The Aborigines’ Protection Society, a metropolitan based humanitarian organisation, which grew out of the Anti-Slavery Society, published its first annual report in May 1838. The report, outlining the history and present activities of the Society and its members, reflected on the gifts of civilisation that should be given to colonised people in the British Empire. Education was central to their vision. ‘The capacity for intellectual, moral, and social improvement in the coloured races cannot be denied’, the report stated. However, they indicated that this capacity needed to be cultivated: ‘with fair means of culture [Aboriginal people] can attain a rank of equality with the other races’.1 This belief spoke of a universal human capacity for change, and ultimately, for civilisation. Arising out of a context of intense humanitarian concern for the impact of colonisation on Indigenous people, the Society believed that education could help to bring the races into peaceful contact with one another. By the 1880s, the close of the period under study here, this belief was increasingly challenged as ideas about race and education became more fixed.
The introduction of western education, although only affecting a minority of children directly, had a significant impact on the lives of Indigenous children, families and communities in the British settler colonies. Education was pivotal to the construction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Histories of colonial education open up the tensions between humanitarian imperatives of colonial governments, missionaries and some settlers, on the one hand, and the need for the creation, management or maintenance of a labour force, on the other. Schools were important sites of contact and exchange between different groups of people, and their ideologies. Within classrooms, on playgrounds and in boarding houses, missionaries, local government officials, Indigenous children and their families connected through the politics of children’s education. At schools, and in discussions of education schemes, imperial and local government policies, mission imperatives and Indigenous knowledge systems came into contact and often, conflict. If the ‘civilising mission’ was about the management of difference, then schools and education formed a central part of this process. I argue that histories of colonial education are central to understanding attitudes about difference, whether of class, race, gender or age.
Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the empire. Education was increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race, from a predominantly cultural to a biological understanding of difference. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonised territories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality. If too successful, this could result in significant challenges to colonialism. Between emancipation and the 1880s, education was increasingly seen as something to be tailored to the needs and capacities of different races. As colonial expansion hastened in the British colonies in the 1830s and 1840s, settlers were increasingly vocal regarding their rights to land and labour. At the same time, humanitarians based in Britain and the colonies called for increased attention to be paid to Indigenous children’s education. In this context, those providing education were faced with a number of challenges. They debated whether education should be a government priority, or whether it should be left in the hands of capable missionaries. Given that government involvement in education was only beginning to take off in the metropolitan context, there were significant concerns about whether government should control schools, the appointment of teachers, the management of curricula or even if it should be involved in education at all. The imperial government’s responsibilities were also questioned as local colonial officials stressed the importance of relying on those with local knowledge in the creation of ‘native’ policy. As the century progressed, and settlers gained more power in the colonies, the need to assert their status as the rightful occupants of the land, and to govern ‘their’ Indigenous populations became more pressing. By the end of the period under study, settlers’ views on race and education were increasingly dominant. The imperial government, however, still wanted to appear to be providing adequate protection to Indigenous people in the settler colonies.
I argue that to fully understand local educational experiences, we must pursue a comparative and connected approach that highlights the connections and divergences between policy, practice and educational thinking, in different parts of the empire. Colonial education systems and practices were shaped by a number of competing and cooperative discourses. These ranged from the intimately local: experiences of individual pupils and teachers at schools; to broader imperial discourses about race and education. In describing education, governments and missionaries needed to be explicit about what ideal colonial citizens and subjects should look like.
I address these questions using material drawn from two primary sites: Natal, South Africa, and Western Australia. These colonies have been seen as more associated with rampant settler colonialism than humanitarianism. However, I show that these ideologies, while seemingly contradictory, actually informed one another. The development of education in these colonies was closely connected to the use of Indigenous people as labourers. I situate the cases of Natal and Western Australia in the context of broader educational change in the British Empire. I do so by referring to the relationship between race, class, education and labour in the Caribbean immediately after emancipation, metropolitan Britain in the 1830s and the 1870s, and New Zealand and the Cape in the mid-nineteenth century.
