Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies

Helen May, Baljit Kaur, Larry Prochner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138252882
• eBook ISBN: 9781317144335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Taking up a little-known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavor, Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner focus on the experiences of very young 'native' children in three British colonies. In missionary settlements across the northern part of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and British-controlled India, experimental British ventures for placing young children of the poor in infant schools were simultaneously transported to and adopted for all three colonies. From the 1820s to the 1850s, this transplantation of Britain's infant schools to its distant colonies was deemed a radical and enlightened tool that was meant to hasten the conversion of 'heathen' peoples by missionaries to Christianity and to European modes of civilization. The intertwined legacies of European exploration, enlightenment ideals, education, and empire building, the authors argue, provided a springboard for British colonial and missionary activity across the globe during the nineteenth century. Informed by archival research and focused on the shared as well as unique aspects of the infant schools' colonial experience, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods illuminates both the pervasiveness of missionary education and the diverse contexts in which its attendant ideals were applied.

Chapter 1 A Civilizing Mission: Educational, Evangelical, and Missionary Endeavours

DOI: 10.4324/9781315579337-2

Can we as men, or as Christians, hear that a great part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls are as immortal as ours ... are enveloped in ignorance and barbarism? Can we hear that they are without the gospel, without government, without laws, and without arts, and sciences; and not exert ourselves to introduce among them the sentiment of men, and of Christians? Would not the spread of the gospel be the most effectual means of their civilization? Would not that make them useful members of society?¹ [emphasis added]

¹ William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for Conversion of the Heathens in Which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings are Considered (Leicester: Ann Ireland, 1792), 69-70.

Christianity and civilization went hand-in-hand for William Carey, the first foreign Baptist missionary, who made the above arguments in his famous 1792 pamphlet An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for Conversion of the Heathens. He urged his fellow Christians to send a mission to ‘heathen lands’ as ‘a duty and an obligation’. The non-Christians in distant lands, like the poor in Britain, while ‘ignorant and barbarian’, had ‘immortal souls’ that could be saved by the gospel. In Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century, a Protestant evangelical ethos of sin and redemption found expression in a plethora of philanthropic voluntary societies devoted to humanitarian causes such as antislavery, education, Sunday schools, factory reform, and bettering the life of the poor.² There were cogent links between the earlier Enlightenment traditions and the new wave of evangelical energy. Carey echoed this wider Protestant evangelical sentiment when he insisted on all Christians making concerted efforts for the proclamation of the Word, which was their ‘divinely ordained duty’, so that the ‘kingdom of Christ’ would bring ‘civilization’ to the entire world. He outlined ways of fulfilling this dream, concluding with the plea:

² David. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

What a heaven will it be to see the many myriads of poor heathens, of Britons amongst the rest, who by their labours have been brought to the knowledge of God. Surely a crown of rejoicing like this is worth aspiring to. Surely it is worth while to lay ourselves out with all our might, in promoting the cause and kingdom of Christ.³

³ Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, 87.

This chapter presents the broader historical context for missionary and educational ideas in which infant schooling for young Indigenous children became a tool for realising the purposes of Christianization and civilization. It takes as its focal concern the following questions: what were the educational legacies of the Enlightenment, and how did these interface with missionary endeavours; how were missionary initiatives conceptualized, implemented, and changed over time and across settings; how were they perceived and responded to by Indigenous people at whose ‘transformation’ they were aimed; and how did the missionary aspirations and visions get changed when faced with the realities of diverse cultures and languages and significantly different religious beliefs and worldviews? It begins with a sketch of selected Enlightenment education ideas, followed by an outline of the circumstances that led to early missionary forays into the British foreign territories and some of the dynamics of differences that they constituted and confronted. The mission theories and principles prevalent in the nineteenth century, the chronological focus of this book and the heyday of mission initiatives in the British colonies, are discussed next in relation to the issues of ‘native agency’ and ‘reaching the unreached’. Both were major concerns of the missionaries and influenced the nature of their educational undertakings significantly. The chapter ends with a more focussed contextualization of mission endeavours in India, Canada, and New Zealand.

Educational Legacies of the Enlightenment

The eighteenth-century fashion of portraiture with children (and adults) posed reading was the quintessential metaphor associated with an enlightened society (see Figure 1.1). Interestingly two significant educators associated with the Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Robert Owen, both eschewed the use of books – of the kind available – for young children. Literacy was, however, a key focus of both charity and missionary schooling.

