Modernisation – colonisation – recolonisation? Entangled histories of progressiveness in the Erbil School Museum (Kurdistan Region/Iraq)

Founded in 1928, the First School in Erbil (Kurdistan Region/Iraq) is now a museum. We analyse the specific manner in which the history of this school is remembered through the museum’s displays, and through the individuals who guide visitors through the exhibition space. We also reconstruct the careers of some of the teachers featured in the museum, drawing on records from the museum’s archive. The overarching narrative of the exhibition portrays the school as a place of progressiveness. In its quest to be progressive, the school selectively adopted Western pedagogical ideas, and this was facilitated by its headmasters and teachers and their exposure to Western intellectual discourses – often filtered through Ottoman and post-Ottoman networks and institutions. Consequently, this story could be interpreted as one of modernisation through selective, deliberate and situated Westernisation. While we show that there are good arguments for reading it also as a story of colonisation, we suggest that it is too simplistic to trace the progressiveness represented in the museum merely back to Western ideas. Such a conceptualisation fails to take into account both the self-perceptions of local actors and the specific Ottoman and post-Ottoman discourses that shaped and reframed ideas about education and progress.