Missionaries and modernity

Education in the British Empire, 1830-1910

Felicity Jensz, Alan Lester

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526152961
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Historia de la educación

Many missionary societies established mission schools in the nineteenth century in the British Empire as a means to convert non-Europeans to Christianity. Although the details, differed in various colonial contexts, the driving ideology behind mission schools was that Christian morality was highest form of civilisation needed for non-Europeans to be useful members of colonies under British rule. This comprehensive survey of multi-colonial sites over the long time span clearly describes the missionary paradox that to draw in pupils they needed to provide secular education, but that secular education was seen to lead both to a moral crisis and to anti-British sentiments.

Introduction: entangled histories of missionary education

In April 1834, Jabez Bunting, Secretary of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS), wrote to John Lefevre of the Colonial Office, London, England, in relation to a plan proposed by the British government to establish a system of education for the soon to be freed slaves in the British West Indies. His letter began with:

Our long experience, as a Missionary Society, in various parts of the world, and especially among various tribes and classes of heathen and other previously uninstructed people, has fully convinced us, that any Education dissociated from religion, or not avowedly and habitually connected with some form of Christianity Profession and Discipline, is exceedingly inefficient, and will fail to accomplish, in any large or permanent degree, those objects even of civil amelioration and of social order and security, which must be supposed to be contemplated by the State, when it undertakes to afford pecuniary assistance to plans of this description. We respectfully state our earnest hope, that no alterations will be made in the plan for educating the Negro Youth, which would so far generalize the instruction to be given, as in fact to neutralize it also, as to its moral influence and public benefit. [emphasis in original]¹

Bunting’s comments encapsulated the beliefs of many evangelical missionary societies in the nineteenth century that education without religion would fail to shape non-Europeans within the British Empire into good Christians and good subjects. Christian education was imperative, Bunting argued, to underscore governmental desires for ‘civil amelioration […] social order and security’.² Bunting’s comments were specifically directed to the proposed Negro Education Grant, for which governments and missionary bodies cooperated to provide ‘religious and moral education’ for emancipated slaves.³ His comments also reveal the growing expectations of evangelical missionary societies from the 1830s that they would collaborate with governments more generally as the providers of education to ‘heathen’ and ‘uninstructed’ peoples. In this logic, missionary societies were the most suited to provide schooling as they were the only ones with the ability to provide religious and moral instruction infused across all aspects of the curricula and thereby help colonised societies to fulfil their potential.

Western schooling was a tool used to transform people considered to be ‘traditional’ into people considered to be ‘modern’. Along with infrastructure, such as railways, plantations and factories, colonial schools were visual markers of colonial modernity. Schooling had the potential to reorder societies through creating epistemic cleavages and provided other ways to view and connect to the broader world. Through schooling, European ideas of modernity were presented to, and at times indeed forced upon, non-European peoples. The technologies taught in schools, such as writing, were thought to ‘modernise’ peoples in oral cultures. Colonial schooling also provided local people with a means to engage with Western forms of knowledge, sometimes on their own terms. The ideologies, premises and assumptions that informed colonial education were themselves constantly in flux, responding to local specificities as well as to broader social and political changes. A constant in this flux was the belief held by evangelical Protestant missionary groups that they were best placed to provide education to non-Europeans in the colonies and with it access to missionary modernity. From the instigation of the Negro Education Grant in the 1830s, missionary schooling in the colonies was increasingly undertaken with the support of colonial governments, yet this relationship was not always easy. This book traces mission schooling from the 1830s, a period in which missionary education was central to humanitarian governance, to the disappointments of the early twentieth century when missionary schooling was perceived as not having reached its full potential due to the secularising influences of colonial modernity and of local and imperial governments.

Within the framework of the nineteenth century, there was a belief in progress, development and growth associated with the implementation of Western-style modernity. I make a distinction in this book between what David Scott has called ‘colonial modernity’ and what I term ‘missionary modernity’.⁴ Both colonial and missionary modernity recognised that the rate of modernisation might be different across different cultures and colonies dependent upon the institutions and peoples encountered, yet both forms rested on the assumption of Western superiority of politics or religion.⁵ I argue that whereas colonial modernity was driven by aspects of colonial governmentality that shaped and categorised non-Europeans into political subjects through ‘modern’ political instruments such as voting, political participation and the census, the rationale driving missionary modernity was religious rather than political. Missionary modernity took on many of the liberal ideas of the age such as economic independence of individuals through the toils of their own labours, universal education and female emancipation from ‘traditional’ roles, including those associated with ‘traditional’ marriage. Missionary modernity focused on the rejection of ‘heathen’ superstition and ‘traditional’ religions and expected an embracing of Christian faith and morality. It used religious instruments such as church order and moral discipline to shape non-Europeans into religious subjects, and used modern forms of media, such as mass published tracts and periodicals, photographs and magic lantern shows, to raise awareness and support amongst potential donor communities to extend missionary reach in colonised lands. Schooling was an integral instrument of missionary modernity, even as the concept of missionary modernity shifted over time to respond to local and larger circumstances. Schooling was a consistent means used to instil Christian morality and to create strong ties to denominational identities. Although missionary modernity co-existed within a colonial system, it did not always do so easily, nor did all participants in mission schooling conform to various ideals of modernity. This monograph examines competing expectations held for the schooling of non-Europeans in the British Empire by evangelical missionary societies, various governments and non-European groups as a means to participate in or reject certain ideas about ‘modernity’ within the colonial context. The main argument developed within this book is that British missionary groups sought to combat their marginalisation in the nineteenth century during a period of secularisation by dynamically positioning themselves as the most apt providers of education to non-Europeans within the British colonies. In examining schooling as an aspect of missionary modernity, the book underscores the ways in which missionary groups proved and maintained their legitimacy in a modernising and secularising world amidst countervailing criticism from varied sources.