The philosophical and political writings of John Locke in the seventeenth century and those of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century fuelled new thinking on the nature of education, childhood, and family.⁴ Although they are sometimes regarded as foundational thinkers on education, Locke and Rousseau ‘offer two opposing views on how children should be reared, and the debate between them has never been resolved’.⁵ Locke proposed a view of human development in which the child came into the world with a mind as a ‘blank tablet’. Locke’s imagining of the minds of children as fertile ‘garden plots’ was a powerful metaphor that was embellished over the next centuries. In the right environment a child’s mind could be cultivated and moulded through early education experiences with the implication that education could overcome the inequalities of birth. Progressive and evangelical education initiatives were shaped by this Lockean premise. Locke also signposted the directions of so-called child-centred approaches to education by suggesting that ‘Learning must be a Play and Recreation to Children, and they must be brought to desire to be taught’.⁶

⁴ John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent Everyman Library, 1911). ⁵ Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London: BBC Books, 2006), 114. ⁶ Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 208.

Rousseau’s ideas that pushed him to both fame and persecution were written in Èmile (1762), the fictional story of a boy’s upbringing based on the premise that society was corrupt. The ‘very well governed’ ‘savages of North America,’ he claimed, were illustrative of societies that had not degenerated in the way European society had.⁷ Rousseau’s prescriptions for education would allow Èmile, the fictional child, to retain the perceived goodness of ‘natural man’, the ‘noble savage’, whose likeness over the eighteenth century, according to James Belich, ‘shifts from Huron to Tahitian and to some extent Māori’.⁸ Rousseau’s writings were popular and had a major impact on educational thought if not practice. Albeit he was an archetypal figure of Enlightenment thought, Rousseau was hardly preaching a doctrine of progress. Since he regarded contemporary society as corrupt and beyond regeneration, his alternative prescriptions, which looked to distant lands for inspiration, fuelled a rethinking of the elements needed to educate young children. For example, Rousseau’s developmental schema of childhood shaped debate on the idea that education for young children should be framed around a child’s interests and propensity for play. Tenets of these understandings emerged in the later infant schools.

⁷ Rousseau, Emile. ⁸ Jane Williams to Marianne Williams, July 1845, in Frances Porter, ed., The Turanga Journals 1840–1850: Letters and Journals of William and Jane Williams – Missionaries to Poverty Bay (Wellington: Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, 1974), 347.

Fig. 1.1 ‘The Young School Mistress’, by Jean-Simeon Chardin, 1735–36.

© The National Gallery, London. n-4077-00-000031-a4.

Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was one of Rousseau’s disciples and a practising conduit for some of his ideas on education. In contrast to Rousseau, Pestalozzi’s ideas were formulated through the practice of teaching.⁹ In a number of village and orphanage school experiments in the early nineteenth century Pestalozzi developed a philosophy of schooling children based on premises of affection and stimulation of the senses through active learning and conversation. He held that all subject matter could be reduced to simple elements, which, through the use of familiar objects and discussion, could be presented according to the child’s ability to comprehend. Pestalozzi offered a method that might be adaptable for schooling large numbers of children more effectively than the extant rote learning regimes. His experiments attracted visitors with both evangelical and radical interests. Robert Owen was one visitor and many aspects of Pestalozzi’s methods were evident at Owen’s school ventures.

⁹ Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Leonard and Gertrude, 1781, trans. Eve Channing (Boston, MA: D.C. Heath, 1885); How Gertrude Teaches her Children, 1801, trans. L.E. Holland and F.C. Turner (London: [s. n.] 1894).

Visiting Pestalozzi in 1812 was the Anglo-Irish Richard Lovell Edgeworth, along with his daughter Maria, who returned again in 1818 after her father’s death. The Edgeworths’ interest in education stemmed from Richard’s membership of the Lunar Society, a group of industrialists and intellectuals engaged in science who met regularly to discuss new ideas and exchange information.¹⁰ Women and children w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Authors
• Foreword: History Lessons: What Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Teaches Us
• Introduction: Old World Enlightenment: New World Contexts
• 1 A Civilizing Mission: Educational, Evangelical, and Missionary Endeavours
• 2 ‘Nurseries of discipline’: Infant School Experiments in Britain
• 3 ‘A fine moral machinery’: Infant Schools in British India
• 4 ‘Suited to the tastes and dispositions of Indian children’: Infant Schools in Canada
• 5 ‘An alphabet on her coffin’: Infant Schools for Māori Children in New Zealand
• 6 Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index