Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies 9781472409607, 9781315579337

Table of contents :
Cover
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

Citation preview

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies

Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods 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, and often from the streets, 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 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 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.

Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present Series Editor: Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University, USA This series recognizes and supports innovative work on the child and on literature for children and adolescents that informs teaching and engages with current and emerging debates in the field. Proposals are welcome for interdisciplinary and comparative studies by humanities scholars working in a variety of fields, including literature; book history, periodicals history, and print culture and the sociology of texts; theater, film, musicology, and performance studies; history, including the history of education; gender studies; art history and visual culture; cultural studies; and religion. Topics might include, among other possibilities, how concepts and representations of the child have changed in response to adult concerns; postcolonial and transnational perspectives; “domestic imperialism” and the acculturation of the young within and across class and ethnic lines; the commercialization of childhood and children’s bodies; views of young people as consumers and/or originators of culture; the child and religious discourse; children’s and adolescents’ self-representations; and adults’ recollections of childhood. Also in the series Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914 Simon Sleight Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 Shih-Wen Chen Kipling’s Children’s Literature Language, Identity, and Constructions of Childhood Sue Walsh Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain Beliefs, Cultures, Practices Edited by Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies

Helen May University of Otago, New Zealand Baljit Kaur Canada Larry Prochner University of Alberta, Canada

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner 2014 Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: May, Helen, 1947– Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies / by Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner. p. cm.—(Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-0960-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Indigenous children—Education—Canada—History—19th century. 2. Indigenous children—Education—India—History—19th century. 3. Indigenous children— Education—New Zealand—History—19th century. 4. Great Britain—Colonies—Asia. 5. Great Britain—Colonies—America. I. Title. LA411.7.M39 2014 371.829089—dc23 2013031545 ISBN 9781472409607 (hbk) ISBN 9781315579337 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures   Notes on Authors    Foreword: History Lessons: What Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Teaches Us   Sarah de Leeuw and Margo Greenwood

vii xiii xv

Introduction: Old World Enlightenment: New World Contexts  

1

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

21

2 ‘Nurseries of discipline’: Infant School Experiments in Britain  

71

3 ‘A fine moral machinery’: Infant Schools in British India  

111

4 ‘Suited to the tastes and dispositions of Indian children’: Infant Schools in Canada  

149

5 ‘An alphabet on her coffin’: Infant Schools for Māori Children in New Zealand  

185

6 Conclusion  

225

Selected Bibliography   Index  

239 261

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List of Figures I.1 I.2 I.3 I.4i

‘Portrait of Masters Thomas and John Quicke assembling a geographic dissections’, by William Hoare, c. 1770. © Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London (Private collection). ‘Mutual Enlightenment’, engraved by I. Phillips and W. Harrison. Title cartouche of the Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1783) by James Rennell. © The British Library Board. Maps D40013-99.

9

11

‘Procession of Hindoo woman to the funeral pile of her husband’, by illustrator W. Skelton, 1793. In Travels in India, during the years 1780–1783, by William Hodges (1793). © The British Library Board. W 3836 plate 9. 12 ‘Sauvagesse Iroquois’. In Encyclopédie Des Voyages (1796) by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Paris. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-042a.

14

I.4ii ‘Sauvagesse de la Nouvelle Zelande’. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. GoA G768 466, 92/925.

14

I.4iii ‘Indienne du Coromandel’, Paris, 1796. In Encyclopédie Des Voyages (1796) by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Paris. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. R910-4-Gras.

14

1.1

23

‘The Young School Mistress’, by Jean-Siméon Chardin, 1735–36. © The National Gallery, London. n-4077-00-000031-a4.

‘Passing through a swamp in New Zealand’. In Church Missionary Paper, London, 1836. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ, PUBL-0031-1836-1.

37

1.2ii ‘Night Scene in New Zealand, Christmas 1837’. In Missionary Paper, London, 1838. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. PUBL-0031-37.

37

1.2i

1.3

‘Calcutta Central School’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1828), p. 168. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509d.

39

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1.4

British territories in mid eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India, 1770 & 1805. Map published by George Phillip and Son Ltd. The London Geographical Institute. Author’s collection.

43

‘KRISHNA on an elephant composed of female attendants’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1827), p. 449. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509c.

45

‘Preaching at a Hindu Mela’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1852), p. 64. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509i.

47

1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8

‘Church Mission House at Burdwan’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1842), p. 432. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509h. 49



‘A missionary map of North America, showing missions and mission prospects in “heathen countries”’. In Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, The Colonial Church Atlas (London: R. Clay, Printer, 1850). William C. Wonders Map Collection, University of Alberta Libraries.

52

1.9

‘The Credit River Mission, Upper Canada’. In Egerton Ryerson, The Story of My Life (Toronto: Briggs, 1882).

58

1.10 CMS missionary Rev. John West, recruiting a student for the Red River School. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1823), facing page 279. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-510.

59

1.11 ‘Map of Northern part of New Zealand’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1836), p. 343. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-508a.

61

1.12 Henry Williams portrayed in ‘The power of God’s Word’, 1856, by unknown artist. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. PUBL-0151020013.

67

2.1

‘Quadrille Dancing, first floor school room’, by G. Hunt, New Lanark, 1825. Mr. Owen’s Institution, New Lanark. (Quadrille Dancing). In M. Egerton, Airy Nothings; or; Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-Cum-Shorts; in a Circumbendibus Hop, Step, and Jump.

List of Figures

2.2



ix

By Olio Rigmaroll (London: Thomas McLean, 1825). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

74

‘The school room and playground in Wilson’s infant school’. In William Wilson, A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools, adapted for Infants’ Schools in the United States by H. William Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

90



Outdoor play. In Samuel Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, Applied to all Faculties (London: James S. Hodson, 1840). Author’s collection.

100

2.4

The ‘uncovered schoolroom’. In David Stow, The Training System (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1840). Author’s collection.

101

2.5

St Mary’s Infant School on Church Commons in 1824. Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest. 106

2.6

A gallery lesson. In Samuel Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, Applied to all Faculties (London: James S. Hodson, 1840). Author’s collection.

107

Infant school, 1898. ‘“Which is Your Right Hand?” A study in an infant school, drawn from life by Paul Renouard’. In The Graphic, London, March 19, 1898. McGill University Library, Montreal.

108

2.3

2.7 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1

‘Plan of Calcutta’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1832), p. 535. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509g. 111 ‘A scholar of the native-female schools in Calcutta’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1828), p. 175. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509e. 136 ‘School of Hindu girls in Calcutta’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1826), p. 183. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509b.

139

‘Map of the Prince Edward District, Upper Canada’ showing the Grape Island Missionary Station. Publius V. Elmore (New York: Stiles & Co., 1835). Archives of Ontario, Canada. Carto N-4012, F005309. 151

x

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‘Map of the Prince Edward District, Upper Canada’, the missionary station is gone. Publius V. Elmore, Map of the Midland and Prince Edward Districts (Hallowell, Upper Canada: P.V. Elmore, 1836). Archives of Ontario, Canada. Carto N-2530-C. F005678.

152



‘An Indian Boy: Shahwahnekzhih (Henry Steinhauer)’, 1829, oil on canvas by John Neagle. Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada. 79.1.1.

162

4.4

‘View of Infant school’. In Mrs Howland, The Infant School Manual (4th ed., Boston, MA: 1831). Author’s collection. 165

4.5

‘First Infant School in Green Street, New York’, by Anthony Imbert, lithograph after Archibald Robertson, 1827. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US. Art 41170. Image source: Art Resource, NY. 166

4.3

4.6

‘Henry Steinhauer preaching at Whitefish Lake, 1855’. Reproduced in Missionary Outlook (Trenton NJ: MacCrellish and Quigley, July 1881). Author’s collection.

174



Church Missionary Society poster of a New Zealand Missionary School c. 1840s. Church Missionary Society, London. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. A-105-009.

184

5.2

The Paihia Mission: ‘Etablissement des Missionnaires’, by Louis Auguste de Sainson, 1830. Author’s collection.

187

5.3

‘Native Girl Writing on a Slate’ dressed in her mission clothing, attrib. Joseph Jenner Merrett, c. 1840s, Waimate Mission. Governor George Grey Collection. © The British Library Board. C4000.05 V51.

191



‘Maori Woman Reading’, by Joseph Jenner Merrett, 1842. In Mrs [Eliza] Hobson’s Album. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. A-275-002.

194

5.5

‘The Waimate Mission’, by Hutton Biddulph, 1850. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. A-196-024.

210

5.6

‘Maori women learning to read, 24 April 1844’, by William Bambridge, Waimate Mission. In William Bambridge Diaries. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. qMS-0130-038.

214

5.1

5.4



List of Figures

xi

5.7

‘Native Infant School’ attendance register 1844, Waimate Mission. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. MS-1408-03.

5.8

‘Interior of Infant school November 16, 1844’, by William Bambridge, Waimate Mission. In William Bambridge Diaries. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. MS-0130-208. 218



6.1 Morere ‘Maori Swing,’ by Joseph Jenner Merrett, c. 1840. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. 12 760.a.

216

233

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Notes on Authors Helen May is Professor of Education, University of Otago College of Education, Dunedin, New Zealand. Baljit Kaur is a freelance researcher, educator, and counsellor presently living in Canada. She has formerly served on the faculties of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and the M.S. University of Baroda, Vadodara, India. Larry Prochner is Professor and Chair of the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Sarah de Leeuw is an Associate Professor in the Northern Medical Program, University of Northern British Columbia, the Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Canada. Margo Greenwood is a Professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Scientific Director of the National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal People’s Health, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.

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Foreword History Lessons: What Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Teaches Us Sarah de Leeuw and Margo Greenwood

One of Michel Foucault’s most enduring lessons has significant implications for critically engaging histories of education, a central concern of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods. Disciplining people, according to Foucault, is about much more than meting out actual, physical, or material violence.1 While it is true that Foucault principally referenced industrialized European societies as opposed to Indigenous communities in lands now known as the Americas, Australia, or New Zealand, his ideas are germane to the role of education in colonial projects around the world. Maintaining social power relies on a mostly unstated and often obscure threat of violence that is, very importantly, buttressed by people coming to believe that the social systems within which they (we) live are, first and foremost, operating in their (our) best interests and, secondly, that it is their (our) right and duty to enfold others into those systems, for their own good.2 Knowledge and associated belief systems of a particular society, what Foucault names as discourses, turn upon people accepting a common or universal knowledge against which anything else, or anything ‘different,’ is a deviation. Deviations come to be conceptualized as punishable, or to be actually punished, through violence or the threat of violence. Norms, or states of ‘normalcy,’ are valorized and rewarded ideologically, thus consistently (re)producing and (re)positioning them as logical, acceptable, and laudable phenomena to which all good and normal members of society should aspire. Foucault was particularly interested in how we come to monitor ourselves and each other for signs of deviations from those senses of ‘the normal’ that we have internalized about ourselves and that we then come to believe are, naturally, in the best interest of others. For Foucault, the social power of normalcy rests on the production of difference, on differentiations between right and wrong, moral and immoral, normal and abnormal. But how does this occur? As explored 1 Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1972); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977); ‘Questions of Method’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 73–86. 2 See also, for instance, Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of Colonial Common Sense’, The Philosophical Forum (2008): 349–61.

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by the authors in this book, education systems, including schools, curricula, pedagogy, teachers, and governments are fundamental to disciplining individuals and societies. Educational systems, as the authors of this text make clear, are principle means of trying (and trying is an operative word here, because there are always slippages and resistances) to acculturate subjects into particular ways of knowing and being. Education is critical to processes that ensure members of society are acculturated about why some ways of knowing and being are wrong, immoral, and abnormal while other ways of knowing and being are good, right, and normal. In other words, education is never neutral or benign. Education always fosters and maintains systems of social power. Education takes hard work – and great investment of resources across vastly different geographies and remarkably expansive timeframes – to ensure that ideas about what is normal and right are circulated, adapted, and brought into being. Education is an expensive, rigorously maintained, and deeply historical project. Critically understanding and unpacking the underpinnings of education, particularly in its service to empiric efforts of dispossessing Indigenous peoples, offers insights into the operations of hegemonic social structures and systems of power. It is thus worthwhile to understand educational systems because doing so allows understandings about how, potentially, to undo the many injustices that education has wittingly or unwittingly resulted in. Expanding on Foucauldian thought, but focusing more expressly on colonialism and imperialism, Edward Said observed that the settling and taking of lands already occupied by someone else (Indigenous residents) requires an unexamined moral mission buttressed by an arsenal of media and cultural practices that support military-geo-strategic expansions into territory.3 State apparatuses, including the schools and educational sites that the authors in this book write about, are key to the production and circulation of moral missions and the cultural practices, products, and media upon which such missions rely. Education is vital to colonial work, another central tenet of this book. Schools and educational systems function in the production of cultural products (e.g., literature, music, art, and religious materials) and/or in instructing people from an early age towards a fluency in those cultural products. Cultural products become normative and can then be deployed in order to conceptualize and construct ‘Othered’ subjects who, by definition, are those not fluent in those cultural products. Of particular importance to colonial and imperial expansion, as we have written about elsewhere,4 are Said’s concepts about the persistent and pervasive (re)production of an Eastern Other for Eurowestern domination and consumption. This (re)production rests on ideas of difference and thus, at least in part, education plays an critical role in instructing Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994). 4 See for instance S. de Leeuw, A. Kobayashi, E. Cameron, ‘Difference’, in A Companion to Social Geography, ed. V.J. Del Casino Jr., M. Thomas, P. Cloke, and R. Panelli (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 3

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about difference and otherness and then, within Othered places, in instructing Othered subjects about how to transform. Succinctly, and, as Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods makes subtly clear, the production of and education about ‘an Other’ rests on reducing diverse times, spaces, and societies into an undifferentiated mass imbued with characteristics like barbarism and savagery against which the Eurowest (in this case Britain) understands itself as modern, cultured, and civilized. Indeed, the Eurowest might even be said to require a homogenous subjugated Other in great part in order to understand itself.5 This dualistic relationship positions Britain as entitled, if not required from a morally righteous perspective, to intervene into the lives and lands of those categorized as different or Other. In Canada, New Zealand, and India, as Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods elucidates, Indigenous peoples were those Others. And infant schools were the places where education, through various cultural products upon which pedagogic ideals rested, was put to work in the instruction and disciplining of those Othered children into what colonial subjects believed to be righteous social imperatives. These are, fundamentally, the lessons of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies. Over and over again we see the crucial role that education had in the empiric work of Britain during the nineteenth century, at home in the heart of empire and abroad. The book also demonstrates the remarkably small-scale nature of this empiric educational work;6 it was done, ultimately, in and upon the bodies and minds of children and within the comparatively small spaces of school rooms and educational compounds. These small spaces and even smaller bodies, however, were consistently positioned and repositioned within broad and expansive discursive structures comprised of government and ecumenical policies, philosophical debates, political maneuverings, and economic transformations. By making clear the linkages between diminutive geographies (children and schools), macro-scale sociopolitical and economic agendas, and the synergistic relationship between church and state in colonial education efforts, the book affords a unique understanding of the historical underpinnings of many contemporary social injustices that remain in former British colonies. This is perhaps the book’s greatest teaching, and something we are interested in charting and contemplating. In further contemplating what Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies teaches 5 See for instance Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 6 See also Sarah de Leeuw, ‘Intimate Colonialisms: The Material and Experienced Places of British Columbia’s Residential Schools’, The Canadian Geographer: Special Issue, Historical Geographies of Colonialism 51, no. 3 (2007): 339–59; Sarah de Leeuw, ‘“If Anything is to be Done with the Indian, We Must Catch Him Very Young”: Colonial Constructions of Aboriginal Children and the Geographies of Indian Residential Schooling in British Columbia, Canada’, Children’s Geographies 7, no. 2 (2009): 123–40.

