Resumen de The coloniality of girls’ education in Sri Lanka. Agency, transformation and adaptation
This article looks at the global, entangled history of girls’ education in late colonial Sri Lanka. This article looks at two European women educators, Lilian Nixon and Florence Farr, who came to the island to become principals of girl’s schools at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both had been educated at the Cheltenham Ladies College, England, whose impact on the education of girls, in England and the Empire, is crucial. By looking at the discussions on girls’s education at CLC, Ladies’ College (Nixon), Colombo, and Ramanathan College (Farr), Jaffna, Sri Lanka, this article proposes a new, global historical, approach to the history of girls’ education and female empowerment, colonial power structures and postcolonial transformations. I will argue that the answer to the question whether colonial girls’ education and its successors is seen as empowering, depends on the conceptualisation of empowerment and agency in their relation to religion. The case study of Sri Lanka can, thereby, serve as an example to instigate new discussions within postcolonial and feminist approaches in history.
