The shaping of republican societies in Latin America was tied to the introduction and development of school education. The insertion and deployment of the school institution were at the core of the political and cultural transformations during the second part of the 19th century. The debates and innovations around the meaning, form, and scope of school education were not limited then, as they are not today, to the school itself. The dominant character of the social order brought about by the school also includes minor tonalities that have sought to harmonize various educational processes, as necessary as schooling, for social relations, new subjectivities, family forms, and citizenship practices to take root. In the context of internal coloniality proper to these decades, women's education, corporal education, and sentimental education illustrate several of the ambiguities and tensions intrinsic to the new social order. These examples recognize the minor tones in which ideas, practices, and experiences are propagated in tandem with the deployment of the school institution and, in general, teach some particularities of modernity in Latin America.

In the 1880s, Edward Blyden, director of Liberia College, elaborated an educational curriculum to struggle against the colonial epistemology which denied black people the ability to be subjects of knowledge. In the 1920-30s, on the shores of Lake Victoria, Africans educated in mission schools produced a rich corpus of literature in local languages to create an autonomous intellectual space for themselves, and to struggle over intellectual authority against the colonizers. In the 1940-50s, in Ethiopia, Senedu Gebru, a women educationalist, thought about a balanced Ethiopian and European education as a tool to equip girl students to be first-class citizens in the name of Ethiopian independence. I will draw on these examples to demonstrate how African educationalists who wanted to challenge colonial power relations maneuvered strategically and, at times, ambiguously to claim a specific educational place. I will further argue that to address the question of ambiguity - that of the actors of the past and our own in the present - is critical for historians of education in the postcolonial world.