This week we continued to discuss the topics in Chapter 8 in Osborne's book. The topic we focused on this week was the influence of Western education on the emergence of nationalism in Southeast Asia and the role of traditional local education vis-a-vis Western education.
Western education here means basically two things. First, it is a school-oriented education, where students are divided into grades and classes according to their ages, taught subjects according to a curriculum and a timetable, and evaluated their progress at each term by teachers, who have been also educated at schools. Second, it is the introduction of new subjects which were not taught in traditional education, including language (local or foreign), arithmetic, science, and other skills considered useful in modern society.
We looked into some of the prominent persons in the early modern era in Southeast Asia and their educational backgrounds.
Abdullah bin Abdul al Kadir (Malaysia, 1796-1854), also known as Munshi Abdullah is, because of his autobiography in Malay, regarded as the founder of modern Malay literature. Born in Malacca, he had a mixed ancestry of Arab, Tamil, and Malay. In Singapore, he became a Malay teacher for British colonial administrators, including Stanford Raffles.
We also observed that the 19th century saw an awakening of Islamic modernism, which greatly influenced Muslims in Southeast Asia. The best-known case is Padri War in West Sumatra, whose influence remained as a Muslim reformist movement in West Sumatra and beyond. This prepared an educational environment that facilitated the emergence of many intellectuals from West Sumatra in the era of nationalism in Indonesia.
Jose Rizal (the Philippines, 1861-1896) was educated in Manila in the Spanish education system and later obtained higher education in Spain. His life shows that the introduction of Western education was much earlier than any other place in Southeast Asia and it facilitated him to understand the situation of the colonized country.
Phan Boi Chau (Vietnam, 1867-1940) was regarded as one of the first nationalists in Vietnam. Yet his education was traditional, based on Confucianism and other Chinese classics. He belonged to the last generation of Vietnamese intellectuals who benefitted from the richness of traditional Chinese classical education.
After the beginning of the 20th century, increasingly more people obtained Western education in Southeast Asia. We will discuss its consequence next week.