Sarah Steinbock-Pratt offers a new paradigm to understand the colonial education system in the Philippines. Rather than looking at those who developed educational policies in the Philippines, she instead focuses on the experiences of ordinary teachers entrusted with the task of carrying out these policies in the territory. Through this critically grounded approach, Steinbock-Pratt reveals a more intimate and nuanced account of how power circulated within the colonial possession. At the heart of the book are two main points: first, Educating the Empire rethinks who the historical actors in the colonial education system were to include African Americans, women (both white and black), Filipino teachers, and students. This inclusive approach provides a refreshing take on the history of colonial education in the Philippines. In her attention to the categories of race and gender, Steinbock-Pratt also demonstrates how colonial education in schoolhouses, towns, and villages created a space where the Thomasites (a group of teachers from the United States) navigated and negotiated their relationship to the U.S. empire in relation to these categories of difference.

The second main point, which examines how the Philippines provided fertile ground for restructuring and redefining personhood not only for Filipinos but also for Americans, is where the work is the most compelling. Indeed, Steinbock-Pratt argues that in looking at a wider cast of historical actors, we formulate new insights into the history of the Progressive Era and gender: “Rather than constructing their experiences as expressions of maternalism or domesticity—which many scholars argue was the linchpin of women's Progressive Era politics—white female teachers in the Philippines engaged with traditionally masculine notions of colonial power, constructing identities as adventurers, imperial officers and professionals” (9).

In a similar vein, the author shows how African American teachers strategically used their role to demonstrate their ability as “purveyors of civilization” and to move up the social ladder during a time when Jim Crow limited professional opportunities for them (11). This is reflected well in her case study of Gilbert Somers Perez, an African American teacher who, due to class and professional ambitions, not only used the opportunity to teach for professional advancement, but also used the new context to reformulate his racial and social identity throughout his career. Steinbock-Pratt argues that Perez's ability to make claims of whiteness were a product of American notions of race being challenged and stretched in the Philippines (147), leaving the reader to wonder if Perez was influenced by both Filipino and American notions of race: Filipino elites and intellectuals also emphasized or fabricated Latin or Spanish descent in order to claim privilege in a colonial context that valued people's proximity to whiteness. Nevertheless, the Perez case study expands the actors within the history of the United States and the Philippines and also demonstrates the author's rich research methodology, which carefully traces Perez's life through several minor American colonial officials’ letters, personal papers, and diaries from multiple archives. One of Steinbock-Pratt's many contributions is her introduction of several unknown or underused archives to the field of study on the U.S. empire in the Philippines, which surely will generate even more research.

Steinbock-Pratt demonstrates the agency of Filipinos within the colonial education system, particularly in Chapter Seven, “Speaking for Ourselves: Dignity and the Politics of Student Protests,” which examines a series of student strikes in response to poor treatment and racist policies in the school system. Steinbock-Pratt argues that student organizing came to be framed increasingly within a nationalist push toward independence. When describing the student protests that occurred in the Philippines after the murder of Fermin Tobera in the continental United States, she writes, “Their protests reveal a contractual understanding of the colonial relationship; probably influenced by labor activism and strikes, students understood absenting themselves from school as a way to influence education in a deeply unequal colonial power dynamic” (252). The book also looks at the spectrum of Filipino resistance to colonial education by covering organized strikes, and Filipino students’ resistance in the classroom. For example, Steinbock-Pratt presents an episode where a Filipino schoolgirl became upset at a primary textbook because the students were featured in working class native garb instead of Americanized clothing (173). While the student took issue with depictions of rural Filipino life, Steinbock-Pratt argues that American teachers wanted Filipino students to accept their life as laborers and farmers, while students “refused to accept this permanent second-class status” (175).

Within this discussion, Steinbock-Pratt could have productively engaged with the foundational texts on the history of the Philippines written by Filipinos, such as Teodoro Agoncillo or Renato Constantino, which also deal with education policy.Footnote ¹ She does mention Constantino's essay, “The Miseducation of the Filipino,” but she does not engage with Constantino's argument that in producing idealized notions of the Philippines as a rural agricultural country, the education system encouraged the colony's dependency on cheap American goods rather than motivating industrialization. Steinbock-Pratt is able to read the American school teacher's biography against the grain in order to demonstrate the student's act of resistance, but the analysis would have benefitted from being placed in the context of larger discussions that Filipino intellectuals were having about nationalism and self-determination. Additionally, Constantino's analysis of Najib Saleeby's writing could have perhaps offered a way of understanding how Saleeby defined his relationship with empire rather than how the colonial state viewed him. For example, Saleeby critiqued the Americans’ English-only policy in the public school system.Footnote ² That said, Educating the Empire is an important work vital to anyone interested in the history of education, empire, race, and gender.