Promises of Modernity and Abundance
Five “The Appeal to the German Mind”: Educational
Reconstruction in the American Zone of
Occupation, 1944–49 105
Charles Dorn and Brian Puaca
Six Demystifying the Divine State and Rewriting
Cultural Identity in the U.S. Occupation of Japan 129
Kentaro Ohkura and Masako Shibata
vi Contents
Seven G erman Postwar Educational Reform and
the “American Way of Life” 147
Thomas Koinzer
Part IV After the Cold War, in the Face of Terror
Eight American Academics and Education for
Democracy in Post-Communist Europe 169
Laura B. Perry
Nine L ost in Translation: Parent Teacher Associations and
Reconstruction in Bosnia in the Late 1990s 189
Dana Burde
Ten A llah, America, and the Army: U.S. Involvement in
South Asia and Pakistan’s Education Policy 207
M. Ayaz Naseem
Eleven C orporate Education and “Democracy Promotion”
Overseas: The Case of Creative Associates
International in Iraq, 2003–4 229
Kenneth J. Saltman
Contributors 251
Index 255
P A R T I
Introduction
C H A P T E R O N E
American Imperatives, Educational
Reconstruction and the Post-Conflict Promise
Noah W. Sobe
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
—Julia Ward Howe,
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)1
In one telling of the story, the transatlantic transfer of European civi-
lization has created a new kind of democratic people who are haunted
by an obligation to bring a similar conversion to other peoples around
the world. After observing a review of Union troops in the midst of the
American Civil War, the ardent abolitionist Julia Ward Howe penned
the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”2 which proposed that the distinc-
tive American mission of war was to “to make men free.” Though
this notion has not gone unquestioned and though the song itself has
been satirized many times—for example, by Mark Twain who in 1901
suggested, “as Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us
rich”3—the ideas it expresses have shown a curious resiliency across
American history. The notion that Americans have a messianic duty
to make others free recurs as a topic of cultural reflection and regu-
larly informs policy and actions. National symbols and national nar-
ratives come out in spades in times of war, yet war sometimes also
provides moments of clarity and insight into the composition of social
imaginaries.4 Howe’s battle hymn provides one crystalline image of
4 Noah W. Sobe
the American relationship to military conflict; the “Star-Spangled
Banner,” which became the U.S. national anthem in 1931, provides
another.
When Francis Scott Key, an American lawyer and amateur poet,
contemplated the early light on the morning of September 4, 1814, he
was aboard a British prisoner-of-war ship and observing the attempted
invasion of Baltimore. Key’s verse was set by his brother-in-law to the
tune of an old drinking song and by the end of that month had been
published in newspapers across the United States. As historian Robert
A. Ferguson and others have pointed out, this text makes a strange
choice for a national anthem. Its first stanzas feature a series of hesitant
questions—“can you see? / does that star-spangled banner yet wave?”—
hardly a rousing, self-affirming national hymn on the face of it. In
Key’s version, it was in the light of exploding shells that he was able to
see the American flag flying over a besieged Fort McHenry. However,
the ultimate outcome of the battle is revealed at the end of the second,
rarely sung, stanza when the light of day showed that the American
flag was still flying. (“Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first
beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream”—see figure 1.1).
Ferguson argues that this combination of uncertainty and conviction
captures in a nutshell the special meaning that the Enlightenment took
on in America. The song offers a narrative of origins that symboli-
cally places the constitution of America in a moment of violence. The
Figure 1.1 Initial two stanzas of the U.S. national anthem as first published. (Published as a
broadside under the title “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” September 1814. Reprinted with permis-
sion of the Baltimore Historical Society.)
