This dissertation surveys the development of the Hawaiian higher educational system in the 19th century Hawaiian Kingdom as a strategy of Hawaiian leadership in promoting and protecting Hawaiian independence. This analysis revisits a Hawaiian educational history canon that overwhelmingly credits missionaries and foreigners as imposing an…

From 1893 to 1899, "The Progressive Educator" was published and distributed to every teacher in the Republic of Hawai'i. This article explores what the newspaper can teach us about Hawai'i's unique and ongoing contributions to the American progressive education movement. The author focuses on an article from the newspaper originally…

Recent scholarship has focused on the vital role of social movement organizations as key pathways into activism. Yet attention to how learning unfolds within social movement organizations has not been adequately studied. Informed by critical learning sciences, we investigated Kokua Hawaii, a social movement organization that catalyzed a near half…

Prior to the United States' (U.S.) illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom government in 1893 and illegal annexation in 1898, literacy rates and educational attainment in the Hawaiian Kingdom were amongst the highest in the world. In contrast to the educational history of the 19th century, the usurpation of the Hawaiian educational system…

Throughout the nineteenth century and continuing after annexation, an American hegemony was exercised over Hawai'i and its people. It is the purpose of this article to continue the story of the use of hegemony as it pertains to education in Hawai?i. While prior research on the use of hegemony dealt with the 19th century and the first 40 years of…

Background/Context: Current historical understanding of Hawai'i's territorial period celebrates American education as a crucial influence on the islands' political development. In particular, the territory's public school system represents an essential institution for spreading democratic freedom, fostering social mobility, and, more importantly,…

This article explores the efforts of Native Hawaiian students to appropriate and take control of their schooling as part of a broad Indigenous story of empowerment during Hawai'i's territorial years (1900-1959). Histories of this era lack a visible Indigenous presence and contribute to the myth that Natives passively accepted the Americanization…

After the Civil War (1861-1865), the United States faced a problem of "reconstruction" similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been…

The purpose of this article is to review four educational issues introduced by this author in previous articles (Beyer 2004, 2015) that faced the Kingdom of Hawai'i in order to investigate the educational policies taken to address these issues by the White Architects of Hawaiian education. The American Protestant missionaries, who arrived in…

This chapter is a detailed investigation of education for Native Hawaiians during the 19th century. However, adhering to Ronald Takaki's assertion (2000) that it is important to demonstrate that America's racial policies involved common practices across culturally diverse groups, this paper incorporates prior studies on the education of African…

Last summer, California and Massachusetts became the sixth and seventh states--along with Hawaii, New Mexico, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maryland--to send a resolution to the U.S. Congress calling for a constitutional amendment to (1) end the court's extension of personhood rights to corporations, and (2) enable the government to definitively…

Due to political agreements between Micronesian nations and the US government, greater numbers of people are migrating from these "small islands" in the western Pacific to the United States. I interviewed 26 Micronesian adults to explore their childhood experiences in island schools and their perceptions about education for immigrant…

In this article, the author discusses how she uses film and new media to "teach students to comprehend the complex historical, social, political, and cultural dimensions of the African American experience." The author uses D.W. Griffith's 1915 "Birth of a Nation," a number of "Blaxploitation" films, YouTube videos,…

August 21, 2009, marks the 50th anniversary of the entry of the 50th state into the United States of America. All the states have their stories, but as a string of islands in the vast Pacific Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from any other land mass, Hawai'i has a story that is unique in many ways. Consider, for example, that Hawai'i has two official…

This article presents an interview with Albert Nawahi Like, Hawai'i Department of Education teacher from 1927 to 1965. Albert Nawahi Like was born 1900 in Honolulu's Chinatown. When Like was eight years old, his family moved to Kalihi. After the death in 1912 of his father, Edward Like, who was editor of the Hawaiian-language newspaper "Ke…