Lecture, Session 10
Document Actions
School Days (cont.)
Teaching of history and values
This portion of the story introduces the concept of manifest destiny: that the white Europeans were meant to colonize the world. On page 121, the coming of Europeans is portrayed as a civilizing light. Notice the veneration of the French culture, places, etc. At the front of the room are pictures of “winter scenes” and maps of a country shaped like a hexagon (p. 39), but no tropical scenes and no map of Martinique. The arrangement ignores African and Caribbean history.
When the substitute teacher comes in, they suddenly learn an alternative version of their history. The substitute quotes Aimé Césaire and spoke about the négritude movement. He sometimes wore African dress. He unleashed the splendor of his universal French.
Universal French
At the same time, the universal is confounded with European history, identity and values. European capitalist ideology is masked as neutral, objective humanism or philosophy, as though its practices were value-laden. The teacher preached the gospel of universal values (p. 135), in other words, a close connection between form and content, meaning and style. The language wraps itself in abstraction--a way of imposing seemingly universalistic values, even though they are the values of a particular class.
A question arises: who is the "we," as described? Much like Marx in the Communist Manifesto, the poor man has no nation, no country. Many are silenced and ignored. On such occasions, the poor (ignored) man might admit that he was a black man and criticize specific racial injustices (e.g. Ku Klux Klan or apartheid in South Africa). This concept of universal values is intrinsically linked to the idea that human beings are everywhere equivalent, though this is contrary to the particularistic Creole world view.
