Missionary Schools

7 Key excerpts on "Missionary Schools"

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  The Making of Indian Secularism

  Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830-1960

  • N. Chatterjee(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  436 What the above-mentioned works correctly identify is the fact that Christian mission schools, while extremely popular with Indian students, were outstandingly unsuccessful as means for their conversion. They also underline the manner in which such institutions functioned and the domi- nance of their curricula by subjects which had little to do with religion (whether such subjects could be used to convey religious messages success- fully is another debate). What is less accurate is the characterization of this theology as a well-planned strategy to inveigle Christianity into the minds of unsuspecting students rather than recognizing that it was a species of post-facto justification for failure, directed towards ‘home’ audiences that St Stephen’s College 111 held (some of) the purse strings. As for empire, it was one thing to exalt in its projected glory and quite another to be one with it; to imagine that mis- sionary educators called the shots in determining education policy in India is to focus on their moments of success in influencing the Government, which became fewer and further apart as the nineteenth century wore on. In fact, by the late nineteenth century, missionary educationists were no more than numerically cornered entrepreneurs selling wares that other ‘private agencies’ of Indian origin were also offering, the latter having the advantage of being able to offer doctrinal security to parents and ‘authentic- ity’ to a government keen on demonstrating that it was in touch with the ‘real’ people of India. 437 A recent study on Christian missionary education in colonial northern India by Hayden Bellenoit demonstrates how missionaries had to act as entrepreneurs, tackling the financial and legal policies of the Government on the one hand and the expectations and prejudices of their increas- ingly nation- and religion-conscious students on the other, giving rise to an atmosphere of ‘cultural secularism’ in mission schools and colleges.

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  Society, Schools and Progress in Nigeria

  Society, Schools and Progress Series

  • L. J. Lewis, E. J. King(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Pergamon

    (Publisher)

  Development of Modern Education, 1571-1925 31 program, so far as they exist, have usually been due to their conception of education. Some have thought of education merely as the imparting of information, or, at most, as the development of the mind without relation to the moral and spiritual life. To such a group education has no religious significance. Others have thought of education as necessary chiefly to enable the Natives to read the Bible and to understand the spirit of Christianity. This group has been content with education in books. For the masses they have provided the three R's. For the catechists and the advanced pupils they have endeavoured to give a knowledge of literature, including, of course, an interpretation of religion. In this limiting education to class-room instruction in books, missionaries were following the ideals prevailing in their home country . . . the missions have failed to see how their success depends on native welfare, and have therefore been strangelv indifferent to the economic value of agriculture, and little concerned with the health and morals of the people.* These remarks were m a d e on behalf of a group of people, some of w h o m were missionaries themselves, and all of w h o m accorded unstinted admiration to the devotion a n d self-sacrifice of missionaries. T h e obvious defects, however, are but a part of the story. For not only were the missionaries themselves aware of the inadequacies, but they also tried to devise a system of education suited to the country's needs. At Abeokuta, Lagos, Onitsha and Calabar different missions had established industrial and vocational training, including in the instruction teaching about the cleaning and packing of agricultural produce for the E u r o p e a n markets, brick and tile making, carpentry, masonry, tailoring, printing, and so on. A good deal of missionary effort was directed to what was known in government a n d commercial circles as the Basle method.

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  Religious Diversity in Singapore

  • Ah Eng Lai(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • ISEAS Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The introduction of school rankings in 1992, which was only the confirmation of a larger trend to emphasize academic results at the expense of most other non-curricular aspects of student life, also served to discourage and dissuade “religious” teachers who saw their primary purpose as lying precisely in these other non-curricular parts of the educational process. The relatively limited prospects for career advancement and related perquisites in mission schools, when compared to the increasingly expanding sector of government schools, also posed a stumbling block to teachers thinking of a career in mission schools (ACS 1986, pp. 144–45, 181, 189; Kong et al. 1994: 187; Ang 2004). It is significant that this aspect of interpersonal moral influence and its abiding importance in the mission school project over the years, is not just the rhetoric of the schools themselves (in which case sentimentalism and self-propagandizing might naturally be suspected), but also of key government leaders closely concerned with the education project in the decades after independence. While there were certainly attempts to make the mission schools toe the national line of promoting “the widest common area of understanding” and “jelling the various ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups into a uniform distinctiveness” (then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew 1968), there was also repeated recognition of the distinctive “spirit” of the mission schools, which was one that was not reducible to aspects of their curriculum or formal rituals and structures, and yet was seen as highly effective in shaping the moral character of many generations of students. The prime minister himself noted that “senior masters and principals of mission schools are men moved by deep religious convictions….They care for the pupils under their care, as if they were their own children” (Lee 1970).

