Could education do anything, get enough generations of the colonized to consider themselves French, British, etc. even second class?
Of course if it even has a chance it would be in places that didn't already have a national identity of their own.
That's the thing with education; when you start teaching your average African or Asian how to read, at one point he'll stop just reading the books you give him and start searching for other influences.
That's what happened in Senegal. The French had a strong paternalist connection to that colony, believing it was their "burden" to civilize it, so they educated the locals, and ended up creating an indigenous intellectual elite, with its own agenda. This agenda happened to be decolonization and the creation of a strong, "national" culture for Senegal.
So, yeah. Education tends to actually decrease the power of the colonizers in the long run.
I, for one, have another theory: a few British scholars seem to consider that the West Indies were the most loyal part of the British Empire. It even shows today, when apparently 60% of Jamaicans think they would be better off if they were a British colony. Now, as far as I know, during the, what, 300 years in which the British ruled the West Indies, what did the West Indians get? They didn't get shit. The one thing that I can see as a rallying point for the West Indians was the figure of the King/Queen. Perhaps countries with more paternalistic(and I mean paternalistic not in the Senegalese way, the "let's give them schools" way; I mean just generally postage stamps exhalting the colony, with the monarch in the background) figures, or perhaps downright authoritarian ones like Wilhelm II, could hold on to their colonies better.