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us, we were struck by a number of dominant themes in the text, themes that weave themselves throughout all the chapters and link disparate people (Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples around the world), times (the book encompasses over 100 years of history), and places (principally three continents, but touching on more). The book anchors three in-depth case studies of schooling projects in New Zealand, India, and Canada in a deep and systematic review of the ways that various educational projects came into being, faded from style, sought to maintain validation and power, and shifted and adapted over time. The authors also, and importantly, demonstrate the amorphous and often accidental-seeming ways that ideas about the best and most effective ways of educating children circulated amongst those interested in missionizing and in pedagogic theory and practice. The authors are careful to chart the extraordinary resistances and resiliencies of Indigenous peoples as they navigated an often violent and most certainly confusing transformation of entire ways of living and being. The book makes clear that colonial education was a uniquely gendered and classed project, something not all studies of empiric and colonial projects do justice to. Finally, the very idea that educating children is always a socioculturally, geographically, and temporally engineered project – something that the authors of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods make clear – opens up the possibility of educational projects being (de)constructed and consequently re-tooled (re-engineered) for social change and social justice. Realization that the social construction of education and pedagogy is, fundamentally, a fragile and sometimes even happenstance occurrence also makes it eminently more open to dismantlement and thus a reconfiguring of it with the possibility of putting it to use in decolonizing efforts. Detailed historical investigation about education, the ilk of which Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods clearly is, thus affords a vision of education for future generations around the world: education that has learned of and from its colonial past and, through such history lessons, might be put to service for social justice as opposed to the social injustices that we are now increasingly becoming aware of. Much work has been done to demonstrate that empiric colonial work was large-scale in nature, focused on disposessing people (Indigenous populations) from land and resources, often through geostrategic and military means, in order that colonial subjects and forces could acquire wealth and territory.7 Relatively less work, however, examines the intimate and small-scale nature of empiric colonial work. Furthermore, of that still burgeoning body of work, not much of it focuses clearly upon the complex, non-linear, messy, contradictory, and fragile nature of colonialism and its progenitors. Despite historian Ann Laura Stoler’s impactful observations that the hierarchal terrains of colonialism relied deeply See for instance, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999); Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2002); Daniel W. Clayton, ‘Geographies of the Lower Skeena’, BC Studies 94 (1992): 29–58. 7

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on the domains of the intimate, and that it was precisely through the ‘“tense and tender ties” of empire [that] relations of power were knotted and tightened, loosed and cut, tangled and undone’ and that ‘[t]hese ties are not the microcosms of empire, but its marrow,’8 there is a dearth of evidence about the role of education as central to the tender microcosms of empire. Clearly, however, as the authors of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods demonstrate, colonial Britain was deeply invested in tender microcosms, notably often very young children in infant schools in Canada, India, and New Zealand during the nineteenth century. Disciplining small bodies and minds in the ways of Christianity and the ‘high moral and educational’ standards of Britain was synonymous with expanding the British Empire. Schools, missions, and educational spaces were critical to this aim. Individual missionaries and teachers, sometimes accompanied by their families or a handful of colleagues, represented the more abstract and distant ‘heart of empire,’ underscoring again the small scale and diminutive nature of empiric and colonial work during the nineteenth century. These colonial educators took with them hard-fought pedagogic ideals and lessons that had been debated and experimented with in Britain. Little consensus, though, existed about the best way to educate children; was it a best practice to inculcate children by rote, didactic means or better to teach through physical and creative means focused on play and animate primal expressions? Although these questions were fodder for much theoretical discussion in the heart of Metropole, those on the colonial frontlines were often forced to adapt and shift, sometimes even learning from the Indigenous peoples who were ostensibly inferior. It was thus imperative for colonial educators to hold fast to ideologies that Indigenous Others were always, despite being ‘educated’ or even ‘civilized,’ innately (e.g., biologically and culturally) inferior. This, in many ways, was the most consistent component of colonial education focused on children in India, New Zealand, and Canada during the nineteenth century. The places of infant schools were not staffed or run in a ways easy to make sense of within more traditional applications of post-colonial theory. For instance, colonial education made room – early on – for British women of a particular class who wanted to escape the strictures of gendered expectations at home. Missionizing and educating in distant lands afforded certain, privileged, British women opportunities to travel and lead independent lives. Thus, despite unquestionably being subservient members of nineteenth-century society, some British women became critical players in attempts to transform geographies far from their homes in the heart of empire. The work of these women, however, is a sharp contrast both to laboring women, who were understood as conscribed to lives in factories and whose children, potentially streamlined by education, were understood as fated to the same future, and to the Indigenous women and girls upon whom colonial education foisted imperial ideals. There are other interesting slippages 8 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, in Haunted by Empire, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 23–70, 26.

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that the project of nineteenth-century colonial education was constantly forced to account for: how to address the need for, and thus role of, Indigenous Maori as teachers or mentors in infant schools in New Zealand? How to account for the remarkably well-considered thoughts of Bengali translators who were so integral to the ‘civilizing’ of children in India? How to stem the persistence of Indigenous languages being spoken by Aboriginal children attending schools in Canada, a persistence that undermined the ostensible supremacy and easiness of colonial power? By posing and considering the presences of these slippages, the authors of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods make clear that colonial education was not a straightforward or streamlined endeavor. Still, from the perspective of those whose lives were transformed and lands were reterritorialized, and who globally continue to be the embodiments of many health inequities, it remains the case that colonial education – and all that it buttressed and laid the foundations for – had lasting and devastating impacts. Education, early childhood development, and Aboriginal (Indigenous) Status are three social determinants of health recognized, respectively, by the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) and the Public Health Agency of Canada.9 Addressing these and the other major determinants of peoples’ health rests in part on understanding the broad ‘thematic areas’ that contain them and/or the outcomes that the various determinants result in. According to the World Health Organization, then, understanding the global disparities in health between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples requires applying a lens of social exclusion, in which colonial education and discriminatory early childhood development practices have played an important role. Social exclusion, as documented by the WHO and as can be comfortably theorized to be an extension/ outcome of Saidian and Foucauldian ideas about power, social hierarchies, and Othering, has systematically led to the prohibiting of particular groups of people from engaging fully in community and social life. The result is a diminished state of health and well-being. At an eminently applied level, for instance, it is well documented that residential schooling in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – the predecessors and foundations of which the authors of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods explore in detail – has directly impacted the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples in each of these countries.10 Not only was the project 9 Richard Wilkinson and Michael Marmot, eds, Social Determinants of Health: The Solid Facts (Geneva: WHO, 2003); Public Health Agency of Canada, What Makes Canadians Healthy or Unhealthy? (Ottawa, 2003). http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ph-sp/ determinants/determinants-eng.php (accessed February 15, 2011). 10 See for instance, Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre Lts, 1997); John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999); Janet Smylie, ‘The Health of Aboriginal Peoples’, in Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives, 2nd ed., ed. Dennis Raphael (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2008), 281–301; Marvin Waterstone and Sarah

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violent and premised upon an ideology of de-Indigenizing Aboriginal children – and consequently their families and communities – it has resulted in an abiding mistrust of educational systems in the twenty-first century. This mistrust results in lowered rates of literacy and a host of other challenges that can, and have been, linked back to early colonial projects. Indeed, and as we have written about elsewhere,11 it is fundamental that when addressing health inequalities, attention be paid to educational projects that systematically Othered and patholoziged Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples across Canada and around the world live what some call ‘third world conditions of health’ and what others refer to as the ‘embodiment of inequality.’12 Although Canada is ranked among the best places to live in the world, if the United Nations Human Development Index was applied to Indigenous peoples living on-reserve, Canada would rank between 68th to 80th in the world.13 The health profiles of Indigenous peoples around the globe, including and notably in developed nations like Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, mirror those in Canada and thus, in the same way research from those countries has some bearing on Canada, discussions about the Canadian context may have relevance for those nations. Drawing linkages across wide geographies, as the authors of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods have done, seems fruitful, particularly when considering historic and neo-colonialism. There are remarkable differences in the twenty-first century between India, New Zealand, and Canada. All, however, were lands into which during the nineteenth century British subjects interceded with a host of educational efforts and aims to transform children, families, communities and, ultimately, the nations’ social systems and structures. In each country, because of vastly different geographies and the wide span of time over which the educational efforts unfolded, curricular and educational adaptations had to occur. Despite colonial educators being vested with ideological proclivities about the legitimacy of their work and the potential of its success, there was no straightforward or linear uptake of colonial lessons. Consequently, Canada, New Zealand, and India remain today utterly varied places – both internally and as compared with each other – with no indication of de Leeuw, ‘A Sorry State: Apology Excepted’, Human Geography: A New Radical Journal 3, no. 3 (2010): 1–28. 11 Sarah de Leeuw, Margo Greenwood, and Emilie Cameron, ‘Deviant Constructions: How Governments Preserve Colonial Narratives of Addictions and Poor Mental Health to Intervene into the Lives of Indigenous Children and Families in Canada’, International Journal of Mental Health and Addictions 8, no. 2 (2010): 282–95. 12 Naomi Adelson, ‘The Embodiment of Inequity: Health Disparities in Aboriginal Canada’, Canadian Journal of Public Health 96 (2005): S45–S61. 13 Marlyn Bennett, Cindy Blackstock, and Richard de La Ronde, ‘A Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography on Aspects of Aboriginal Child Welfare in Canada’, (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Child Welfare Research Portal, 2005); Ann Silversides, ‘The North “Like Darfur”’, Canadian Medical Association Journal 177, no. 9 (2007): 1013–14; Paul Webster, ‘Canadian Aboriginal People’s Health and the Kelowna Deal’, The Lancet 368, no. 9523 (2006): 275–6.

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being simple, uncomplicated, iconic mirror representations of the empiric force (Britain) which made such efforts to educate in its own image. As we have alluded to, perhaps one of the most important lessons offered by Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods is that colonial education was a constantly adapting, and in many cases a hybridized and even somewhat haphazard, project. It nevertheless spawned trends and structures that arguably reach into the twenty-first century, often to calamitous ends for Indigenous peoples. Acknowledging the confused although powerful nature of nineteenth century education in infant schools in India, New Zealand, and Canada to some extent makes colonial instruction more fragile, easier to critique and thus, perhaps most importantly, easier to emplace and then (hopefully) dismantle in contemporary times. Indeed, and particularly in Canada and New Zealand, it feels imperative for today’s educators to acknowledge the colonizing roots of their/our histories and profession. In other words, only by charting and understanding the work of historic colonial educational imperatives – many of which in Canada, India, and New Zealand sat alongside and informed the educational systems within which we work today and within which our children learn – will it ever be possible to decolonize the present. Doing this is an urgent necessity, particularly given that Indigenous children continue to grow up on the margins of health and wellbeing, inheritors of a colonial and educational past that was neither of their making nor under their direction and in which, mostly, they did not willingly choose to partake. Despite this urgency, and also as the authors of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods make clear, it is vital we never overlook the incredible strength and resiliency of people who still live and thrive in New Zealand, Canada, and India. British colonial education in the nineteenth century was premised upon the basic assumption that it would, and could, transform the bodies and minds of children, thereby transforming the communities and societies of which they were a part and which they would grow up to lead. Certainly social transformations abounded; and they continue to do so. But those transformations do not follow, nor have they ever followed, clear-cut instructions that those at the helm of education so deeply believed they would. It might even be said that the last and most important lesson of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods is that people, particularly Indigenous peoples, can, did, and always will, thrive and survive despite educational paradigms that claim to know what is best for them.

Introduction Old World Enlightenment: New World Contexts Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods makes visible a little known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavour between the 1820s and the 1850s, with its focus on very young ‘native’ Indigenous children, its parallel stories across three British colonies, and its construction from a myriad of archival sources and publications of the early nineteenth century. Glimpses of these missionary infant schools provide a window to gaze afresh and consider the momentous impact of the collision of ideas and consequences that resulted from missionary teaching and colonial conquest. New ideas concerning the role and nature of education, legacies of the eighteenth-century ‘Age of Enlightenment,’ were, in the nineteenth century, transported from their place of origin and transformed as frontier tools in the quest to civilize the Indigenous child and convert his or her peoples to Christianity. The infant school itself, in its missionary version, can only be a speck on the panorama of colonial endeavour, but its crucial focus on the very young child was intended to hasten the advent of Christian Indigenous communities that hitherto had not delivered significant numbers of converts through either schooling or preaching. The story is revealing, too, of the crosscurrents and counter-flows of debate originating in the eighteenth century concerning ‘What was enlightenment?’ and ‘Who was enlightened?’1 By the early nineteenth century evangelical missionaries had definite aspirations and answers to these questions, including solutions to apply their Eurocentric notions on a global scale. The various missionary infant school experiments are illustrative of the mix of ‘enlightened’ understandings of childhood, new styles of education, and the evangelical quest to include the poor and the ‘heathen’ as potential civilized citizens in a so-called enlightened society. The new idea of infant schools, significantly established during the 1820s to 1840s in Britain for children generally between the ages of two and seven years from the poor and working classes, had demonstrated the possibilities of moral reform realized through a curricular mix of physical movement, sensory activity, music and entertainment, the three Rs, and biblical missives. This same period coincided with the burgeoning of British missionary endeavour across the globe, including its emphasis on schooling. Infant school advocates as well as missionary educators realized the possibilities for utilizing the idea of schooling very young children as another tool in the growing missionary quest to Christianize the Indigenous peoples across the lands of Britain’s expanding empire interests. 1 Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers to Britain 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).

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The historical stories from each colonial site were not initially intended for this book. Instead the authors – May, Kaur, and Prochner – discovered them in the context of documenting the history of the education and care of young children in the respective colonial settings of New Zealand, India, and Canada.2 Each author independently traced various threads of the existence of infant schools established for young Indigenous children by missionary educators. These missionary infant school ventures had been absent, excepting the occasional passing reference, in the documented missionary histories of each country or indeed any historical educational analysis. This exclusion repeats a pattern common in the field of early childhood education linked in part to: the age of the children; the gender of its teachers as mainly women; and the positioning of its institutions often outside the mainstream of education systems. Noting, too, that the pedagogies of early childhood are often experimental and its field of scholarship is more recent – an exception being the documenting and analysis of the later and more visible institution of the kindergarten.3 Consequently, the threads of the missionary infant school stories remained ‘unnoticed’ or deemed of little ‘interest’ in archive collections, still incompletely trawled and elusively incomplete. Nevertheless, there were sufficient clues for the missionary infant schools to find a place in each author’s broader historical studies of early education; intended also to redress the exclusion noted above. The authors fortuitously heard of one another’s work, wondering at the significance of the parallel stories and their aftermath legacies.4 The similarities and connections across the different colonial settings were collaboratively explored and subsequently prompted this larger study.5 The cover sketch is revealing of some key themes of this book, and is the only known image of a missionary infant school. The children are clearly drawn as ‘not English’ but rather appear ‘African’ in caricature form, thus resonating with the notion introduced by Sarah de Leeuw and Margo Greenwood in their foreword 2 Baljit Kaur, ‘“Keeping the infants of coolies out of harms way”: Raj, Church and infant education in India, 1830–51’, Contemporary Issues in Early Education 5 no. 2 (2004): 221–35; Helen May, School Beginnings: A Nineteenth-Century Colonial Story (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2005); Larry Prochner, A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009). 3 Helen May, The Discovery of Early Childhood, 2nd ed. (Wellington: NZCER Press, 2013). 4 Ailie Cleghorn and Larry Prochner, Shades of Globalization in Three Early Childhood Settings: Views from India, South Africa, and Canada (Rotterdam: Sense, 2009); Helen May, Politics in the Playground: the World of Early Childhood in Postwar New Zealand, 2nd ed. (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2009); Baljit Kaur, ‘Early childhood education in India from 1830s to 1940s: Leapfrogging through a century’, in Early Childhood Care and Education: Theory and Practice, ed. Prerana Mohite and Larry Prochner (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2009), 144–65. 5 Larry Prochner, Helen May, and Baljit Kaur ‘“The Blessings of Civilisation”: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools for Young Native Children in Three Colonial Settings: India, Canada and New Zealand’, Paedagogica Historica 5, no. 1 (2009): 83–102.

