"The view represented in this passage is that British colonialism knowingly put the tools of enlightenment into the hands of the subjects at the risk of endangering its own position. From it further springs the general historical judgment that the Western commitment to the ideals of liberal though was so unqualified that it took complete precedence over whatever political apprehensions were bound to prevail.
This sort of description demands that we subscribe to two notions: first, that the functions of education remain constant regardless of context or circumstance, so that a humanistic education would have the same meanings and serve the same purposes for both colonizer and colonized, the fuling class and the class it rules; and second, that the curricular elaboration of a given body of knowledge or though is a faithful representation of that content as it occurs in its free, unbounded, non-institutional form."
This sort of description demands that we subscribe to two notions: first, that the functions of education remain constant regardless of context or circumstance, so that a humanistic education would have the same meanings and serve the same purposes for both colonizer and colonized, the fuling class and the class it rules; and second, that the curricular elaboration of a given body of knowledge or though is a faithful representation of that content as it occurs in its free, unbounded, non-institutional form."
— Viswanathan. pg. 17
