An educated Sint Maartener? National belonging in a primary school on Sint Maarten

Abstract

Both in academia and in everyday discourse, the belief in the (re)production of national ideology and related civil culture(s) within state schools has remained strong. This idea(l) has also become salient among a growing number of educational specialists, anti-colonial activists and policymakers on Sint Maarten, the Dutch or southern side of the bi-national, Caribbean island St. Martin. Drawing on fourteen months of fieldwork I show how the different elites’ imaginations of the nation were remade and unmade by the teacher and pupils in a sixth-grade classroom in a public school. Lingering colonial relations, ongoing migration and popular culture challenged a well-bounded, shared imagination of the educated Sint Maartener.

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