Education and Colonialism
Historians of education have argued that education is never ‘neutral or benign’: as a political project, there is always an agenda in education provision.2 Tracing shifting ideas about education, from government, missionaries, settlers, researchers and Indigenous people shows that education systems, schools, teaching and curricula were deployed in service of vastly different aims. Even when missionaries believed that they were providing education for the benefit of Indigenous people, in vernacular languages and within local communities, they were still driven by some ideological principle—often, the desire to convert the ‘heathen’. Similarly, governments that began to speak about the necessity for compulsory education in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were driven by new ideas about childhood. All interventions in education, therefore, need to be seen as a reflection of the social and ideological mores of particular contexts and moments in time. Government, missionaries and settlers deployed competing definitions of education that were related to ideas about race, science, religion, labour and citizenship. Within these groups, and even within individual mission societies, there were differences of opinion regarding what education was, and what it should do for Indigenous children.
Thus, the category of ‘education’ was itself subject to debate and discussion—debate that is reflected in the historiography on colonial education as well. While histories of education have often focused on formal schooling, taking place within specialised institutions,3 education in colonial contexts was far broader in its aims. Education involved transforming relationships to land and labour, and shifting religious and ideological positions of children, families and communities in varied social contexts. Education took place within and outside of schools. A significant focus in this book is the relationship between education and labour. Some education policies and practices in colonial contexts have been overlooked in the literature because these were labelled as labour regimes. For example, Native Protector Charles Symmons wrote about the employment of Aboriginal children in Western Australia in the 1840s, arguing that their labour was much desired by Perth residents. It was his view that their training as labourers would ensure their ‘moral conduct’ in future.4 This was as much about educating children and youth into new patterns of behaviour as it was about creating a new labour force. In other parts of the empire, including the Cape, New Zealand, Natal and the Caribbean, industrial education centralised labour as part of young people’s education. Moreover, as I indicate in Chap. 2, this kind of thinking about the civilising potential of labour was as prevalent amongst the Irish poor and children in London’s slums as it was in the colonies. While the South African experience has been explored in relation to the exploitation of labour, this approach is less common in the Australian case, where the focus has more often been on the dispossession of Indigenous land.5 Yet, before the introduction of convict labour in 1850, Aboriginal people in Western Australia, a primary site of this study, were looked to as a labour force. I therefore place labour’s relationship to education at the centre of this discussion, showing how the management of labour in relation to education was a central facet of settler colonial expansion in both Natal and Western Australia.
Education also included familial, social and cultural arrangements and interactions for adults and children. The conviction that Indigenous people should be clothed, use their bodies, and express intimacy in particular ways was always a subject of interest for colonial educators. Taking a broad view of education shows how education and colonialism as concepts were often inseparable. As Sanjay Seth argues, ‘[F]rom the early decades of the nineteenth century colonialism itself came to be seen as an essentially pedagogic enterprise’.6 However, this was not always recognised by colonisers: as Cohn points out, the British in India understood education as ‘taking place in institutions, meaning buildings with physically divided spaces marking off one class of students from another, as well as teachers from students’.7 Thus, in some cases, colonisers failed to recognise when education was already taking place. While there may have been limited apparatus for the provision of education in the colonies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, there remained a set of guiding principles, both for how colonisation should take place, and for how it should transform Indigenous people, which underpinned colonial expansion in these settler colonies. If we are to see colonialism as a pedagogic process in which Indigenous people were taught new ways of seeing and being, then we must take seriously the broader contexts in which education took place. Throughout this book, I point out how concepts of education changed over time, and eluded narrow definitions. I therefore examine both formal education in specialised institutions and the broader context of colonial education.
Schools were sites for colonial encounters—between missionaries, Indigenous adults and children, researchers and the colonial state. For this reason, it has been important for me to think about the intimate nature of education. Education could be intensely disruptive to children’s lives, and influence relationships between parents, children, family and community. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, schools and education were part ...