Colonial education in the Congo - a question of “uncritical” pedagogy until the bitter end?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our approach is a historical, and not a theoretical or a philosophical one. But such an approach might be of help to understand the complexities and ambiguities of the pedagogical mentalities in the course of the twentieth century. As is usually the case in historical research the groundwork has to precede the formulation of hypotheses, let alone theories about the nature of pedagogical practices. Therefore, since the 1990s, “we” (as a team) have been busy studying the history of education in the former Belgian Congo. Of course since then we have not only closely monitored the theoretical and methodological developments in the field of colonial historiography, but have ourselves also contributed to that history. This article tries to give an overview of some of our analyses, concentrating on the question to what extend the Belgian offensive of colonial (i.e. mainly Catholic) missionary education, which was almost exclusively targeted at “paternalism”, contributed to the development of personal life, individual autonomy and/or emancipation of the natives. From the rear-view mirror of history we are, among other things, zooming in on the crucial 1950s, during which decade thoughts first turned to the education of a (very limited) “elite”. The thesis we are using in this respect is that the “mental space” of colonialism was not of a nature as to have a very great widening of consciousness among the local population as its effect.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".