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of the ambiguous representation of the Other: those who are not like Us, have nothing to distinguish them, thus can all be lumped together amorphously. The sketch was buried deep in archives in Australia and, like many other finds in this book, accidentally discovered. The location of the school is the Waimate mission in New Zealand, and the children are Māori. The architecture is also revealing. The infant school which was established in 1843 is modelled exactly on the English plans of Samuel Wilderspin. There is a gallery for seating the infants, including a teaching post for the teacher who, in this drawing, is the newly ordained Anglican missionary William Colenso, whose wife Elizabeth ran the school and who had recently stitched the surplice that Colenso was wearing.6 Colenso’s newly acquired status was clearly the focus of the artist’s eye rather than the children. Colenso was only a fleeting visitor to the school; if only Elizabeth, a long-standing and esteemed teacher, had interested the artist! Nevertheless, the children can be studied. They are arranged by age, from very young and possibly uninterested (and even asleep) in front, to older children at the back. They are clothed in European school dress. The re-clothing and often renaming of Indigenous peoples are illustrative of missionary intentions to remake so-called heathens as Christian, and to refashion peoples regarded as savages in the newly minted mould of civilization. These are recurring themes across the contexts of British evangelical and missionary endeavour at home and abroad. The artist, William Bambridge, taught singing at the school and his diary commentaries and sketches feature in the New Zealand case study. His art was never intended for public display and usually confined to diary sketches. This image was found pasted into the journal of a fellow missionary who sent travelogues back to his family in Britain. Generations later, the journals were placed in a collection of colonial documents purchased by the State Archives of New South Wales, Australia. This travelling of ideas and information, in the past and the present, including losses and finds, encapsulates the long forgotten transporting of missionary infant schools across the globe and their recent discovery that this book details. But overall the sketch provides a rare glimpse of the role of education in the acculturation of the young Indigenous child into particular Christian and civilized ways of knowing and being.7 It should, however, be noted that this process was neither neat nor complete as Indigenous peoples in turn refashioned missionary teachings for their own purposes. In this uncensored sketch, not intended for missionary publication, the artist captures two young children with their own agendas: one is possibly dancing, and the other is likely asleep, while the rest of the children engage in the lesson being given. But even here the artist has drawn faces that frown and faces that smile, including those that seemingly sing or recite the lesson being taught. The vignette is illustrative Peter Wells, The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso (Auckland: Vintage, 2011). 7 Sarah de Leeuw, ‘“If Anything Is to Be Done with the Indian, We Must Catch Him Very Young”: Colonial Constructions of Aboriginal Children and the Geographies of Indian Residential Schooling in British Columbia, Canada’, Children’s Geographies 7, no. 2 (2009): 123–40. 6

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of how such fragmentary data can, with interrogation and interpretation, be surprisingly rich in the insights it yields concerning the dynamics and minutiae of engagements that collectively comprise the larger scale of missionary and colonial endeavours. This is significantly an early nineteenth-century story. The introductory chapters, however, travel backwards to the eighteenth century to summarize the contradictory mix of ideas concerning exploration, empire, education, ‘Englishness,’ and evangelism – legacies of the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that spilled into Great Britain and across education and missionary ventures of the early nineteenth century. The broader theme of the Enlightenment was about progress and the possibilities of the ongoing improvement of peoples and institutions. To effect the necessary change in individuals it was realized too that new kinds of institutions might be required. The very young child was seen as a potent force in this transformation, and a raft of childhood institutions including the infant school were a consequence. The missionary intent within this milieu was to refashion childhood for Christian purposes on a global scale. However, it is the intersection between these purposes and the evolving political interests of empire and its subsequent colonial endeavours that is yielding fresh considerations concerning the relationship between missions and the colonial imperial empires. Situated within a Canadian indigenous perspective, de Leeuw and Greenwood’s foreword is illustrative of the imperial consequences of missionary education with parallels across each case study setting. Yet the trajectories of the purposes of Christianity, civilization, and colonialism, while connected in the aftermath of the bigger picture of the three case study narratives, do not overlap neatly. In New Zealand, missionaries who operated prior to and outside of any imperial interest consequently had a difficult relationship with later colonial administrators and settler arrivals. Similarly, there are tensions between the parallel purposes of Christianizing and civilizing Indigenous peoples, particularly with the emphasis by evangelical missionaries on the use of indigenous languages as a conduit to preaching, reading the Bible, and conversion. This introductory chapter outlines the study as a whole and frames the contexts of the Enlightenment, exploration, and empire across Old-World and NewWorld settings that so fuelled the subsequent endeavours that this book is about. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the seeds of new education ideas and their evangelical expression, alongside an analysis of the rapid growth and challenges of missionary activity across Britain’s territories of colonial interest. This includes an introduction to the particular missionary contexts of the three colonial settings and their positioning within the broader agendas of exploration and empire. Chapter 2 illustrates the bridge between the known scholarship on the history of infant school beginnings in Britain and the unknown missionary infant schools. Using new archival sources, this chapter foregrounds the context, development, and popularity within Britain of the idea of infant schools, including commentary on the distinctive curriculum approaches developed within infant-school settings. These initiatives persuaded significant numbers of people across church, educational, and

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political institutions and enticed the interested participation of the children as a conduit for realizing the broader moral, economic, and social aims envisaged by the patrons and backers of infant schools. The sequence of stories constructed around the missionary infant schools in the respective country settings collectively shape the book as three separate chapters; each reveals a different colonial context and a facet of the engagement between missionaries and young indigenous children, their families, and communities and provides a summary insight into the aftermath legacy of colonization. Yet it is the cohesion that is the striking element of this story – in both the endeavour and the message of infant educators in Britain itself and across its missionary lands. This is the focus of the concluding chapter. There is a pervasive quest to Christianize and civilize the perceived savagery of ‘heathen’ children whether they live in distant lands and are indeed not Christian or in fact live in a Christian land like Britain where poverty and ignorance had created ‘heathenlike’ behaviour at ‘home’. The idea of educating young children in infant schools demonstrating the latest pedagogical techniques was, for a while, perceived as an educational solution to a broad mix of perceived ills in both contexts. Old World Enlightenment: New World Contexts However much they struggled to keep the word Enlightenment and its surrounding dialectics within the confines of European thinking, Europeans always had the rest of the world clutching at their elbow … Drawings brought back from voyages to the Pacific of tattooed princes, palm trees, outrigger canoes … or accounts of bargaining practices of the Indians of Nootka Sound [Vancouver] … persistently raised the question: who was the really Enlightened person?8 [emphasis added]

Dorinda Outram reminds us that the ideals and endeavours of European exploration, Enlightenment, education, and empire during the late eighteenth century were much entwined. These intersecting legacies provided a springboard for British colonial and missionary activity across the globe during the nineteenth century. Economic interests were an essential forerunner to the expanding horizons of the British Empire from the Old World towards the South Asian horizons (India), America’s frontiers (Canada), and the Antipodean oceans (New Zealand). The British East India and the Hudson Bay companies were established in 1600 and 1670, respectively. By the early nineteenth century British interests dominated much of the Indian subcontinent with the government assuming full rule from the East India Company in 1858. In Canada, in the aftermath of the American wars of independence and wars with both Indigenous Indians and the French, British constitutional government was established in 1791. With the eventual demise of the Hudson Bay Company in 1867, the Dominion of Canada was constituted. On a much smaller scale and significantly later, the New Zealand Company was established in 1838 to implement and profit 8 Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 10.

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from settlement schemes about to commence. This hastened the British Crown to sign the Treaty of Waitangi with Māori tribal chiefs in 1840. Sovereignty was ceded but not land. Nevertheless, land wars between settlers and Māori in the 1860s, along with many legal loopholes, were to transfer most Māori land into settler ownership by the end of the nineteenth century. Increasing scholarly interest in the colonial politics of religion, land, economics, and governance is evident in book titles such as: The Bible and the Flag (1990), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (2001), Religion versus Empire? (2004), Missions and Empire (2005), and Converting Colonialism (2008) although the balance of these connections is contested.9 Both Andrew Porter and Norman Etherington have positioned the expansion of Protestant missions as an integral aspect of Britain’s imperial history. For Porter this was about ‘constructing a bridge’ across mainly separate ‘scholarly traditions’.10 Etherington suggests that: Although missions and official Empire were quite different operations they play related parts in a larger drama – the spread of modernization, globalization and Western cultural hegemony … when they are considered on a micro level, they often appear to enact or mimic the operations of political and economic imperialism at the macro level.11 [emphasis added]

It is a new window onto this ‘larger drama’ that motivates the authors of this study. The expanding empire of the nineteenth century was seen as a potent mechanism for the spread of civilization through trade and ‘the imposition of superior codes of “English” behaviour on its “savage inhabitants”’.12 The place of education and the kind of schooling intended for these ‘inhabitants’ became a tool in this process – again evident in scholarly studies, particularly those relating to specific places, including India, Canada, and New Zealand.13 This book extends 9 Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (England: Apollos, 1990); Brian Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Surrey: Curzon Press Ltd, 2001); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Dana L. Robert, ed., Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008); Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10 Porter, Religion versus Empire, 7. 11 Etherington, Missions and Empire, 4. 12 Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London: Abacus, 1994), 185; Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 13 James A. Mangan, ed., Benefits Bestowed? Education and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Judith Simon and Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, eds, Civilising Mission? Perceptions and Representations of the Native School System (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001); Hayden J. Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920, Empires in Perspective (London: Pickering

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these analyses by making visible this account of missionary education for very young children in infant schools which Indigenous children living in proximity to mission settlements variously engaged in with interest or disinterest, acceptance or rejection, as well as collaboration and co-option. Gazing at the minutiae of these engagements reveals a new window onto Etherington’s ‘larger drama’ including the transformation of new education pedagogies across places and peoples. By collating, connecting, and considering the fleeting references to missionary infant schools, many insights are gleaned into the everyday operations and dramas involved in their strategy. It was not unusual to find a minor reference to the infant school as an aside to something more momentous in the mind of its writer at the time. As these piecemeal and dispersed threads are woven together, within each country and across countries, a rich tapestry emerges revealing another facet of the engagement between missionaries and Indigenous peoples. The tapestry includes the minutiae of everyday places and personalities that mirror the ‘larger drama’ of colonization for both peoples. Outram’s question that opened this section of ‘Who was the really Enlightened person?’ did not seem to have perplexed the colonizers or the missionaries much. By 1800 many people in Britain had readily determined an answer. It is evident, for example, in the first resolution of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799 claiming ‘That it is the duty highly incumbent upon every Christian to propagate the knowledge of the gospel amongst the heathen’.14 The first missionaries were instructed to model the ‘arts of civilized life’ in their everyday life and ‘gather the children for instruction’: The instruction of children facilitates access to their parents, secures their friendship and conveys information to them through unsuspected channels. The minds of children are more susceptible and less under the influence of habit and prejudice than those of their parent.15

In this way, the children were to become ‘missionaries to their countrymen’.16 It is evident too in King George III’s patronage of the British and Foreign School Society established as the Lancastrian Society in 1806 (see Chapter 1) when he announced: ‘It is my wish that every poor child in my Dominions shall be taught to read the bible’.17 These Dominions now included lands and peoples from near and far. The later infant schools attracted similar kinds of patronage, with

and Chatto, 2007); Jean Barman, Yvonne Hebert, and Don McCaskill, eds, Indian Education in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986). 14 Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand (Wellington: Church Missionary Society, 1935), Foreword. 15 The Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1814): 29–30. 16 Church Missionary Society Committee Minutes 1799–1884, 14/11/1700, MC, University of Auckland, New Zealand. 17 Quoted in Elsie Riach Murray, Infant Schools and Kindergartens (Bath: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1912), 12.

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understandings and expectations that successful outcomes might be hastened by including even younger children. The three country contexts presented in this book consequently illustrate a ‘gathering of the [youngest] children for instruction’ in mission settlements across the north of the North Island of New Zealand, Upper Canada, and in Britishcontrolled India from the 1820s to 1850s. The consequences of missionary and later colonial endeavour for each colony were different. In Canada and New Zealand, Indigenous peoples became dislocated minority populations as European settlement became part of colonial intent. In India, economic and strategic interests that undermined and swept aside borders as well as political and social institutions dominated colonial motives. The missionary and colonial quest, however, was more global in its endeavours. Similarly, British missionary records include occasional references to infant schools in selected Protestant mission sites in Africa, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Archival searches of the kind compiled for this book have not been undertaken in these settings. The authors suggest that this comparative study across three colonial settings is, nevertheless, illustrative of the pervasiveness of missionary endeavour, the diversity of contexts to which those ideals were applied, and the dynamics of its engagement. This transformation of Britain’s infant schools to its distant colonies was deemed, for a period, a radical and enlightened tool hastening the conversion of ‘heathen’ peoples by missionaries to Christianity and European modes of civilization, which hitherto had been disappointedly slow. There were evident synergies between the religious and educational blueprints for ‘saving the heathen’ child of the colonies and ‘civilizing’ the young street child of Britain. The defining characteristic of infant schools, whether in Britain or in its colonies, was an ordered and industrious environment set apart from the perceived disorder of the child’s home environment. The same evangelicalism that was the springboard for early nineteenth-century Protestant missionary endeavours was similarly integral to the British infant-school experiment, albeit adapted from its original form.18 Paul Sedra suggests that to distinguish Enlightenment education and social reform from evangelicalism is mistaken,19 though this relationship is far from unambiguous as made evident throughout this book. Missionaries seized upon new school ventures because they had aims in common with educational reformers. Various forerunner charity institutions of public education became conduits for the evangelical aspiration at home and abroad. Infant schools were one such institution, made distinctive by their experiments with new pedagogical tools and techniques intended to engage the affections and interests of children as well as their minds. 18 Robert Dale Owen, An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (Glasgow: Wardlaw and Cunninghame, 1824); Samuel Wilderspin, Infant Education; or, Practical Remarks on the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 4th ed. (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1829); G. Jeffrey Machin, ‘The Westminster Free Day Infant Asylum: The Origins of the First English Infant School’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 20, no. 2 (1988). 19 Paul Sedra, ‘Exposure to the eyes of God: Monitorial Schools and Evangelicals in Early Nineteenth-century England’, Paedagogical Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 263–81.

Introduction

Fig. I.1

9

‘Portrait of Masters Thomas and John Quicke assembling a geographic dissections’, by William Hoare, c. 1770. © Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London (Private collection).

New World Discoveries Discovery was the watchword of the Enlightenment,20 realized only by a few Europeans but imagined by many others and evident in the fashion for paintings of drawing room explorations with globes and maps, and in toys for children designed with an educational purpose such as the portrait (see Figure I.1) in which the children are doing a jigsaw puzzle identifying the parts of British India. Such apparatus was introduced later as teaching tools in infant schools as part of geography lessons. Outram likens the age of European Enlightenment, stretching towards the 1830s, as ‘a world drama of cross-cultural contact’ that ‘triggered anxieties’ for Europeans about the nature of being civilized.21 To the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, an early archetype of an enlightened thinker and architect of new educational ideas, the discovery of this New World ‘enlarged the sphere 20 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000). 21 Dorinda Outram, ‘Cross Cultural Encounters and the Enlightenment’, in The Enlightened World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (London: Routledge, 2004).

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10

of contemplation’ about ‘civilised man’ and his ‘savage ancestors’.22 Locke was referring to the accidental discoveries of the New Worlds of America in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, who named the Indigenous peoples as ‘Indians’ after those already named in the East Indies. There was, however, more to discover. During the eighteenth century, European horizons and geographic imagination extended to the Pacific Ocean due in particular to the voyages of James Cook, another archetypal figure of the Enlightenment, who also named as ‘Indians’ the people he first saw on the shores of New Zealand in 1769; but the new ‘Indians’ chose to call themselves Māori meaning ‘ordinary’ – compared with Pākehā, the pale and ‘extraordinary’ visitors.23 Cook played a significant role in mapping parts of Canada after the conclusion of Britain’s war with France, as well as mapping New Zealand.24 His writings were an inspiration to the first wave of missionary explorers. The scientific journeys of exploration by Cook were significant for creating the imagination and knowledge of the Enlightenment. Although the Enlightenment was European in origin, its scope became global as the scholars of Europe attempted to classify and order the peoples, plants and animals of other worlds as well as map and paint their landscapes. In 1759 the British Museum was opened free to the public. This first public national museum in the world was described as ‘one of the most potent acts of the Enlightenment’.25 Its mandate was to showcase the ‘discoveries’ of the Enlightenment concerning new knowledge and ideas, as well as displays from the ‘new’ lands, peoples, and cultures whose ‘discovery’ triggered the series of engagements that became the British Empire. In 2003 the British Museum established a permanent display devoted to the Enlightenment, recreating its early collections to capture the sense of ‘wonder’ the early visiting public enjoyed, and providing an insight into the presentation and classification of its acquisitions.26 The Eurocentric cultural labels and understandings of New World discoveries is only one legacy of the Enlightenment and its colonial aftermath. Anne Salmond’s description is poetic: Pressed, painted, written about, bottled and transported, exotic plants, animals, and people were taken to the explorer’s homelands to be sorted, stored and exhibited in herbaria, encyclopaedia, zoos, botanical gardens and museums.27 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Menston Scolar Press, 1970, facsimile of original ed. London: T. Bassett, 1690). 23 Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Māori and Europeans 1773–1815 (Auckland: Viking, 1997). 24 Jeremy Coote, Curiosities from the Endeavour: A Forgotten Collection. Catalogue to the Exhibition Captain Cook Memorial Museum (Whitby, England, 2004); Cook and Canada: A Reputation in the Making. Catalogue to the Exhibition at the Captain Captain Cook Memorial Museum (Whitby, England, 2009). 25 Kim Sloan, Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London: The British Museum, 2003), 12–13. 26 The Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century. Catalogue (London: The British Museum, 06/2009). 27 Anne Salmond, Between Worlds, 32. 22

Introduction

Fig. I.2

11

‘Mutual Enlightenment’, engraved by I. Phillips and W. Harrison. Title cartouche of the Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1783) by James Rennell. © The British Library Board. Maps D40013-99.

Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai-Smith succinctly sums up the process: ‘They came, they saw, they named, they claimed’.28 Likewise, on the Indian subcontinent, the British were mapping its interior. The front-piece of the Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1788) by James Rennell, the first surveyor-general of Bengal, is entitled ‘Mutual Enlightenment’ (Figure I.2). The economic benefits of this mapped knowledge being delivered by learned Brahmins to Britannia were intended to predominantly accrue to the British. The artefacts collected on voyages of ‘discovery’ became the prized curiosities of collectors, although Tuhiwai-Smith reminds us that Indigenous peoples ‘might call

28 Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books Ltd and Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001), 80.

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

12

Fig. I.3

‘Procession of Hindoo woman to the funeral pile of her husband’, by illustrator W. Skelton, 1793. In Travels in India, during the years 1780–1783, by William Hodges (1793). © The British Library Board. W 3836 plate 9.

this stealing rather than collecting’.29 The journals of scholars and captains, and the drawings of wandering artists became popular travel literature for non-travelled Europeans. The landscape painter William Hodges who had accompanied Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific, subsequently became the first professional landscape painter to visit India, travelling with East India Company officials during the years 1780 to 1783.30 The landscapes, peoples, and occupations Hodges portrayed in Travels in India (1793) popularized information on the hinterlands of India,31 including scenes of sati, the Hindu practice of burning newly widowed 29

Ibid., 61. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill, William Hodges 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration. Catalogue to the Exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (London: Yale University Press, 2004). 31 William R.A. Hodges, Travels in India during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (London: Printed by the Author, 1793). 30

Introduction

13

women on the funeral pyre in certain parts of India (see Figure I.3). Various versions of this ‘savage’ scene were reproduced over the years in magazines such as London Missionary Society’s (LMS) Missionary Magazine and Chronicle and the CMS’s Missionary Register and continued long after the practice had in fact been outlawed. Immense in scope were the five volumes of Encyclopédie Des Voyages (1796) by the French Canadian Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, which illustrated with coloured plates the ‘cultures costumes and habits’ of the peoples of Africa, America, Asia Oceania, and Europe.32 Not having visited these places, SaintSauveur and his assistants relied on other artists’ versions, thus creating the fanciful [Māori] ‘Indian’ wearing a headdress more akin to the North American ‘Indian’ (see Figure I.4). Such representations of Indigenous peoples, fanciful or real, led Europe to compare itself with other societies. Moreover, this refashioning of Indigenous peoples in accord with European interests, established a pattern repeated by missionaries who re-clothed and renamed their adult ‘converts’ or children at school in ways that set them apart from their ‘heathen’ relatives. Wolff and Cippoloni argue that the Enlightenment: … in one of its most potent coinages, gave the lexicon of many European languages the new word and concept ‘civilization’ [that] came to sum up European identity of enlightened men and women who comparatively and selfconfidently assumed superiority of their own way of life’.33

British Missionaries transported these sentiments of superiority back to the distant lands that had originally sparked the comparison. Enclaves of fenced missionary settlements, including schools, were transformed into exemplars of evangelical civilization. But within these cross currents, missionaries also likened themselves as explorers, whose mission work became a popular filter of information about distant geographies and peoples, their beliefs, practices, products, and institutions. To Europeans, the classification of this knowledge, whether in its explorer or missionary versions, was also about progress. A belief in progress, as compared with the laissez-faire mentality, was the core of enlightened thinking. The notion of ongoing improvement was a key aspect of civilized behaviour, kindling the possibility of a better future by righting past wrongs and present ills. Roy Porter proposes Robert Owen as the archetypal figure of ‘improvement’: the ‘Sun King among entrepreneurs, a consummate illustration of the application of enlightened

Jacques Grassett de Saint-Sauveur, Encyclopédie des Voyages (Paris: se trouve chez l’auteur, chez Deroy, libraire, et chez les principaux libraires de la Republique, 1796); Tableaux des Principaux Peuples de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, de l’Amerique; et les Découvertes des Captaines Cook, La Pérouse (circa 1798). 33 Larry Wolfe and Marco Cipolloni, The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), Preface. 32

Fig. I.4

i) ‘Sauvagesse Iroquois’. In Encyclopédie Des Voyages (1796) by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Paris. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-042a. ii) ‘Sauvagesse de la Nouvelle Zelande’. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. GoA G768 466, 92/925. iii) ‘Indienne du Coromandel’, Paris, 1796. In Encyclopédie Des Voyages by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Paris. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. R910-4-Gras.

Introduction

15

ideas into industry’.34 Owen outlined his ideas in A New View of Society (1813). Education, inclusive of the labouring classes, was to be the means of progress and advancement for both individuals and society as a whole. This was the rationale for the idea of the first British infant school established by Owen in 1816 at his industrial mill complex at New Lanark in Scotland. The notion of progress, first considered in relation to the peoples and places of home and with its entwined educational and industrial possibilities demonstrated by ‘entrepreneurs’ such as Owen, was further reshaped and extended to include the idea of leading the primitive peoples towards civilization and the ‘heathen’ towards Christianity. Enterprise of Empire The missionary enterprise became global in its scope, intersecting with the expansion and consolidation of the nineteenth-century British Empire. The enterprise was also cultural. Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May consider the ‘frontier encounters’ of mission activities with Indigenous peoples as a forerunner of twentieth-century globalization and multiculturalism.35 The frontier of education, inclusive of the very young child, was a key tool for both civilization and colonization. From 1815 the empire had been further transformed by the ‘settler revolution’ of an expanding ‘Anglo-World’ created by 36 million migrating peoples. James Belich suggests: There was massive energy, but not a lot of careful rationality. It was like a great colonizing crusade and the prime enemy is nature, and the incidental enemy is natives. But you cut through both like a knife through butter.36 They destroyed, crippled, swamped or marginalized most of the numerous societies they encountered. They also built new societies faster than anyone had done before.37

This contextual backdrop to missionary work included the frontier lands of Canada and New Zealand. In 1828 the Secretary for the Colonies reported to Parliament that ‘Wherever our Empire is acknowledged we have carried thither our language, our laws and our institutions’,38 and even architecture, sometimes including the sending of prefabricated school rooms.39 The legacy of this empire shapes many Porter, Enlightenment, 432. Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, eds, Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchanges (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), xi. 36 Interview with James Belich by Ruth Laugeson, [NZ] Listener, July 20, 2009. 37 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 558. 38 Quoted in Phillip McCann, ‘The Newfoundland School Society 1823–55: Missionary Enterprise or Cultural Imperialism’, in Mangan, Benefits Bestowed?, 101. 39 May, School Beginnings, 2005. 34

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Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

16

of the divides – between rich and poor, East and West, developed and developing countries – that characterize the world today. The enterprise of empire in India had a different function, intent on economic interests and aided by the exploitation of political fragmentation and rivalries. Successful arguments overturning India’s earlier exclusion of missionaries were that ‘conversion would advance civilization and create new customers for British products’.40 The governance of India, no longer solely shaped by East India Company interests, broadened its horizons towards remoulding the country and enlightening its peoples along a Western mould. For a while India became a social laboratory for British liberal and evangelical theories – predicting, for example, that ‘Hinduism would wither away as Western learning spread’.41 Policies towards emancipating India from its past led, however, to resistance by India’s peoples and a collision with their rulers. Belich likens the Indigenous peoples who survived the consequences of empire as ‘riders of the whirlwind’. In the three colonial sites the ‘whirlwind’ differed in its intensity and composition. Between Canada and New Zealand there were differences in the length of contact and size of the landscape, but in both settings missionary endeavour eventually included significant proportions of the Indigenous population. In India, missionary work was only ever on the fringes and arguably India was ‘the least overwhelmed by the onslaught of Europeans’.42 Cautioning against a historical portrayal of Indigenous peoples solely as victims of this settler ‘whirlwind’, Belich emphasizes the importance of positioning the histories of survival alongside the histories of dispossession.43 He is similarly cautious concerning the scholarship on empire, noting that for ‘many Asians and Africans real empire only lasted about fifty years’ yet its story is ‘etched deep into the psyches of both victors and victims’. He argues: ‘It was settlement not empire that had the spread and staying power in the history of European expansion’.44 Irrespective, European education, first pioneered in missionary contexts, became a crucial tool in the aftermath management of Indigenous populations. A Contestable Tapestry There are several issues to consider concerning the construction of the narratives for this book, likened to a contestable tapestry and in effect still incomplete. There are gaps not yet revealed, perspectives to challenge and others to be included. Firstly, it is important to comment upon the variety of historical and contemporary terms used in the book to describe Indigenous people. Indigenous refers to Aboriginal people James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 221. Thomas Macaulay, 1833, quoted in James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire,

40 41

220.

John R. Hales, Age of Exploration (New York: Time-Life, 1966). Ruth Laugeson, ‘Interview with James Belich’ [NZ], Listener, July 20, 2009. 44 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 22–3. 42 43

Introduction

17

in a global or international sense, and this is the meaning intended by the book’s title.45 The notion of Indigenous childhood is used throughout the book to describe the childhoods of the child inhabitants of lands that had come under economic, colonial, and missionary interest by the British with the intent of transforming the lives of Indigenous children. The term itself was not current in the early nineteenth century and when using writings from these times the authors have also adopted popular usage that might include ‘Aboriginal,’ ‘Savage,’ ‘Heathen,’ or ‘Native’. There are other terms specific to national contexts. In India and Canada, ‘Indian’ is a historical term, firstly in the naming of India itself, but it also has colonial origins that in Canada continued until recently in use by government (e.g., Indian and Northern Affairs Canada) and by some Aboriginal people. The most specific term is always preferred: First Nations, Inuit, Innu, or Métis. In New Zealand we have used the name Māori, which they gave themselves when they first met Europeans, but where appropriate we refer to the particular tribe with which Māori identified at the time. Whenever possible, we have made direct reference to a cultural group or in the case of India, a religious group such as Hindu or Muslim, and in general, we try to use terminology appropriate to the historical period. A second consideration arises from fact that the archival sources relating to the missionary infant schools are missionaries’ own letters, diaries, biographical writings, and reports to their missionary organizations.46 Documents originating from occasional travellers and colonial officials provide some alternative evidence, although most of the insights are similar to those of the missionaries themselves. Each narrative setting uses a different configuration of these sources that shape the respective stories. These fragmentary sources are as much a part of the story as the insights and analysis the fragments yield. Belich usefully reminds us about interpreting missionary accounts of their work: We should not deride the missionaries’ efforts, or sneer too hard at their selfdefined failures, but we should equally avoid accepting their account of their own impact, which claimed the wholesale religious conversion and partial ‘civilisation’ of Māori by the 1840s.47

This was in the context of New Zealand, but the caution applies similarly in India and Canada. Missionary writings, particularly of the kind that might be published, were intended for an audience ‘at home’. Missionaries were adept at shaping their tales and trials to suit the sentiments of their British audiences with a delicate

National Aboriginal Health Organization, Terminology Guide (Ottawa: NAHO, 2012). http://www.naho.ca/publications/topics/terminology/?submit=view (accessed October 18, 2012). 46 A combination of original and published sources are used. Where there are published diaries, letters, or reports these have been referenced. 47 Belich, Making Peoples, 1996. 45

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Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

balance of optimism that their mission work was money well spent and pessimism that the enormity of the task ahead would require more donations. Anna Johnston labels missionary texts ‘curious artifacts’: They were produced in prodigious quantities by missionary societies, keen to promote the evangelical work of their colonial representatives, in order to justify their ongoing involvement in colonial projects and ensure continued funding.48

Missionary periodicals such as the CMS’s Missionary Register and the LMS’s Missionary Magazine were popular and newsworthy accounts of missionary travels and missives, with excerpts from the journals and letters from missionaries, edited and sometimes enhanced for publication.49 Some periodicals included engravings of ‘heathen’ images and practices, indigenous artefacts, mission buildings, intrepid missionaries at work, and the dangerous animals and landscapes in the mission field. Missionary writings that make reference to the infant schools, nevertheless, provide revealing insights into their own assumptions and intentions as well as insights into the ways the pedagogy of infant schools was transported from Britain, adapted and sometimes subverted. There are clues, also, to the humour, humdrum, and sometimes horror of childhood and childrearing in the mission settings. There are other distortions. Most missionary writing is by men even though the new missionary societies usually sent married couples to model Christian family living. As well as rearing their own families, wives became engaged in education initiatives particularly for girls. From the commencement of the missionary infant schools, wives and daughters were much involved in the everyday operations. A few women wrote letters and journals that have survived, but the substantive reporting of infant school happenings came from men who had the official task of reporting to their respective societies. The authors were often irritated at their lack of attention in reports concerning institutions they might visit daily for prayers, singing, and services. Most significant is the absence of the perspective of the Indigenous recipients of infant schooling, or their families and communities. In both popular and scholarly writing this distortion has created an education story founded on ‘the active, dominant settler-teacher and the subjected native recipient’.50 The recent growth in scholarship around Indigenous studies, particularly as it relates to minority group peoples, has yielded Indigenous voices who in the words of Canadian scholar Marie Battiste are ‘unfolding the lessons of colonization’ by ‘liberating Indigenous … discourses rather than rely on existing Eurocentric or

48 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32. 49 Ibid. 50 Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins, ‘Invitation and Refusal: A Reading of the Beginnings of Schooling in Aotearoa, New Zealand’, History of Education 37, no. 2 (2008): 187.

Introduction

19

colonial theory’.51 Baljit Kaur’s initial study on missionary infant schools in India is a first consideration of the history of early childhood education from within India, and in a long tradition of Indian scholarship concerning colonial matters.52 From the very different setting of New Zealand, Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins challenge the ‘assumption of a passive indigene’. These two scholars, one Pākehā (European) and the other Māori, are together revisiting the early schooling of Māori by missionaries with a view to foregrounding ‘indigenous engagement’: ‘re-reading’ the documents and wondering how the educational engagement appears when ‘understood’ ‘in terms of a complex reciprocity rather than a form of subjugation’.53 This interpretation is a shift from earlier missionary scholarship that emphasizes more the consequences of the latter. He Kōrero: Words between us (2011) explores the first Māori-Pākehā conversations on paper and reveals an extensive engagement by Māori with the tools of technology and literacy beyond the boundaries of missionary intentions for the ‘arts of civilised life’. The issues of schooling are central to these processes both within and outside of mission boundaries. There are other challenges to the tasks of this book. In his overview of the British Missionary Enterprise since 1700, Jeffrey Cox expresses the frustrations of scholars ‘tied to the imperial archive created by colonizers’ who can only ‘approach their topic from one side of the binary’.54 Although the age of the children is a factor in the absence of recollection, the more substantial part of the explanation is the one-sided recording of missionary education. Questions remain unanswered, such as, ‘Why did families want or allow their children to go to the infant schools, or were the children taken from their families? What did the children learn at school? Why did some children leave or run away? What was the fate of the children? It is known that some children died young but what about those who reached adulthood?’ In constructing this expanded narrative of missionary education inclusive of infant schools, it is necessary to leave space for the experiences and perspectives not found or known. The context of this schooling experience for the young Indigenous children and their families was hugely different from the context understood and recorded by missionaries who did not see (except with disapproval) the broader environment of learning for Indigenous children. The missionary frame of reference was selective. Our examination of the records and our weavings of the respective narratives are intended as a contestable tapestry for further reshaping.

