1910–1913: (Johnston’s Verdict on Elite Education and the Perversely Useless Curriculum): Sir Harry Johnston’s critique extended beyond the phantom rural sch…

1910–1913: (Johnston’s Verdict on Elite Education and the Perversely Useless Curriculum): Sir Harry Johnston’s critique extended beyond the phantom rural schools to the fine education of the elite themselves — men he described as highly educated, clever with tongue and pen, witty and well-read, such men of the world — but his admiration descended to despair when he confronted the utterly impractical relation of this superior education to a useful and profitable existence. France, Johnston observed, showed herself able to educate and send to Africa and Asia hosts of young men supplied with the most practical instruction, but the education she gave to the youth of Haiti was perversely useless in its nature, apparently only adapted to life in Paris or in a French provincial town. Lawyers could think of nothing but the meticulous intricacies of the Code Napoléon and seemed incapable of devising a simple civil and criminal jurisprudence applicable to the essentially African race that inhabited Haiti, while as to other branches of science — agriculture, forestry, zoology, botany, mineralogy, and bacteriology — not a single Haitian interested himself. Johnston’s diagnosis — that the colonial education system reproduced metropolitan forms without metropolitan function — identified the mechanism that Fanon would later theorize as the national bourgeoisie’s characteristic alienation: an elite educated to administer a society that existed only in Paris, governing a nation whose actual conditions — its agriculture, its ecology, its legal needs — remained as invisible to the curriculum as they were to the budget.