Strong to serve: The Alliance High School of Kikuyu, Kenya.

摘要

The Alliance High School is a boys' boarding school in Kenya so prestigious that a president of the nation claimed that he could have been among its graduates. Founded by a group of Protestant missionary organizations in 1926, it was for years the only school of its kind and for decades afterward widely regarded as best.; Alliance students debate whether their school made or ruined Kenya. In doing so they exaggerate their alma mater's importance, but not as egregiously as people elsewhere might imagine. Alliance's publicly known history is a string of firsts, and its graduates have wielded enormous power in government, business, churches, and education. Yet they also number among Kenya's best known colonial era nationalists, as well as those more recently detained without trial, beaten by police, and driven into exile by their government.; This dissertation is an attempt to describe and to locate historically and culturally an institution that is both the unique product of extraordinary people and circumstances and a window on broader issues---of schooling and society and of enduring oppositions. In chapters on religion, language and ethnicity, and wealth, I try to connect everyday life in the school with the changing contexts, beliefs and actions that help shape it, as well as the ways we think about schools. In chapters on the origins, practices and beliefs associated with the school's prefect system, I address an important, common feature of boarding school life in former British colonies that connects in complex ways to larger systems of social and political stratification.