Marie Battiste, ed., Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), xvi, xix. 52 Kaur, ‘Keeping the Infants of Coolies out of Harm’s Way’, 221–35. 53 Jones and Jenkins, ‘Invitation and Refusal’, 187; He Kōrero: Words between Us. First Māori-Pākehā Conversations on Paper (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2011). 54 Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 6. 51

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By revealing some patterns of the tapestry of engagement between missionaries and Indigenous peoples in the early nineteenth century, with infant schools in the foreground, the intention is, from the ‘history lessons’ learned, to reframe our understandings of the consequences for children, their peoples, and cultures. This is particularly relevant in a twenty-first-century global environment in which ‘enlightened’ minority Eurowestern cultural beliefs are still fashioning the childhood of children in past colonial, Majority World countries. The institutions of early childhood education are even now a significant instrument of neo-colonial remoulding through the economic policies of development agendas.

Chapter 1

A Civilizing Mission: Educational, Evangelical, and Missionary Endeavours 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]

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: 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

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

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worth while to lay ourselves out with all our might, in promoting the cause and kingdom of Christ.3

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 Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, 87. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693, ed. John W. Yolton and

3 4

Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile, 1762, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent Everyman Library, 1911). 5 Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London: BBC Books, 2006), 114.

A Civilizing Mission

Fig. 1.1

23

‘The Young School Mistress’, by Jean-Siméon Chardin, 1735–36. © The National Gallery, London. n-4077-00-000031-a4.

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 Rousseau’s ideas that pushed him to both fame and persecution were written in Émile (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 Émile, 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 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 208. Rousseau, Émile. 8 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian 6 7

Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1996).

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Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

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. 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. 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 were an integral part of the group, ‘helping to develop its culture of education, invention, literary and philosophical critique’.11 In the large Edgeworth family, children would have ‘card, pasteboard, scissors, wire, gum and wax’ rather than ‘doll’s houses and tea sets’.12 These ideas were expounded as a method of teaching and rearing young children in Practical Education written by Maria and Richard, first published in 1798. This educational work captured the spirit of enlightened thinking with the child being encouraged to learn through discovery and invention rather than by rote and discipline as discussed further in Chapter 2. The Edgeworths’ avoidance of religious dogma throughout the text of Practical Education elicited criticism from conservative clerics, but its usefulness overcame the wariness of others. From New Zealand, Jane Williams, an early missionary 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). 10 Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 11 Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 119. 12 Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, (London, 1798), 4.

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teacher, asked her sister Marianne, also a missionary teacher, for a copy of ‘Miss [Maria] Edgeworth’s Early Lessons’ [1801], a sequel to Practical Education.13 Both sisters were involved in the establishment of missionary infant schools. The Edgeworths argued that ‘we should invest pleasure with whatever we wish our pupils to pursue and pain with whatever we wish them to avoid.’14 The latter strategy was more in line with the tenor of evangelical religious thought, but there is evidence too that missionary educators interested in the new infant school pedagogy supported the principle that learning should be pleasurable. Locke, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and the Edgeworths are exemplars of the Enlightenment legacy, articulating ways and means to education that laid the foundations of child-centred approaches to learning and teaching. There were, however, contrary views on education, also shaped by Enlightenment legacies but refashioned as appropriate to the class, culture, and country of origin of the children in question as discussed in the later chapters. As Outram contends, ‘Many enlightened debates were fought over the bodies of small babies, just as they were also fought over the bodies of exotic people’, so too did the minds, bodies, and morality of young children serve as sites of debate and contestation on the kind of education best suited to mould them.15 Evangelical Energy – ‘How Shall They Preach Except They be Sent?’16 William Carey’s call, noted at the start of this chapter, proved to be persuasive although he and others had been raising similar concerns for ‘heathens’ in church meetings and other public gatherings for several years prior.17 His suggestion was to establish a missionary society in Britain, with an executive committee and subscriptions of a tenth of the income or at least one penny per week from all members of the congregation. Consequently, ‘The Particular [Calvinistic] Baptist Society for propagating the Gospel among the heathen’ was formed in 1792 with the express goal of ‘spreading the gospel’ to ‘heathens’ along the lines suggested by Carey. Soon thereafter, at its third meeting, the Society (BMS) confronted the question of where to send its first missionary by contemplating, ‘In what part of the heathen world do there seem to be the most promising openings?’18 Carey had volunteered 13 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. 14 Edgeworth and Edgeworth, Essays on Practical Education, 158. 15 Dorinda Outram, ‘Cross Cultural Encounters and the Enlightenment’, in The Enlightened World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (London: Routledge, 2004), 122. 16 Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians. Carey used this phrase on the title page of his 1792 pamphlet, quoting Paul. 17 See Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New York: Routledge, 2008). 18 George Smith, The Life of William Carey: Shoemaker & Missionary (London: John Murray, 1885). http://books.google.ca/books?id=o8QHAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover

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to go to a ‘heathen’ land as the first missionary. Initially, influenced by his reading about Captain Cook’s voyages as well as by the evangelical work among the freed slaves by Moravians and Wesleyans, he had wished to go to Haiti or Western Africa. However, the BMS settled on India as a starting point, partly because John Thomas, a medical practitioner and preacher, was at that time in Britain trying to raise funds for evangelical work in Bengal. Thomas had been to India and was conversant with Bengali language. Thus, Carey, along with his wife and children and accompanied by Thomas and his family, left for India aboard a Danish East Indiaman in June 1793, landing in Bengal in November of the same year.19 Not permitted to remain in the British territory, he took up a job at an indigo plantation near Calcutta in a Danish territory before moving to Serampore, where he later established a mission. The setting up of BMS marked the beginning of modern missionary activity. A number of Protestant missionary societies were established in quick succession as a conduit for the evangelical message to distant lands: the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1795, the Edinburgh (Scottish) Glasgow Missionary Societies in 1796, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799,20 and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1813. Likewise in America and Canada, where settlers were already present and missionary activity had an older history, homegrown societies were established. Financial support came from an ever-widening spectrum of the philanthropic public who supported their purposes. Andrew Porter notes how the new missionary ventures had to ‘come to terms with the economic character of the age, adapting its message to the characteristics of capitalist society in its various guises’.21 Some commentators have hailed Carey’s vision for a voluntary foreign mission as historic, a crucial turning point in ‘pioneering’ these rapid developments and his efforts in India as heralding a new era in Protestant evangelical mission work in foreign lands.22 Others have argued that it was more a case of him being a product of the time. The debate about whether to undertake and support missionary work in the colonies when there was enough work to be done at home was rife in churches of various denominations. A critical mass of writings arguing for the significance and feasibility of foreign missions was widely circulating at that time. Further, Andrew Porter points to the significance of close personal and professional connections between those at the helm of affairs of various missionary societies, &dq=george+smith+the+life+of+william+carey&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lbyJUJeBN4i60AGHIDoCg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA, 56. 19 Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992). 20 The Society for Missions to Africa and the East was established in 1799 and became known as the Church Missionary Society from 1812. 21 Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 96. 22 Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed., Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-cultural Communication since 1500, Studies in the History of Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003); Smith, The Life of William Carey.

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‘networks of influence and contacts built over nearly half a century’.23 Individuals with zeal and commitment to Christianity were willing to take the risk of sailing from Europe to the far-flung European colonies in increasing numbers. On this view, thus, Carey was simply voicing the concerns and aspirations that were commonplace at that time in missionary circles and that he was indebted to the inspirational lives and ideas of others before him.24 Brian Stanley argues that new missionary endeavours of this period must be understood in the context of the ‘intellectual milieu within which evangelicalism was shaped … the established consensus [is] that this milieu was essentially formed by the intellectual contours of the Enlightenment’.25 This milieu was not in the earlier enlightened tradition of admiring Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’. By the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a general agreement amongst evangelicals that ‘noble savages’ should be civilized through Christianity. The church had thus found its own pathway to enlightenment. ‘Ideas that exotic peoples were somehow happy and natural were superseded by a new vision – that of corrupted indigenous peoples, perhaps facing extinction.’26 However, the idea of civilizing the poor at home and ‘natives’ in colonies through education was contentious. The elite classes in Britain did not necessarily see a literate poor population as compatible with preserving order. The notion of a biblical education was spearheaded by evangelical Christians who played a key role in defining popular education across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth century charity school movement, which included both Established and Non-Conformist church varieties, was evidence of the evangelical concern that children of the ‘labouring classes’ be given some education. Children were given a ‘Christian and useful education’, taught the basics of the three Rs, educated in the Bible and the catechism (if sponsored by the established Church of England), and prepared for service or apprenticeship.27 The advent of the Sunday School movement in the late eighteenth century was heralded by its sponsor, Robert Raikes, as a means to get ‘little heathens off the streets’ and instructed in ‘reading and in the Church catechism’ without disrupting their working week.28 These initiatives shaped later missionary models of education. Motives for educating the poor were a mix of a practical need for literate workers, philanthropic idealism, Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700; Robert Eric Frykenberg,

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Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present, ed. Owen Chadwick and Henry Chadwick, Oxford History of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Porter, Religion versus Empire? 25 Brian Stanley, ed., Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Surrey: Curzon Press Ltd, 2001), 4. 26 Outram, ‘Cross Cultural Encounters and the Enlightenment’, 178. 27 M.G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Great Britain: Frank Cass and Co Ltd, 1964). 28 Quoted in Jones, The Charity School Movement, 149–52.

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and, for some, an insurance against revolution by the poor. Sarah Trimmer, a High Anglican supporter of charity schooling, wrote in ‘An Address to Ladies’ (1801): Whoever seriously considers the present manners of the lower orders of people, must surely see the necessity of vigilant attention towards the rising generation; since no less than the safety of the nation probably depends on the education of those children … whose parents … are likely it is to be feared, to lead them astray by their own bad example, if the hand of charity is not reasonably stretched out to guide them in the paths of religion and virtue.29

Another key player in extending the possibilities of charity schooling was Hannah More, a respected figure in England’s bluestocking circle of literary women.30 She had links within both enlightened and evangelical circles. Prior to her literary successes More had been a teacher. Her conversion to evangelical Anglicanism during the 1780s shifted the focus of her writing to become ‘a public conscience and a critic of aristocratic society’.31 Instead of flirting with the ideas of Rousseau, as were other bluestocking women and progressive men, More preached the dangers of child innocence while praising Locke’s views on the pliability of young children. Like Locke, More believed that the right sort of education could regulate the innate sinfulness of the child. Mary Hilton suggests that educators such as Edgeworth, Trimmer, and More provided a legacy from the eighteenth-century enlightened world of letters for a raft of evangelical ventures in the early nineteenth century whose focus was the rescue of ‘heathens’ both at home and abroad. ‘Clearly to the middle class evangelical mind, both the English poor and the Indians were sunk in misery and vice. The elision between “heathen” and “pauper” became a familiar trope of their reforming rhetoric.’32 Rousseau’s innocent child of goodness had been rejected, but the Lockean belief in the enlightened notion of the malleable child awaiting improvement was strongly held by evangelical Christians and missionaries. In the context of the colonies, as Jana Tschurenev argues, ‘… questions of “how much civilizing” was useful and when “too much civilizing” became politically dangerous’ plagued the evangelical Christians and missionaries alike.33 Despite such misgivings, the establishment of the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) in London illustrates the increasingly outward focus of 29 Sarah Trimmer, The Economy of Charity (Dublin: Messrs White H. Whitestone, Moore and Jones, 1787), 10. 30 Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008). 31 Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young, 140. 32 Ibid., 161. 33 Jana Tschurenev, ‘Incorporation and Differentiation: Popular Education and the Imperial Civilizing Mission in Early Nineteenth Century India’, in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development, ed. Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 95.

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British evangelical intentions. The BFSS was founded as the Lancastrian Society in 1808 by Joseph Lancaster to establish monitorial schools for children of the poor.34 Lancaster’s ideas had colonial origins. His vocation as a teacher had been conceived with the idea of journeying to Jamaica to ‘teach the poor blacks the word of God’.35 Lancaster’s schools had similarities to Andrew Bell’s Madras schools in India, devised to teach large numbers of children in a standardized system with the assistance of children to monitor other children.36 Bell melded traditional ‘teaching practices from local village schools’ in Madras that had been practiced for centuries prior with ‘“system, method and order” and re-modelled his school accordingly’.37 In 1811 Bell’s Madras system became the National Society for the Promotion of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, known as the National Education Society (NES). The monitorial system of schooling was adapted by missionaries in distant lands. The pervasive surveillance by monitors, teachers, and ultimately God was intended to develop an inbuilt moral code, an internalized self-surveillance.38 The use of rewards rather than punishments was an integral aspect of the new pedagogy, which in NES schools often involved small playthings. Both Bell and Lancaster adapted Lockean plant-like metaphors for the malleability of childhood. ‘Like the tender twig they are easy to be bent in any direction,’ wrote Bell.39 Both institutions had powerful evangelical backing and subscribers.40 In the emerging debate on educating the ‘heathen’ poor at home and in the Dominions, both the BFSS and NES were training grounds for potential missionary educators, and the teaching materials produced by the societies were sent to mission schools. Sentiments similar to those underpinning the BFSS and NES infused the later Home and Colonial Infant School Society, established in 1836, to promote ‘infant school instruction based on Christian principles in Britain and the colonies’.41 Regular reports from these societies were reproduced in missionary publications that Paul Sedra suggests were a ‘sort of “clearing The Society adopted its current name, British and Foreign School Society, in 1814. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social

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Practice 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66. 36 Andrew Bell, The Madras School or Elements of Tuition (London: John Murray, 1808); Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education (London: Joseph Lancaster, 1808). 37 Tschurenev, ‘Incorporation and Differentiation,’ 96. 38 For elaborations of the notion of ‘internalized’ ‘self-civilizing mission’, see Carey A. Watt, ‘Introduction: The Relevance and Complexity of Civilizing Missions c. 1800–2010’, in Civilizing Missions, ed. Watt and Mann, 1–34; Michael Mann, ‘“Torchbearers Upon the Path of Progress”: Britain’s Ideology of a “Moral and Material Progress” in India, An Introductory Essay’, in Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India, ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 1–28. 39 Andrew Bell, ‘Extracts of a Sermon on the Education of the Poor, under an Appropriate System’, Preached at St Mary’s Lambeth, 28th June, 1807 (London). 40 Paul Sedra, ‘Exposure to the Eyes of God: Monitorial Schools and Evangelicals in Early Nineteenth-century England’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 263–81. 41 Missionary Register (1838), 228.

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house” for pedagogical ideas from all over the world’, and a worthy source for understanding the impact of nineteenth century missions.42 Carey was an important link in the chain that extended the influence of Christian churches in the nineteenth century.43 His ‘practical means’ of surviving and succeeding on a foreign mission provided a template, and his subsequent field work in India an exemplar, for missionary stations abroad for over a century. Carey held that the practical difficulties of sustaining mission work, like the lack of familiar European foods in foreign lands, were surmountable: ‘we might procure such [foods] as the natives of those countries which we visit, subsist upon themselves.’44 Further, the missionaries’ path might be eased by sending more than one missionary – ‘two, at least’ – together, accompanied by their families as well as by other helpers and their families, ‘who should be employed in providing for them’.45 In his view, the obligation of all these accompanying women, children and helpers was to ensure that the male missionaries did not waste their time ‘in procuring necessities’ and could carry on their work uninterrupted: ‘the women, and even the children, would be necessary for domestic purposes’.46 However in addition, they became key elements of the later infant school story, detailed in the subsequent chapters. Thus, in Carey’s plan, very few missionaries with the support of a small number of Christians could conduct missionary work in unknown territories, providing company to one another and sustaining themselves materially over the long term, particularly if they could ‘cultivate a little spot of ground just for their support, which would be a resource for them, whenever their supplies failed’.47 The selfsufficiency of the mission and the missionaries was to be further strengthened by sending helpers who were well versed in practical life skills. Carey recommended that ‘those who attend the missionaries should understand husbandry, fishing, fowling, etc., and be provided with the necessary implements for these purposes’.48 Such missionary initiatives were meant to require little from the home society beyond the initial support. Carey’s plan proved to be an effective strategy of the missionary enterprise in at least two ways. First, the idea that one or two missionaries could create a selfsustaining field station in hitherto uncharted territories without significant ongoing Sedra, ‘Exposure to the Eyes of God’, 264. Protestant missions had ventured to foreign soils since the 1600s. Most attempts

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were short lived but for a few notable exceptions such as the Halle mission set up in 1706 at Tranquebar, a Danish trading colony situated near Tanjore in South India. See Daniel Jeyaraj, ‘Mission Reports from South India and Their Impact on the Western Mind: The Tranquebar Mission of the Eighteenth Century’, in Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914, ed. Dana L. Robert (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008). 44 William Carey, An Enquiry, 73. 45 Ibid., 73. 46 Ibid., 73. 47 Ibid., 73. 48 Ibid., 74.