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  The Cross and the Rising Sun

  The Canadian Protestant Missionary Movement in the Japanese Empire, 1872-1931

  • A. Hamish Ion(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Wilfrid Laurier University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SEVEN Missionaries and Education While Charles Eby devoted his enormous energy during the 1880s and 1890s to direct evangelism, other Canadian Methodists began to con-centrate their attention on the development of mission schools. Education quickly emerged as the major endeavour of the generation of student missionary volunteers. By offering general education with a Western-studies emphasis in the Christian atmosphere of the mission school compound, missionaries hoped to convert the young. In starting schools which went beyond simply providing theological training for candidates for the clergy, the missions were confronted with the problem of balancing the Christian purpose behind the foun-dation of their schools with the need to satisfy the demand for high-quality secular education. This balancing act was difficult in Japan, and later in colonial Korea, for mission schools faced very severe competi-tion for students from both private and government schools. Moreover, they were faced with having to abide by stringent govern-ment regulations concerning the quality of education if they wished to receive government recognition of their educational program (which was essential if their graduates were to find employment or to go on to further education). For the missionary, teaching in a mission school provided a stable working environment. Further, it allowed the missionary the opportu-nity to provide jobs for deserving Japanese or Korean Christians as fellow teachers and administrators. In that sense, mission schools (while part of the missionary movement) helped to sustain indigenous Christian leadership by providing some of them with a possible chan-nel of employment and, importantly, status within the Christian com-munity. The demand for education in the 1880s offered very considerable prospects of success for the missionary movement. This was especially true in female education. Notes for Chapter Seven are found on pp. 237-39. 116

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  Western Education and Political Domination in Africa

  A Study in Critical and Dialogical Pedagogy

  • Magnus O. Bassey(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  We should remember not what they gave us but what they took away from us. Educating children is, in principle, fine and worthwhile. But there is a question to be asked: what were they being educated for? They were being educated for subservience, they were being ed- ucated to turn their backs on their own past and their own peoples.6z Denis Herbstein and John Evenson of Namibia once stated that Chris- tian missionaries were "to a large extent, the advance guard of empire."63 Nghidi Ndilula of Namibia argued that missionary education was "merely religious ind~ctrination"~~ that paved the way for German col- onizers. Indeed, Ernest Emenyonu of Nigeria argued that European mis- sionaries did not come to Africa to prop up native institutions but to justify their downfall.65 A. Babs Fafunwa has argued that the earliest Christian Missionary Schools in Africa were without doubt "adjuncts of the church.'"j6A. F. Leach explains missionary interest in education in a forthright manner: The missionaries had to come with the Latin servicebook in one hand and the Latin grammar in the other. Not only had the native priests to be taught the tongue in which their services were performed, but their converts. . . had to be taught the elements of grammar before they could grasp the elements of religion. So the grammar school became in theory, as it often was in fact, the necessary ante-room, the vestibule of the WilliamBoyd points out that the church went into the business of education not for its concernfor education as good but because the church wanted to give the adherents some formal learning to enable them to read the Bible.

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  The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850

  The 'Heathen' at Home and Overseas

  • A. Twells(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  36 The missionar- ies who travelled from Britain to India, the Pacific and West Africa in the 1790s were among many Westerners – soldiers and sailors, colonial adventurers and administrators, captives, traders, travellers, explorers and natural historians – who enjoyed an unprecedented access to ‘other’ peoples in these ‘remote’ parts of the world as part of an expanding and colonising power. 37 Much of the writing on overseas missions has been concerned with the extent to which missionaries might be considered ‘handmaidens’ of British expansion or imperialism. While, as Andrew Porter argues, any general assertion of a close relation- ship between missions and the actual mechanics of colonial power may be questioned, 38 there can be little doubt that mis- sionaries provided networks and institutions that facilitated contact between indigenous peoples and colonisers. They also created a popular imperial culture at home. It is unhelpful, with regards to the impact of missions, to try to distance mission- aries from the harsher aspects of imperialism. To be emphatic about their ‘good intentions’ must be qualified by the aware- ness that representations of themselves as civilisers of heathen savages contributed to a wider discourse of colonialism and to assumptions of the superiority of Western civilisation. 39 This not only had a profound impact in Britain and the West, as Edward Said has shown, 40 but could work to devastating effect in the colonies themselves. As articulated most powerfully by Frantz Fanon, the imposition of Western religion and cultural systems could contribute to the destruction of indigenous religious sys- tems and social organisation, paving the way for further colonial Introduction: Missions, the Local and the Global 11 exploitation, and affecting the individual psyche and sense of self-worth.

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  Pedagogy for Religion

  • Parna Sengupta(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  This was a process in which the colonial state, ashraf elite, and eventually the emerging Bengali Muslim middle class were invested. In the next two sections, I will look at the different ways that the state and the Muslim ashraf defined what constituted modern religious education and subjectivity. making the modern muslim While Muslim ashraf discourse in Bengal drew upon the North Indian Muslim reformist debates, it also paralleled discussions of religious identity among missionaries and Indian Christians. Schools had long been seen as a constitutive element of evangelical Christianity from its very beginning, but the expansion of Christianity among lower-caste, Mission Schools and Qur’an Schools | 143 dalit (untouchable), and adivasi (tribal) peoples in the late nineteenth century prompted European missionaries to demand greater funding for educating their own rural congregations. Missionary committees became anxious about the “nominal” status of recent converts and felt that religious education was crucial to incorporate the new communi-ties into the Church. Pastoral care, protecting and being responsible for the spiritual care of one’s congregation much as one would a flock of sheep, was a concept that Protestant Christians constantly touted as a practice that differenti-ated them from Hindus and Muslims. 38 A significant part of the pastoral duties of missionaries in a colonial setting revolved around “civilizing” native Christians and ensuring that they did not “lapse” back into hea-then behavior or practices. Recognizing that a Scottish Christian might be different from a Bengali Christian, the missions nonetheless wanted to make sure that a Bengali Christian would not be confused with a Ben-gali Hindu or Muslim. The policing of cultural practices was a tension inherent in missionary work, especially as more tribal and low-caste pop-ulations were brought in through mass conversion movements.

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