In the making of a comprehensive mass education system in Denmark aimed at “the whole population”, experience and experiments with education and conversion of colonized populations, of slaves and former slaves seems to have been of major interest to theologians and to e.g. geographers and historians, who involved themselves in the educational field. Especially in the 1900s-1930s colonial experience was re-actualized in educational materials, popular science writings and missionary information pamphlets directed towards a broader public. These texts had a colonial content, but were directed towards the metropolitan context and the metropolitan population. 

This should be understood in relation to at least two important historical ruptures: First of all the change into parliamentarism in 1901, through which educational politics became increasingly focused on ‘education for all’ and on a unification of the school system. Secondly, the selling of the colony the Danish Virgin Islands to the US in 1917, something that spurred mayor discussions.  Thus, a central part of the Danish colonial regime was dissolved on the one hand, on the other there was an increasing interest in using colonial experience ‘inside the kingdom’ in questions concerning how to manage social difference in education of the population.

The paper will examine how colonial figures such as ‘the negro’, ‘the Greenlander’ and ‘the missionary’ where used in popular education and in state schooling, e.g. in Religious Education in public schools, in metropolitan Denmark on its road towards decolonization and development of a modern welfare state.

The paper is part of a research project in the disciplinary field of Curriculum History, focusing on the emergence of the category of culture in Danish state mass schooling. Theoretically it draws on a Bernstein-inspired history of curriculum and knowledge perspective (Goodson, Lundgren et al.), combined with historical social epistemology. That is so-called New Curriculum History (Baker et. al) and the scholarly contribution of Rabinow, Stoler et al. in relation to the history of modern states and its colonial relations. It especially finds inspiration in the thesis of the colonial context as a laboratory of modernity and the colonial experience as a tool of power and a resource in social development and conflicts in the European metropolitan context.

The questions to be examined are:

What role do the colonial figures in the text books, hand books and pamphlets play? How can they be understood in relation to the meaning of culture in an education for the whole population? And what are the implications of the category of race in this context?

What role is played by the contributing scholars from the religious academic field, (theology, comparative religion)? How can we understand these actors in relation to their North European transnational network, and how do their curricular and pedagogical contributions look compared to similar contributions from e.g. historians, geographers, and anthropologists?

How is religion transformed into culture as an area for schooling in the process, and what becomes the role of religion in popular education in the emerging democratic welfare state?   

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