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help from the home societies caught the imagination of many a missionary. Second, the very act of constituting the missionary societies served to engage the ordinary Christians in the home countries in unprecedented ways to fulfil their ‘obligation’ of spreading Christianity in the world. In due time, the reports from the missionaries in the field assured them that their prayers and donations, however meagre, were significant in furthering the mission abroad.49 The missionaries, however, faced an uphill task in their endeavours due to the complex dynamics of difference that confronted them, often shaping and altering the missionary practices in the field. First, the missionaries came from different countries, cultures, and social classes with their attendant beliefs and worldviews, although to ‘native’ eyes they often appeared of the same ilk. Second, they did not necessarily rank high in the colonial hierarchy. Their plans and practices met with resistance from the local people as often as from the British traders and officials and European settlers. Third, they had to contend with politics and differences within and across the missionary societies, although there was also an element of cooperation or camaraderie in the field among various societies.50 Fourth, their engagement with people in different colonies occurred over an extended period of time. Thus the changing realities of the times and contexts played a significant role in shaping their strategies and their relationships with Indigenous peoples, often raising issues of ‘native agency’ in the church. Their ideas and ideals were attractive to many ‘natives’ who aligned with them for their own motives, and threatening to others who shunned or at times abused them. On the one hand, their crisis relief work and humane treatment of the ‘destitute’ and dispossessed earned them lifelong loyalties. On the other, their attempts at mass conversions earned them the wrath of rival religions. Initially most of the missionaries were single men sent alone for the fear of tropical disease. However, the mission policies changed rapidly to sending mostly married men, so they could avoid ‘the pitfalls of “the field”’ reflecting the extant views on the ‘desirable and depraved’ nature of ‘native women’.51 When women accompanied their husbands, brothers, or fathers, their role was to support the male missionary. As Carey described it, women and children were there to serve ‘domestic purposes’. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, female missionaries outnumbered males in most colonies.52 It is instructive to ponder the roles that women of the missionaries and the missionary women played in furthering and altering the missionary endeavours, particularly in changing their Dana L. Robert, ‘Introduction’, in Converting Colonialism. Jacob S. Dharamraj, Colonialism and Christian Mission: Postcolonial Reflections

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(Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1999). 51 Catherine Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’, in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46–76. 52 Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Jane Haggis, ‘Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of “Women’s Work” in the “Mission of Sisterhood” to Indian Women’, Feminist Review 65 (2000): 108–26.

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focus from evangelical work to secular work like education and health.53 The issues of ‘native agency’ and the role of women in mission work with specific reference to reaching the ‘heathen’ females and the education of young children are considered below. Foreign Missions and ‘Native Agency’: Mission Theories and Principles By the early nineteenth century, there was a dawning realization in missionary circles that the task of creating ‘a Christian world’ was prohibitively expensive to sustain for the parent societies, despite Carey’s plan to the contrary, and much bigger than could be accomplished exclusively by foreign missionaries, notwithstanding the increased missionary activity. As early as 1805, Carey and his fellow clergymen at Serampore, Joshua Marshman and William Ward, argued for the need to train ‘native’ preachers: ‘Europeans are too few and their subsistence costs too much … for us ever to hope that they can possibly be the instruments of the universal diffusion of the Word among so many millions’.54 However, there was the question of what roles the ‘native’ converts and missionaries could be allowed to play.55 By the 1830s and 1840s, the ‘native 53 There is now a vast (and increasing) scholarship on gender and empire, for instance, Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Claire Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2007); Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Research on missionaries and women often forms a part of this work, in addition to the dedicated studies of women and missions, such as: Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Robert, Converting Colonialism; Rhonda Anne Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2003). Further, on diverse, evolving, and multi-faceted roles of ‘women with a cause’ in empire and mission, see Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); on gender roles in South African missions, see Deborah Gaitskill, ‘Rethinking Gender Roles: The Field Experience of Women Missionaries in South Africa’, in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, ed. Andrew Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003). On reasons for underrepresentation of women in mainstream mission history, key findings and methods used in significant studies of women’s roles, see Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock, ‘Women and Cultural Exchanges’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 54 John Clark Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marchman, and Ward: Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859). http://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/jcmarshman/lifetimes.htm, 229. 55 For indigenous appropriation of Christianity with its complex motivations and trajectories, see Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest

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agency and how to cultivate it’ became a major concern within the church hierarchy, with the LMS, the CMS and the Church of Scotland actively seeking to engage with the issue.56 By the middle of the century, Henry Venn,57 the secretary of CMS, articulated a strategic vision for the development of ‘native churches’.58 He argued that for a robust expansion of ‘native church’, it was crucial to follow ‘the elementary principles of self-support and self-government and self-extension’ [emphasis added].59 Venn saw the missions as a temporary or transitional stage in the spread of Christianity and thus looked for ways in which his ideas could be actualized through promoting ‘native agency’. As Porter notes, ‘Venn’s vision was that of a providentially ordained world, in which conversions were everywhere widespread and Christian churches firmly established at the centre of the transformed local societies’.60 The ‘three-self formula’, as Venn’s theory came to be known, held sway in the mid to late nineteenth century as the official policy of the British and American churches irrespective of the denomination or field.61 Despite a considerable momentum in the ordination of ‘native’ preachers in the middle of the century and policy pronouncements for promoting ‘native’ churches and church leadership, the converts and ‘native’ missionaries in the colonies often suffered discrimination and paternalism at the hands of the church hierarchy and the missionaries in the field.62 And there was little interest or movement towards ‘native agency’ at the for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1852 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: the Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008). As argued by Elbourne and Sanneh in the context of missionary expansions in South Africa and Western Africa respectively, ‘native’ clergymen’s aspirations for better and equal roles in the church hierarchy were equally, if not more, instrumental in forcing the mission societies to ponder the question of ‘native agency’. The argument has resonance for the colonial contexts under focus in the present book. 56 Porter, Religion versus Empire? 57 Henry Venn (1796–1873) was the grandson of Henry Venn and the son of Reverend John Venn, founder of CMS. Both his grandfather and father were highly influential Anglican evangelists and founding members of the Clapham Sect. For Venn’s three influential papers on the subject of ‘native Church’, issued in 1851, 1861, and 1866, see William Knight, Memoir of Henry Venn, B.D., 2nd ed. (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1882), Appendix C, 412–38. 58 Porter, Religion versus Empire? 59 William Knight, Memoir of Henry Venn, 420; also see Porter, Religion versus Empire?; C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self-governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1990). 60 Porter, Religion versus Empire?, 169. Henry Venn’s contemporary, Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), too, came up with similar formulations, Ibid., 168. 61 Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines; Robert, ‘Introduction’. 62 Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 39; Eleanor Jackson, ‘From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey: Indian Builders of the Church in Bengal, 1800–1894’, in Robert, Converting Colonialism.

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higher levels.63 For instance, while the first African Anglican bishop, Samuel Adjayi Crowther, was consecrated in 1864, no such initiatives were taken during the nineteenth century in India, Canada, or New Zealand. Christians in India had to wait till 1912 for Rev. V.S. Azariah to be consecrated as the first Indian bishop. The first Māori bishop of New Zealand was consecrated in 1928 in Napier, and it was only in 1989 that the first Indigenous person, Charles Aurthurson, was made bishop in Canada. The notion of ‘native agency’ was problematic for the missionaries illustrating what Homi Bhabha has called ‘the ambivalence of the colonial discourse’.64 Missionaries’ interest in the social and moral reform had to simultaneously contend with their fear of ‘native’ church seeking freedom from their patronage. Bhabha cites Charles Grant as advocating “partial” diffusion of Christianity, whereby the ‘natives’ could be taught an ‘imitation’ of new [English] manners ‘which will induce them [the colonial subjects] to remain under our protection’.65 The uptake of the policy of ‘three-self formula’ was also challenging as its advent coincided with political upheaval and turbulent times in all three colonies under consideration here, further undermining its relevance in practice. In Canada, violent rebellions against the British colonial government in 1837, involving the Patriotes in Lower Canada and the Reform Movement in Upper Canada, led British authorities to strengthen the Canadian state – the Union Act of 1840 created a single United Province of Canada – and were a factor in Britain’s move ‘towards disengagement in North America.’66 In New Zealand, repeated violations of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and the Māori and large-scale land confiscations led to tumultuous times marked by armed conflicts – variously called New Zealand Wars, Land Wars, or Māori Wars – between the settlers and the Māori in the 1860s. In India, the armed struggle for independence, often called the Mutiny, shook up the British presence in 1857, leading to a hardening of the British attitudes and tighter controls. The British trading presence increasingly gave way to the more formal British Empire as the political power and economic benefits were consolidated under the direct control of the British Crown in both India and New Zealand. The three-self formula, with its aim of creating local independent religious authority, ran counter to the political events of the time and their aftermath. A compromise position was sometimes adopted by establishing two separate churches, one for the white settlers and colonists and the other for ‘native converts’, which was antithetical to the spirit of potential equality of races that had Williams, The Ideal of the Self-governing Church. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’,

63

64

in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997), 153. Charles Grant (1746–1823) was a hard-line evangelical and influential political figure in India and Britain, e.g., Chairman of the British East India Company and a Member of Parliament. 65 Ibid., 154. 66 J.M. Bumsted, ‘British Empire’, in Oxford Companion to Canadian History, ed. Gerald Hallowell (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2004), 89.

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underpinned the three-self theory. The idea of ‘brotherhood of man gave way to the notion of hierarchy of racial types’.67 Therefore, it was considered proper that the ‘spiritual and material improvement’ of those lower in the hierarchical order be ‘entrusted to the paternal direction of gentlemanly rulers’.68 In colonies like South Africa, the colonists eventually used such racial separation, originally meant to ensure access and authority for the ‘natives’, to justify the stereotypes of the superiority of the white race.69 In Canada and New Zealand the geographic distance of missions from European settlements kept the churches for the settlers and the ‘natives’ effectively apart. In India, such segregation aligned well with the already stratified society creating Christian churches that seldom broke away from the caste affiliations of the Indians prior to their conversion. Consequently, the church in India was ‘more Hindu than Christian’ in more ways than the one noted by Eleanor Jackson.70 Alexander Duff, the first foreign missionary of the Church of Scotland to India, and other Free Church of Scotland missionaries propounded another mission theory in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Sometimes known as the ‘downward filtration theory’, its central idea was to create awareness of the ‘superiority of European civilization and Christianity’ by educating the privileged classes of ‘natives’ through scientific and rational training of the mind.71 Schools to impart European knowledge – ‘literary, scientific, and religious’ – were opened for sons of elite classes in various colonies, beginning with India.72 The objective was to raise a superior ‘native agency’ for Christianizing the Indigenous people, but the strategy was different to that pursued by Venn. For Duff, ‘the first impulse must come from abroad’ for ‘national awakening’ or religious reform, but the ‘onward dynamic force must be of native growth’.73 The intended locals took strategic advantage of these institutions to steep their sons in Western thinking, largely to maintain their traditional privilege and seek advantage with the European traders and British rulers. Although Duff or the Scottish mission did not take any initiative towards infant schooling, the promise of infant schools in facilitating the mission of ‘civilizing the natives through education’ was aligned with such thinking. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘downward filtration theory’ got slowly replaced by the ‘upward fulfilment’ doctrine.74 The missionary focus 67 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2002), 285. 68 Ibid. 69 Robert, ‘Introduction’. 70 Jackson, ‘From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey’. 71 Frykenberg, Christians and Missionaries in India, 20. 72 Alexander Duff, India and India Missions: Including sketches of the gigantic system of Hinduism, both in theory and practice (Delhi: Swati Publications, 1839; Reprint 1988), 561. 73 Ibid., 355. 74 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 339; Geoffrey A. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006).

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shifted away from ‘converting the heathen’ to Christianity, moving instead towards recognizing ‘the unity of the religious life of man [sic]’ across all ‘religions of the world’ that were of ‘any importance’.75 The missionaries had only to engage in ‘“dialogue” and “mutual understanding” until, in the fullness of time, all the world would come to Christ’.76 The idea of ‘upward fulfilment’ was widely accepted in missionary circles and was presented as a way forward for mission work.77 Perhaps the shift in focus was also an attempt at reviving the waning interest at home in the missionary endeavour. However, such a radical departure from the traditional evangelical activities of directly spreading the Gospel had its detractors within and outside the church. The issue of ‘native agency’ continued to exercise the missionaries as well as the ‘natives’. The mid-nineteenth-century upheavals in each of the three colonies noted above had a consequent shift in the relationships between the missionaries, the empire, and the ‘native’ peoples, including a significant effect on thinking concerning schooling for Indigenous children. Gradually, although in different ways, the early enthusiasm for the infant school model for shaping the ‘native’ character faded, as discussed in the following chapters. Reaching the Unreached: Itinerant Preachers, Mission Stations, and ‘Women’s Work for Women’ Missionary encounters with Indigenous people were fraught with fear and all manner of resistance, even while missionaries were brimming with passionate commitment to their mission, and many nursed a sense of adventure for exotic lands and a fascination with their peoples. Missionaries travelled into the ‘hinterlands’ of new colonies, set up mission stations to embody ‘the superior civilized way of life’, and tried to find new ways of reaching those whom they perceived as hard to reach. Arguably, the itinerant preachers were an abiding presence in the British colonies well into the nineteenth century as evident in missionary documents, which make numerous references to their ‘toils’, and the ‘perils’ they faced. Images like those in Figure 1.2 of the missionary intrepid traveller facing the tiger, navigating the swamp, or surviving the fever or cold, were popular fare in missionary magazines ‘at home’ of the period. The effect in terms of conversions was less than what they aspired to. Henry Venn listed two functions of a missionary: to bring the ‘heathen’ to ‘the knowledge of Christ’ – the ‘evangelistic’ work to be taken up by the ‘Itinerant Missionary’; and to train the recent converts ‘in Christian habits’ and educate the young, the primary obligation of the ‘Station Missionary’. A missionary usually carried out both these functions, though as Venn lamented, more missionaries were 75 J.N. Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913; 2nd ed., New Delhi: Oriental Books, 1971), 13. 76 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 339–40. 77 Ibid., 340.

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Fig. 1.2i

‘Passing through a swamp in New Zealand’. In Church Missionary Paper, London, 1836. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ, PUBL-0031-1836-1.

Fig. 1.2ii

‘Night Scene in New Zealand, Christmas 1837’. In Missionary Paper, London, 1838. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. PUBL-0031-37.