Across the British Empire, there were historical commonalities as well as disjuncture across varied temporal and spatial sites in the history of mission education. To chart these, I predominately follow the major and most important missionary groups in Britain in the nineteenth century, including the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS, 1792), the Church Missionary Society (CMS, 1799),⁶ the London Missionary Society (LMS, 1795), the Moravian Church (under the auspice of the ‘Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Heathens’ from the 1760s) and the WMMS (1813).⁷ These missionary bodies targeted various groups, and often had separate missions to target home, colonial and foreign (or ‘heathen’) groups. Here the focus is upon the latter: missions to non-Europeans, often initially referred to as ‘heathen’ missions. The main spaces examined in this book are British India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Southern Africa and the West Indies, with reference made to other colonial spaces, such as the settler colonies in Australia and Canada and the political entities that they became after federation and confederation respectively. In some of these spaces, such as Sri Lanka, the remnants of other European colonial powers affected the ways in which missionary schooling was conceived of and enacted. Across the broad geographical space of the British Empire there was no universal policy for schooling, nor was this ill-defined polity uniformly governed. Numerous political entities affected policies for the schooling of Indigenous and non-European children on mission stations, from community, local, missionary and colonial to imperial bodies. In the dynamic and constantly changing environments of colonial societies, missionaries were often the instigators of schooling, yet their work was contingent on both local as well as governmental engagement. In order to conceptualise and analyse such a seemingly disparate topic, I distinguish three overarching topics in transnational educational spaces: organisations and actors; ideologies and discourses; and spaces.⁸ Here the organisations and actors are predominantly British evangelical missionary societies, their executives as well as individual missionaries. Ideologies surrounding the provision of education are predominantly examined through three frames of reference: government discussions on the role of missionaries in colonial education; at missionary conferences to which numerous missionaries from various societies attended; and in missionary periodicals that aimed to engage home audiences to support continuing missionary work. The reactions to these ideologies from local people are examined through their own words, particularly through the writings of prominent individuals and local workers. Both actors and discourses circulated throughout global as well as local religious networks, demonstrating that the boundaries of the British Empire were porous, with influences on schooling coming from beyond the British world. In examining actors, ideas and spaces this book offers a rich understanding of how the changing concepts of schooling affected the self-representation of missionary groups in their strivings to shape the ‘rising generation’ (a Biblical reference to Matthew 13:33) in the colonial world. These changes, in turn, reveal the tensions between missionary modernity and colonial modernity with its secularising effects.

By placing various Protestant missionary societies in the same frame, the book does not generalise missionary education, but rather provides insight into moments in which similarities in aims and methods were evident, and times when they diverged. It also does not assume that missionary societies and individuals cooperated unconditionally with one another, as there were many tensions and much competition between different missionary groups. Yet they did at times collaborate and openly communicate, such as at the 1860 Liverpool Missionary Conference and the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, both of which are examined in depth in this book. These conferences brought missionaries from various societies together to share their experiences with schooling and to make general recommendations on how best to facilitate the Christian education of non-Europeans against the backdrop of missionary modernity. Missionary groups were aware of the particulars of their situations and were themselves often careful to detail the specific historical, cultural and political influences that affected their work. Nevertheless, beyond these specificities was an unwavering belief that Christianity embodied the highest moral tone of all religions, with evangelical missionary education considered to be the most appropriate means to ‘raise’ the moral and religious tenor of all societies, particularly through the schooling of children and females. Thus, although the methods and circumstances of schooling may have been adapted to different local circumstances by various missionary bodies, an overarching belief was maintained that schooling without religion was no education at all.

The two terms – education and schooling – are intertwined and their interplay had ramifications beyond their singular implications. Education is conceived here in broad terms to connote attempts made to mould and change the character of the pupil within, but also beyond, the geographical confines of the school proper with the hope that epistemic change within an individual would influence broader societal notions of morality, character, respectability, religion and politics. Schooling is conceived here as a means to effect such changes within the structures and confines of the immediate geographical sites of schools through the normalisation of knowledge attained by the provision of specific curricula increasingly dictated by external actors over the time period examined here. It is acknowledged that the physical sites of schools were not homogeneous with schools taking place in the open, in churches, in other structures and in purpose-built structures. Missionary schooling was thus one of a variety of forms of missionary education, with preaching also a form of broader education for social change. In focusing upon schooling, the book examines how it was part of the concerted effort of missionaries to cultivate a person, with many of the lessons learnt in the classroom expected to be enacted in daily life and diffused throughout communities. Indeed, schooling was an important means through which social and moral change was expected to ‘prepare’ people for inclusion into British colonial contexts and a particular form of missionary modernity. Here the focus is upon schooling as a site in which non-Europeans were educated in terms of European expectations and to fulfil European needs and Christian norms. This is not to suggest that local parents had no influence on how schools were run, but rather that their ability to influence school curricula was limited compared to the influence of missionaries, and increasingly of governments.

During the nineteenth century, questions increasingly emerged in political and humanitarian circles as to the status of non-Europeans within the British Empire. Education, and schooling particularly, was seen as key to the ‘civilising mission’ of creating new colonial subjects who would ...