Schooling for Statehood: Public Education, Civic Activism, and Hawai‘i’s Campaign to Become a State

Abstract Public education played a central role in the political campaign for statehood in territorial Hawai‘i (1900–1959). Educational administrators and statehood activists presented public schools as evidence of the islands’ fitness for full incorporation and used public education to recruit educators and local students to actively lobby for statehood. Through curriculum, letter-writing campaigns, and direct appeals, they framed statehood as the natural result of American presence in the islands and enlisted students and teachers by emphasizing the campaign as both non-partisan and a fulfillment of democratic practice. In the process, this Pacific outpost illustrated the tensions of American empire, as educators and statehood advocates encouraged democratic activism to advance the settler goal of statehood.