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working as Station Missionaries leaving them little time to devote to preaching to the ‘heathen’.78 Jeffrey Cox too has argued that the popular and widely circulated idea that most of the missionaries worked as itinerants was erroneous. In his view, a large majority of missionaries were instead ‘institution-builders presiding over churches, schools, and hospitals’.79 ‘Alongside the gospel of the spoken word, and the gospel of the printed word, was the gospel of institutional presence.’80 As the focus of missionary agenda changed from evangelical to secular, there was an increasing emphasis on building institutions – ‘the machinery’, as it was sometimes called – ‘and the machinery of parochial institutions included schools’.81 The British Indian landscape was sprinkled with many grand buildings – churches, hospitals, colleges, and schools such as the one shown in Figure 1.3. The missionaries saw Christian institution as a ‘witness in itself’ to their work; an ‘alternative form of proclamation to set beside the Word’.82 Cox’s position speaks to the enduring influence of the infant school practices for young children that missionaries started. Western education as a way of diffusing tenets of Christian, and thus ‘civilized’, life into the colonized societies was a powerful tool in the hands of the missionaries through which they tried to reach far and wide. A Baptist missionary quoted by Cox claimed that institutions ‘have preached the Gospel as the tongue could never do’.83 As discussed in subsequent chapters, mission stations were a significant feature of the missionary presence in British colonies. Missionaries established numerous mission stations or compounds in areas that had previously seen little or no missionary activity. These stations served as exemplars of ‘civilized Christian life’, with missionary homes providing a safe haven for the missionary families and portraying the proper domestic life for the ‘natives’.84 For instance, in 1842 a Christian village was set up at Sekundra under the Church Mission at Agra, India. By 1846 the Sekundra congregation was composed of fifty families. Most of the women gathered once a week at the house of one ‘Mrs. Hoernle’, presumably the missionary wife. Here they were guided to read the Testament, and received ‘advice relative to their domestic duties’ [emphasis added].85 As Catherine Hall suggests, in Britain the notion of ‘Englishness’ was a characteristic of evangelical ideals. Both within Britain itself and beyond in its colonies, those who were 80 81 82 83 84

Venn’s second paper, issued in 1861, in Knight, Memoir of Henry Venn, 414. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 7. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 76. Maina Chawla Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–1940s), ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, vol. 4, Gender, Culture and Global Politics (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). 85 James Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions in Connexion with the Church of England in North India (London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1848), 51. 78 79

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Fig. 1.3

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‘Calcutta Central School’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1828), p. 168. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509d.

not English were defined as ‘other’. ‘Englishness’, as a middle class domestic ideology, became the measure all ‘others’ had to aspire to, in their behaviour, family arrangements, and beliefs.86 As already noted, women in familial supportive roles were encouraged to go on missions from the very first foreign missionary venture. However, in the early nineteenth century, there was strong resistance to the idea of single women travelling to ‘heathen’ lands, reflecting widely accepted ideas about women’s place in the home countries and ‘fears of British or “white” women’s vulnerability to the violent predations of indigenous men’.87 Although several ladies’ societies had been formed since the 1820s to promote the education of females at home and in the colonies, these efforts were mostly spearheaded by married women whose husbands and families held high status in the society or the church. When various societies began to send out female missionaries, their selection and training remained the subject of a great deal of deliberation and caution till late in the nineteenth century. For instance, as Rhonda Semple noted in the context of LMS, a female missionary, ‘a lady of much ability and intelligence, and likely to succeed Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–67 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 87 Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 38. 86

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well in learning the vernacular, and promises to become a good missionary’ was still expected to function best under the ‘wise, and devoted and spiritually minded’ male counsel.88 However, from the 1860s onwards, the number of female missionaries, particularly those from the United States, increased significantly. Females established a distinctive status in the mission societies,89 which came to see the deployment of female missionaries as an effective method of gaining access to the ‘native’ households, thus reaching the unreached. Women’s roles within mission work slowly changed as more qualified and educated women, at times with independent means, petitioned the church for permission to undertake a variety of responsibilities and be recognized for their labours. Many of them worked through medical and education missions.90 Partly due to this gender shift in the missionary work force, the focus of the missionary endeavours increasingly shifted from direct evangelical preaching to secular work in areas like education and health, including the education of females and young children. Despite the changing ground realities, missionary writings, for the most part, ignored the agency of ‘native’ Christians as well as that of women, both ‘native’ and European. Recently, the diverse roles of these groups in spreading Christianity throughout the colonies are being recognized and pieced together by feminist scholars and historians of colonialism and mission studies.91 The recorded presence of Indigenous women in infant schools settings is fleeting, but still evident where, for example in New Zealand, names are given of Māori women who managed the infant school in the absence of the missionary wife or daughter who had been designated the duty or when none were available. The female missionaries in the colonies as well as in the mission society home offices, be they in London or Edinburgh, had to wage a long struggle to get positions of responsibility commensurate with their qualifications even as they

From Council for World Mission correspondence, 1884, quoted in Semple, Missionary Women, 17. 89 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 90 Singh, Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”. For many Western women, the foreign mission work provided an avenue for independence from the traditional gender roles at home, though it has been argued that most of them often ended up taking and promoting the traditional female roles for the ‘natives’ to emulate well into the nineteenth century. See Janaki Nair, ‘Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings 1813–1940’, in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries – A Reader, ed. Catherine Hall (New York: Routledge, 2000), 224–45. 91 For instance, Cox, Imperial Fault Lines; Durba Ghosh, ‘Making and Un-Making Loyal Subjects: Pensioning Women and Educating Orphans in Early Colonial India’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 1 (2003); Jackson, ‘From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey’; Jeyaraj, ‘Mission Reports from South India’; Kent, Converting Women; Robert, Converting Colonialism; Semple, Missionary Women. 88

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fought for the emancipation of their ‘sisters’ in the colonies.92 The missionary stance towards the ‘native’ converts, in essence, remained that of ‘civilized superiors’; they could feel pity and compassion for but not brotherhood with the latter. The changing face of the missionary work force – from predominantly male to increasingly female, and the shifting focus in engaging with Indigenous peoples – from direct evangelization to indirect conversion through educational and social reform, both played a crucial role in the increased emphasis on shaping the Indigenous childhood into ‘Christian habits’ through education. Infant schools were one step in this mission. Missionaries preached that redemption could only be achieved though Christian living, which was to be modelled by missionaries and their families, with its rudiments taught in school and its doctrines preached in church. However, as Hall argues, the ideology of ‘Englishness’ ‘could ultimately only be white’.93 Although coloured Indigenous peoples were encouraged to aspire to English Christian civilization, they could never fully attain it.94 This provided a conduit for colonization. Mission theories and principles outlined above were more influential in the missionary administrative circles than in the shaping of the missionary practice in the field across colonial contexts. In the face of changing practical, social, economic, religious and political concerns in each of the three colonial contexts, the missionary practice began differently, had to constantly evolve and re-invent itself, and took different shapes as illuminated next in the focused commentaries on three colonial settings. Missionaries in India Europeans came in contact with India over a protracted period of time spanning several centuries, though a direct sea route to India opened by Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1498 created a different momentum. Starting with Portuguese traders in the early sixteenth century and Dutch, Danes, French, and English in the seventeenth, they all came originally seeking new avenues to bolster spice trade in the ‘East Indies’. However, in the face of fierce conflict with the Dutch, the English had to divert their attention to India and Indian commodities like indigo, saltpeter, cottons, and silk, along with spices.95 The conflicts among the Europeans to win trade monopoly and supremacy continued for over three centuries. By the early 92 Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden. The struggle for wider and more significant public roles by women was not confined to the missions or to the nineteenth century. 93 Hall, White, Male and Middle Class; Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 94 Also see Watt, ‘Introduction’, 22. 95 Romila Thapar, A History of India (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965); Claude Markovits, A History of Modern India 1480–1950 (London: Anthem Press, 2004).

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nineteenth century, ‘England emerged as the prize-winner from the long contest of the European nations for India’.96 It is estimated that ‘there were perhaps three hundred thousand Indians on the Company’s territory in Madras, two hundred thousand in Calcutta, and seventy thousand in Bombay.’97 A large majority of them were Hindus, speaking a number of Indian languages, chief among them Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali in three geographically apart and culturally distinct areas.98 Figure 1.4 presents a snapshot of the rapid expansion of the British territories between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The territories hitherto under the control of the Dutch and the French had been ceded to the British by the turn of the century. The British had also made myriad arrangements, honoured sketchily at best, with local princes and kings that gave them varying degrees of control over a large part of Indian territory, that was to come under their direct control by mid nineteenth century. The period under focus in this book was marked by conquests, alliances, and treaties leading to British extension into new territories, unintentionally providing growing opportunities for the missionaries to spread out into newly acquired areas once the path to their arrival had been cleared in 1813. The expansion of the British power and the shift from a mere trading company to a political master was completed within a century. Their onslaught on educational institutions was as aggressive as their forceful sweep to political supremacy. According to some counts, the ‘historical self-understandings of Christian communities in India’ date the advent of Christianity to AD 52.99 The exact date remains a matter of dispute. However, it cannot be denied that since ancient times there have been established communities of Christians in India – Syrian, Armenian, Portuguese, and Catholics from various origins. The Church of the East, as it is sometimes called, and to which the Indian tradition belonged, had William S. Meyer et al., Imperial Gazetteer of India, (vol. 2). New edition, published under the authority of His Majesty’s secretary of state for India in council (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–1931 [vol. 2, 1909]), 468. The first edition of the Gazetteer was published in nine volumes in 1881 edited by W.W. Hunter, who had been assigned the task of the statistical survey of India in 1869. The British kept detailed, comprehensive, and systematic records of the Indian Empire from 1861. These records though elaborate noted only those aspects of the Empire as considered worth recording by the rulers. The absence, silence, or distortion of topics and voices important to the Indian population can only be assumed or inferred. 97 Percival Spear, India: A Modern History 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), 187. 98 There were also small numbers of the Indigenous people of India, Adivasis, in these territories, belonging to different tribal groups and speaking a multitude of languages. The British classified them as following ‘animism’. 99 Cyril Bruce Firth, An Introduction to Indian Church History, ed. Franklyn J. Balasumdaram, 5th ed., Indian Theological Library (Bangalore: The Senate of Serampore College, ISPCK, 2001); Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Robert Eric Frykenberg, ‘Christians in India: An Historical Overview of Their Complex Origins’, in Christians and Missionaries in India, 34. 96

Fig. 1.4

British territories in mid eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryIndia, 1770 & 1805. Map published by George Phillip and Son Ltd. The London Geographical Institute. Author’s collection.

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had a long history in India prior to the missionary arrival from Britain and the continent, and it was not conflated with Western civilization.100 In the early nineteenth century, when the missionaries began their activities in India, Bengal in particular, where the British established their ‘headquarters’, had two different systems of ‘traditional’ education, each spanning from elementary schools in most villages through to institutes of higher education.101 The Hindu system of higher education was largely for Brahmin boys. The elementary education in ‘Pathshalas’, ‘Maktabs’ or ‘trade schools’ served the needs of diverse groups of population adequately despite its limited curriculum and emphasis on rote learning in the earlier stages. By the middle of the century the ‘traditional’ system had been eroded beyond repair by the partisan policies that ensued with the British take over. Educational institutions for the very young children were not a part of the traditional Indian education. Thus, the story of infant schools in Chapter 3 begins with missionary efforts in Bengal, later fanning out to Madras, Bombay, and beyond. Hinduism through Missionary Eyes In the Western worldview around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was generally believed that there were four religions in the world: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Heathenism or Paganism. Carey used this classification to estimate the number of pagan non-believers in the world at 420,000,000.102 The first three religions were inter-related and acknowledged within the Christian tradition. The concern for saving the souls of ‘heathens’ in India, therefore, translated to a focus on saving the ‘idol-worshipping’ Hindus. There was comparatively little comment on other religious traditions prevalent in India at that time. The missionary records are full of disparaging descriptions of Hindu practices. The external rituals of Hindu worshippers were interpreted with a great deal of moral sanction, while scant attention was paid to understanding the inner life of their spirituality, despite the contrary emphasis on each individual Christian’s inner spiritual connection with the gospel and God.103 The descriptions of Hindu beliefs and practices came studded with judgements and comments, which proved significantly more influential than the descriptions themselves in shaping their readers’ knowledge of and attitudes towards Hinduism. For instance, consider the comments for the engraving of ‘Krishna on an Elephant’ (Figure 1.5): It has been argued that the Church of the East was a parallel development to the Church of the West. The former spread from ‘beyond the eastern edge of the Roman Empire’. Frykenberg, ‘Christians in India’, 33. 101 Srikumar Acharya, The Changing Pattern of Education in the Early NineteenthCentury Bengal (Calcutta: Punthi-Pustak, 1992); Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: The Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (Coimbatore, India: Keerthi and AVP Publishing House, 1983; Goa, India: Other India Press, 2000). 102 Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, 62. 103 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 35. 100

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Fig. 1.5

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‘KRISHNA on an elephant composed of female attendants’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1827), p. 449. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509c.

The accompanying Engraving is taken from a picture highly valued by the Hindoos: it is grounded on one of those idle stories which are commonly believed concerning Krishna. … [A] number of damsels were his playfellows during his infancy: of these he chose nine, who became his companions: these nine damsels would group themselves into fantastic forms: in the Engraving they are seen in that of an Elephant which the god rides. This profligate deity is the darling god of the Hindoo women: the silly and impure tales … tend greatly to debase the people. Let such representations be looked on by Christians with pity for the folly and indignation for the sin with which they are connected, and with earnest prayer for the deliverance of mankind from the dominion of vice and darkness.104

The notes of contempt for the Hindu gods and beliefs are barely concealed in the comments and are followed up with the expression of hope that the ‘debased Hindoos’ could still be salvaged through ‘Christian benevolence’. The missionary hope was to ‘replace’ Hinduism with Christianity.105 The image, at another level, 104 Missionary Register: Containing the Principal Transactions of the Various Institutions for Propagating the Gospel: With the Proceedings, at Large, of the Church Missionary Society (hereafter MR) (London: L.B. Seeley & Sons, 1827), 448. 105 Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 301.

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speaks to the subjugation of Hindu women, who were deemed foolish enough to abet their own exploitation. That such women needed to be ‘saved’ from their own ‘delusions’ was obvious. The missionary imagery of Hinduism did undergo a slow change from hostility to relative sympathy towards late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reasons for the change have been long debated by historians of missions and religious studies. Geoffrey Oddie, for instance, argues that this change can be attributed as much to the changes in thought occurring in the West as to the changes that were being experienced by the missionaries working in India.106 In his view, Indian laws banning practices like sati and infanticide that had served as emotive symbols of Hindu cruelty and superstition took the sting out of the usual attacks that had previously been levelled against Hinduism. In view of the strong reform movements within Hinduism, there was a reluctant realization in missionary circles that perhaps Hindus were better suited to tackle the negative aspects of their own religion.107 Further, with large territorial gains by the British came the opportunity for the missionaries and other Europeans to live among Indians holding a wide variety of ‘Hindu’ beliefs and practices. Such lived experiences would have generated more nuanced understandings of the attractions of Hinduism for its followers and forced the missionaries to rethink their earlier gross generalizations.108 Furthermore, missionaries faced increasing criticism for their harsh portrayal of Hinduism. After a century of ridicule and harsh judgements against Hindu beliefs and practices, there was a reluctant admission that a confrontational approach of insulting Hindu gods and shaming their followers was counterproductive.109 Despite their changing attitudes towards Hinduism over time, missionaries continued to face severe opposition and contestation of their views from erudite Hindu and other religious leaders. These experiences raised concerns about the adequacy of missionary training in the mission society offices at ‘home’.110 Further, the Indian landscape was dotted with numerous temples and mosques signifying the ‘splendour’ of other religious traditions. The missionaries, too, aspired to build institutions that would stand as symbols of the superiority of the Christian faith.111 Thus, at multiple levels, the missionaries in India had to face stiff competition from well-established and highly accomplished religious traditions, rich in thought as well as material culture. The resistance that missionaries faced in India was not confined to the ‘natives’; the East India Company was wary of the evangelical zeal of missionaries jeopardizing its economic interests. The British government, too, was reluctant Ibid. Ibid., 296. 108 Ibid., 297. 109 Ibid., 298. 110 Ibid., 119. 111 Cox, Imperial Fault Lines. 106

107

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‘Preaching at a Hindu Mela’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1852), p. 64. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509i.

to be seen as promoting Christianity, a fact later condemned by the mission societies.112 When the missionaries were allowed in the British territories in 1813, initially they took up itinerant preaching as a common tool in their efforts to spread the Word, in addition to preaching in big gatherings during religious festivals such as the Hindu Mela (fair) depicted in Figure 1.6.113 As shown in Figure 1.6, their sermons often attracted large numbers, out of curiosity, novelty of hearing a European speak in an Indian language, or a desire to curry favour with the foreigners. Many liberal, well-to-do Hindus chose to engage with new ideas that Christianity brought to their shores – some finding its logic and reasoning more appealing than the traditional Hindu worldview, others seeking changes within Hindu society and religion, and working to support some missionary efforts for education and social reform.114 However, infant education did not form a part of this agenda. Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 78. Kanti Prasanna Sen Gupta, The Christian Missionaries in Bengal 1793–1833

112 113

(Calcutta: Firma L.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971). 114 On challenge to the commonly accepted interpretations about the rise of social reform as a consequence of the Christian and European influence see K.N. Panikkar,

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Mission Stations and the ‘Civilized’ Life The mission stations in India were too numerous to recount here.115 Many stations endured, while others had short and often complex histories with different mission societies at times taking over a station fallen on bad times due to the illness, death, or movement of the original missionary, in order to keep it functioning.116 The mission stations were significant in exemplifying a civilized and ‘uplifted’ lifestyle that the ‘native’ converts and non-Christians were expected to aspire to. For instance, Bishop Daniel Wilson, a significant figure in infant education in India (see Chapter 3), wrote of his visit to Burdwan in Bengal presidency (Figure 1.7) in 1837: There is a little church here, very neat and appropriate. Yesterday we spent four or five hours at the mission house, which is about a mile from the town. I have examined an hundred and fifty native scholars from the villages around. Nothing could be more delightful. … There is a little Christian village, attached to the mission premises, of about eighty souls. I visited it. A neat row of cottages raised a little from the ground, gardens for each family in front, … a fine tank before the gardens, three rooms in each cottage, a little nice furniture, beds, tables, chairs, and writing-desk.117

The mission house and the Christian village at Burdwan as in many mission stations were located away from the town, marking their distinct status. The houses, ‘raised from the ground’, were paragons of ‘cleanliness, comfort, purity’, and meant to showcase the orderliness of ‘English villages’. The quality of life was discernibly better for the converts in material as well as spiritual terms than that for the ‘heathens’. The Bishop noted with satisfaction that men were gainfully employed: a carpenter, a tailor, and so on, and that children were given Christian names: ‘Theophilus’, ‘Abraham’, ‘Sarah’. For him, these were all tidings of a hopeful future for Christianity in India with a new generation being steeped in the Christian way of life. Often the newly converted Christians, particularly those fearing reprisal from followers of their former religion, founded their own separate towns mirroring the missionary teachings of order and discipline: These settlements reflected the new ideas of Christian order that the converts were to embody: the streets were arranged in a grid and lined with trees, the ‘Intellectual History of Colonial India: Some Historical and Conceptual Questions’, in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar, eds, Situating Indian History: for Sarvepalli Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 403–33. 115 On ‘Protestant Missionary Expansion in India to 1914’, see Porter, Religion versus Empire?, Map 2, xii; on locations of ‘Baptist Missions in the Early Nineteenth Century’, see E.D. Potts, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837: The History of Serampore and its Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 116 James Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions. 117 Josiah Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of India, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1861), 353–4.

