The Journal of the Society for Modern Greek Studies

This paper attempts to explore the logic behind the priority given to education by Adamantios Korais from a postcolonial perspective. The evolution of his nationalist thinking in his early treatises of ancient Greek literature and patriotic pamphlets (1798-1803) is analyzed in connection with the Enlightenment’s notion of “civilizing mission” which conceived western Europe as the centre of civilization and a model for the rest of the world. In this context, it is argued that Korais defined the civilizing mission of Greek education as the obligation to westernize the “barbarous” Greek people, thus setting the ideological framework within which the indirect neocolonial rule of western Europe in nineteenth-century Greece and the self-colonization of Greek intellectual, economic, and political ruling elites were legitimized, with long term repercussions in the Greek national policy imperatives and cultural identity-forming processes.