Organization
Lycée Sisowath
Lycée Sisowath, also called Preah Sisowath High School, is a high school in Phnom Penh. The Documentation Center of Cambodia describes it as the first secondary school in the city.[1] It began under the French protectorate as a school that trained Cambodians for posts in the colonial administration, and it takes its name from King Sisowath.[2][3]
Origins
Accounts of the school's beginnings differ. Thomas Clayton, writing in 1995, traces it to a French-language School of the Protectorate that a French infantry officer, Ferry Rolles, opened in Phnom Penh in 1873, renamed the College of the Protectorate in 1893.[2] A history printed in La Dépêche d'Indochine in 1935 does not mention an earlier school. It dates the founding of the College of the Protectorate to April 1893, on the proposal of Ferdinand Fontaine, an inspector of schools from Cochinchina.[3] Its first home was a small building on the quai Piquet, and like the college for interpreters in Saigon its purpose was to prepare staff for the local administration, chiefly by teaching them French.[3]
From 1901 the school was run by François Fontaine, a cousin of Ferdinand, who led it for most of the next quarter century.[3] After Sisowath came to the throne in 1904, the college moved into the former palace of the Second King, which the king gave to the French government. A stone stele in the courtyard, dated 1905 and inscribed in French and Khmer, recorded the gift.[3]
Collège Sisowath
The two sources date the new name differently. Clayton has the College of the Protectorate renamed the Collège Sisowath in 1905, when it offered higher primary schooling.[2] In La Dépêche's account, the school became the higher primary school of Phnom Penh in 1905, and an order of July 19, 1911, named it the Collège Sisowath, to honor the king's gift of his palace.[3] Both describe its purpose in those years as training students for government service.[2][3]
The lycée
Clayton writes that the Collège Sisowath became the Lycée Sisowath in 1933 and introduced an upgraded secondary curriculum in 1935.[2] In September 1935 La Dépêche wrote that the old college, in run-down buildings on the quai de La Grandière, was about to move. Its new buildings on the boulevard Doudart de Lagrée, begun in 1926, would carry the name of lycée. The inauguration was set for the morning of September 14, with the governor-general and the king.[3] The Documentation Center of Cambodia gives 1935 as the year the high school opened.[1] The first Cambodian students to earn the baccalauréat there graduated in 1939.[2]
Students
Several later leaders of the Khmer Rouge studied at the school, among them Pol Pot and his first wife Khieu Ponnary, and Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith.[1]
In December 2010 the school unveiled an anti-genocide memorial, at a ceremony hosted by the Documentation Center of Cambodia and attended by hundreds of students. Its two faces carry statements in Khmer and English, one of them reading "Learning about the history of Democratic Kampuchea is to prevent genocide."[1] The center's director, Youk Chhang, said that young people learning this history in school were "the best healing medicine".[1]
References 3
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 The Phnom Penh Post, Thomas Miller, Anti-genocide memorial inaugurated (December 9, 2010)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Education Policy Analysis Archives, Thomas Clayton, Restriction or resistance? French colonial educational development in Cambodia (volume 3, number 19, December 1, 1995)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Entreprises coloniales françaises, Collège Sisowath, Pnom-Penh, from La Dépêche d'Indochine (September 11 and 16, 1935)
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