Zealots or reformers? Benevolent or coercive? Indiana Jones or Mary Poppins? The best answer to these questions is “yes on all fronts” (p. 291). This is the sense readers will come away with after reading Sarah Steinbock-Pratt's book, Educating the Empire, about the American teacher corps in the Philippines during the first half of the twentieth century. They were a racially diverse group of male and female educators from all over the United States whose personal accounts and ambitions reveal a complex set of experiences and efforts that disrupt and challenge our understanding of America's civilizing project in the Philippines. Their stories bend and perforate official narratives of the colonial regime celebrating America's presence as bestowing democracy and civilization by exposing the various ways American teachers and their Filipino students selectively embraced, ignored, and resisted the colonial educational system.

In exposing this gap between rhetoric and reality, Steinbock-Pratt unearths the rich and complicated human experience with colonialism that underwrites her book. Both the colonizer and colonized were affected by the actions of the other and neither side held absolute control over their situation. This predicament reveals how the colonial education system remained in a constant state of negotiation and navigation between Filipino students and teachers and Americans teachers and administrators as both sides sought to assert and obtain their goals while also grudgingly relenting to the other. The author maintains no illusion that relations and exchanges between Americans and Filipinos were equal. She clearly establishes how the United States used its military and economic superiority to subdue and strong-arm Filipinos into reluctant compliance with American policies. But, as she effectively points out, compliance did not mean passivity or submission. Using the very language of American benevolence and uplift, Filipinos consistently challenged, circumvented, and manipulated colonial education to advance their personal desires and, more broadly, contest American occupation.

One of the book's greatest appeals is its rich coverage of the American teachers. Steinbock-Pratt deftly weaves together personal accounts of various educators to provide a vivid window into their lives and beliefs. She reveals that, despite their different backgrounds, they all shared a similar faith in American exceptionalism and opportunity while also asserting diverging personal goals and attitudes on race and empire. Their exposure to the “catalog of colonial knowledge,” backed by popular media, official government reports, and personal correspondence, provided them with a shared foundation informing and inspiring them about the “Orient” and its “exotic” people and primitive cultures (p. 27). Many women and people of color also saw the Philippines as an opportunity to fulfill aspirations for adventure, professional advancement, and financial security that they would not have had in the continental United States.

Despite these important contributions to advancing our understanding about the complexity of American education in the Philippines, it remains unclear how this book is about “educating the empire.” Steinbock-Pratt does well to situate her work within the theoretical understandings of empire and colonialism, but missing is a clear discussion of how her research connects to the broader literature on schooling within the American empire. If Educating the Empire, as the title suggests, is meant to explain the ways in which educational policies and practices in the Philippines shaped and or influenced those in other American-occupied territories, how so? Which possessions? Her discussion about how schools represented “tools of pacification and colonial control” is an exciting and important one that she establishes clearly in her introduction (p. 5), but she does not connect the colonial project in the Philippines with other examples within the American imperial context. For example, in the case of Hawaiʻi, public education was certainly a tool of pacification the white minority government implemented to legitimize US seizure and occupation of the islands and quell lingering allegiances to the Hawaiian monarchy. And, as Michelle M. Morgan and Bernard K. Hyams have documented, similar to the Philippines, during the territorial period (1900–1959) there was a diverse teacher corps in Hawai'i. Establishing and situating the American and Filipino teachers’ experiences within the broader theme of empire by incorporating examples of colonial education policies and practices in places such as Hawai'i, or alternatively Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Guam, would have helped Steinbock-Pratt support a broader claim about how the empire was educated. (On a side note, the author's citing of Sarah Vowell's book Unfamiliar Fishes is an odd and poor choice to include as a credible source of Hawaiian history.)

Nevertheless, Educating the Empire is a great contribution to expanding the historical literature on education in the Philippines and in providing a vivid account of the complex experiences of American teachers and Filipino students and educators within the colonial system. It is a compelling, accessible, and detailed piece of research for historians and students of education, empire, and the United States, as it documents the messy and tricky business of running a colony and surviving it.