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‘Church Mission House at Burdwan’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1842), p. 432. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509h.

whitewashed houses were equipped with small gardens, and an Anglican church with towering steeple presided over the town.118

The new converts aspired to bring up their children in accordance with the ‘new’ ideas espoused by the missionaries. The early enthusiasm attending infant schools as detailed in Chapter 3 probably reflects such aspirations. Missionaries and the ‘Veiled’ Women of India In the early nineteenth century, the predominantly male mission was ill equipped to deal with the issue of the non-accessibility of Indian women, perceived to be firmly ensconced in Zenana.119 Female education was a rallying point to ‘free’ the Indian girls and women from the shackles of a dogmatic society. Reaching them was also thought to be crucial in order to have enduring influence on the men and children. Women of the missionaries and other European functionaries in Calcutta established the Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education as early as 1824 Kent, Converting Women, 28. Zenana refers to separate women’s quarters that were prevalent in some Hindu

118 119

and Muslim households, mainly in the well-to-do classes in certain parts of northern India. However, it came to hold a larger than life, and oppressive, presence in the missionary as well as the colonial imagination. For an analysis, see Nair, ‘Uncovering the Zenana’, 224–45.

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under the patronage of the then Governor-General’s wife, Lady Amherst.120 Their efforts were spearheaded by Mary Ann Wilson, whose students often went on to teach in infant schools – a story elaborated in Chapter 3. By the mid-nineteenth century, with increased number of female missionaries,121 the Zenana work became a significant tool in the missionary efforts.122 So much so that a dedicated society, The Indian Normal School and Instruction Society, was established in London in 1862 to train women for Zenana work.123 Just as the ‘native’ catechists had supported the male missionaries since the beginning of the foreign mission work, ‘native’ Bible women enthusiastically assisted women missionaries. These women could communicate through their own example and in a local language the transformative benefits of Christianity. The missionaries’ training for low-caste, poor, Christian women was different from that emphasized in Zenana work among the elite class and higher-caste women. The latter was aimed at raising their awareness of European and American ideals of femininity and liberation, ‘trying to open up the walls enclosing the high-caste zenana’.124 In the process, ironically, the missionary women themselves took on subordinate positions relative to men. ‘It was their public and willing acceptance of their role as breeders for race and nation that Englishwomen would uphold before the Indians.’125 For low-caste women, the focus was on teaching them to read and write and to manage homes and children according to the Western distinctions of private and public. In Eliza Kent’s words: … reformers had to stop the easy traffic across the threshold … and the boundary between the home and the surrounding environment clearly demarcated … . To missionaries, and perhaps the converts themselves, these boundaries were the

M. Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1875). 121 Female missionaries included those who arrived from Europe and the United States as well as those converted to Christianity or born in India to Christian or missionary parents and ‘Eurasians’. People of mixed race were referred to as Eurasians, or more recently, Anglo-Indians. They often suffered discrimination as ‘half-castes’ at the hands of the ‘natives’ and were employed in lower positions by the Europeans. 122 Missionaries attributed their slow progress in spreading Christianity to the lack of access to women of higher-caste middle classes. Their attempts to reach these women in their own homes or in the neighbourhood came to be known as ‘Zenana’ work. The work was furthered by women missionaries and was focused exclusively on influencing and where possible converting the ‘native’ women. By the late nineteenth century, medical work was added to the Zenana mission, to make it more appealing to both sectors of women. Its appeal was expected to come from its resonance with women’s ‘natural’ propensity to help and serve those in need or pain. 123 Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden, 28. 124 Kent, Converting Women, 161. 125 Nair, ‘Uncovering the Zenana’, 226. 120

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very essence of civilization, their instantiation in the homes of recent converts the visible signs that the inhabitants had been ‘uplifted’ from their former state.126

The extent to which the Zenana work was successful in directly influencing the women of elite classes is debatable. As noted, the greatest impact that missionaries had on the Indian population was through their interactions within institutional settings such as schools and hospitals.127 Mission schools held a significant place in the long-term visions of missionaries. School as a ‘witness in itself’ to the Christian presence, to bear testimony to their teachings, was a powerful motive in the missionary thinking.128 Infant schools were a part of this larger scheme. As already noted, education in India was more centrally controlled from the late 1850s, when the East India Company’s control over Indian land and people changed over to the British Crown. In 1854, Wood’s dispatch on education banned Bible teaching from schools, ruling in favour of exclusively secular education in all government-aided schools.129 The official policy advocating ‘strict religious neutrality’ became more firmly entrenched in the wake of the tragic events of 1857. The missionary efforts, including those for education, became somewhat subdued for several decades.130 The changes with particular reference to infant schools are discussed in Chapter 3 in the story of infant education in India. Missionaries in Canada Initial contact between the Indigenous people of North America and Europeans occurred around AD 1,000 with the arrival of a small group of Norse from Greenland who established an outpost in Newfoundland. At that time the Aboriginal population of the territory of what is now Canada is estimated to have been between 500,000 and 2 million. The Norse settlement was short-lived, and relations between the settlers and Indigenous people were acrimonious. European interest in North America and relations with Aboriginal people intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Portuguese, Basque, French, and English sought resources of fish, furs, and eventually territory. First Nations people belonged to diverse cultures and language groups. Initial missionary activity undertaken by Jesuits from France focused on the Huron; the infant school story Kent, Converting Women, 161. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines. 128 Ibid., 70. 129 Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 32. Charles Wood (1800–1885), a liberal politician, 126 127

was a member of the British parliament. He is often credited with effecting the spread of education at all levels in British India through his influential despatch to the then Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie in 1854. However, infant schools were not a part of Wood’s educational plans. 130 Dick B. Dewan, Education in the Darjeeling Hills: An Historical Survey: 1835–1985 (New Delhi: Indus Publishing Co., 1991), 98.

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Fig. 1.8

‘A missionary map of North America, showing missions and mission prospects in “heathen countries”’. In Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, The Colonial Church Atlas (London: R. Clay, Printer, 1850). William C. Wonders Map Collection, University of Alberta Libraries.

related in Chapter 4 concerns the Mississauga (Ojibwa) and American Methodists. However, there were common features in children’s traditional education in First Nations societies, which was mainly informal but also involved learning from elders via storytelling. Children acquired skills and knowledge necessary for survival and appropriate conduct through observation and guided participation in daily life. Formal missionary education was a poor fit with these traditional socialization strategies.131 Jean Barman, Yvonne M. Hébert, and Don McCaskill, ‘The Challenge of Indian Education: An Overview’, in Indian Education in Canada, vol. 2, ed. Jean Barman, Yvonne M. Hébert, and Don McCaskill (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987); J.M. Bumstead, The Peoples of Canada: A Pre-Confederation History (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2003); Olive Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2009); Olive Dickason and William Newbigging, A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 131

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Missions to Aboriginal people in Canada were established as part of the colonization effort in New France in the seventeenth century by Catholic orders. The Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, employed a variety of strategies to evangelize and civilize Aboriginal people – les sauvages – to bring about their ‘francization’, including forming settlements or reserves (‘sedentary missions’) combined with short-term excursions into remote communities (‘flying missions’).132 The reserves were modelled on the Jesuits’ prior work in South America and Mexico, where they had established mission communities called ‘reductions’ as sanctuaries for Aboriginal people who had been brutalized by colonists. Jesuit Concerns Jesuits were critical of the exploitation of Aboriginal people by colonial powers. However, they also benefited from the situation by gaining relatively stable communities of converts. As Alan Greer explains, in situations where Aboriginal populations were under extreme pressure, ‘the missionaries were able to impose an exacting regime of Christian prayers, sexual repression, and European-style agriculture on the natives, who found this disciplinary utopia preferable to the alternatives’.133 In the words of John Webster Grant in relation to the Canadian situation, ‘mass conversion followed social breakdown’.134 Under pressure from disease and war in New France in the mid-seventeenth century, some Aboriginal groups converted or adopted aspects of Christianity and lived for a time in Jesuit mission communities. From the missionary point of view, isolating converts was a valuable ‘conversion tool’.135 The process of francization was believed to be more easily accomplished when new converts were

On the idea of les sauvages see Cornelius J. Jaenen, ‘“Les Sauvages Ameriquains”: Persistence into the 18th Century of Traditional French Concepts and Constructs for Comprehending Amerindians’, Ethnohistory 29, no. 1 (1982): 43–56; and Peter N. Moogk, ‘The “Others” Who Never Were: Eastern Woodlands Amerindians and Europeans in the Seventeenth Century’, French Colonial History 1 (2002): 77–100. On francization see Cornelius J. Jaenen, ‘Education for Francization: The Case of New France in the Seventeenth Century’, in Indian Education in Canada, vol. 1, The Legacy, ed. Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 45–63. On ‘flying’ and ‘sedentary missions’, see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 133 Alan Greer, ed., ‘Introduction’, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 6. 134 John Webster Grant, Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 42. 135 Donald Bennie, ‘In a World of Their Own: Isolation and the Jesuit Mission to the Huron, 1632–1650’ (PhD dissertation, University of Guelph, 2005), 17. 132

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geographically separated from ‘heathen’.136 Donald Bennie’s study of the Jesuits and the Huron at the Sainte-Marie mission further explains isolation as an important element of Jesuit theology, in which spiritual uplift is gained through physical and mental separation from the world.137 This outlook contrasted with the Huron worldview in which isolating community members occurred only in particular circumstances. Bennie concludes that Huron ‘culture and social structures focused on minimizing isolation and reinforcing community integration’.138 This mission and others were therefore marginalized communities: residents were culturally isolated from traditional beliefs and geographically isolated from the larger population of Aboriginal people. The activities of the Society of Jesus were well documented through yearly reports called the Jesuit Relations (hereafter, the Relations), first published in 1632 and widely distributed in France. The Relations publicized the Jesuits’ work in foreign missions and were popular as travel literature. The importance of forming settlements was described by Jesuit Superior Paul Le Jeune as a ‘Means of Converting the Savages’ in the Relation of 1634: Send a number of capable men to clear and cultivate the land, who, joining themselves with others who know the language, would work for the savages, on condition they would settle down, and themselves put their hands to the work, living in houses that would be built for their use; by this means becoming located, and seeing this miracle of charity in their behalf, in this way they can be more easily instructed and won … It seems to me that not much ought to be hoped for from the Savages as long as they are wanderers; you will instruct them to-day, and tomorrow hunger snatches your hearers away.139

Mission communities that were built on this plan met with varying success. The Aboriginal residents at the Jesuits’ Sillery mission near Quebec City suffered from epidemics and warfare. The converts at Sillery also lived in tension with a majority population of non-converts, called ‘traditionalists’. Other communities were long lasting: for example, the mission managed by the Jesuits near Quebec City exists today as part of the Wendake Reserve. Missions included schools, and Jesuit teachers were originally keen to include young children as students. Referring to the potential of a group of young Huron students, Le Jeune wrote, ‘We expect more fruit from these young plants, than from

Jaenen describes francization as involving ‘conversion to Catholicism, adoption of sedentary agricultural or artisanal life, adoption of European manners, customs, laws and habits, and use of the French language in daily intercourse’. ‘Education for Francization’, 47. 137 Bennie, ‘In a World of Their Own’. 138 Ibid., 26. 139 Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 6, Paul Le Jeune, ‘On the Means of Converting the Savages’, Relation of 1833–34, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, OH: Burrows Bros., 1899), 145–7. 136

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the old trees almost entirely rotten.’140 However, there was a sharp difference in ideas of child rearing between the Jesuits and local parents, who were too attached to their children to release them to schools for long. The Jesuits identified the reluctance of Aboriginal parents to punish their children as a central problem for their education. As observed by Le Jeune, ‘all the Indian nations of these parts – and those of Brazil, we are told – cannot punish a child, nor allow one to be chastised. How much trouble this will give us in carrying out our plans of teaching the young!’141 The Jesuits changed tactics to include alternative approaches, including punishing children on their parents’ behalf.142 Huron parents were apparently keen to nominate their children for punishment, as in the following description in the Relation: This year our Hurons observed that, in the school which is kept in their village of Nostre Dame de Foy [later, Lorette] for the French children, those who are neglectful of their duties are frequently punished; and they thought that, in order to bring up their own children properly, it was necessary to chastise them for their faults, as is done with the French children. So the Captain has been in the habit of going around the village from time to time, calling out aloud that the fathers and mothers are to tell Father Hechon their children’s faults, so that he may have them punished therefore, – The boys by the French schoolmaster, and the girls by a good matron. On hearing the voice of the Captain, the good people bring their children to the Father who, after inquiring into their faults, causes the guilty to be punished.143

The report continued: ‘such exemplary Punishment has made the little savages so well-behaved that one can now do with them whatever he wishes’.144 Despite such enthusiasm, evangelizing in this way saw no widespread results, and formal schooling for young children was largely abandoned.145 ‘Missionary Tradition’ Roman Catholic and Protestant missions to Aboriginal people in the eighteenth century added to the development of the ‘missionary tradition’ in Canada, which was characterized by a ‘program of collecting Indians in mission-sponsored

Quoted in Axtell, The Invasion Within, 57. Quoted in Greer, The Jesuit Relations, 36. 142 Nancy Bonvillain, ‘The Iroquois and the Jesuits: Strategies of influence and 140 141

resistance’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1986), 39. 143 Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 57, Relation of 1672–73, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, OH: Burrows Bros, 1899), 11. 144 Ibid. 145 Bonvillain, ‘The Iroquois and the Jesuits’, 39.

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settlements’.146 There was, however, no great interest in mission work with Aboriginal people in the eighteenth century until it was rekindled by Protestant, mainly evangelical denominations, including Methodists and Baptists, as part of the evangelical revival already described in this chapter. A feature of evangelical mission work at the turn of the nineteenth century was the joining together of humanitarian aims – anti-slavery campaigns and efforts to abolish child labour – with the drive to save souls.147 The Methodists, as described in detail in Chapter 4, were vocal in their support of justice for Aboriginal land claims. Another feature was acceptance of the racial theory that a ‘lower culture coming into contact with a higher one was doomed to extinction’.148 Historian Laura Stephens describes how missionaries participated in the construction of the idea of the ‘vanishing Indian’ through their tracts and other publications.149 The Indians ‘elicit anticipatory grief from missionaries and their supporters, who watch them ever disappearing into an eternally receding horizon’.150 It was argued that it was necessary for Aboriginal people to adopt European culture and values and, ideally, settle in agricultural communities for their protection and, ultimately, for their survival. In terms of the overall process of missionization, and as articulated by Henry Venn in the middle of the century, the end goal was that ‘eventually, the native converts would be able to sponsor missions of their own, and the original missionary would move on to another group to begin the process anew’.151 Methodists were particularly successful in gaining Indian converts through their work around the Bay of Quinte in the 1820s, to the extent that they recruited some as preachers. Methodists undertook camp meetings and forays into remote territory, along the lines of the Jesuits’ ‘flying missions’ as well as mission work with Aboriginal people living in or near towns such as Belleville, where they proceeded to build ‘model communities’.152 Grant explains that ‘Methodism appealed most strongly to groups in desperate straits, especially in areas where farming offered a viable alternative to traditional means of support.’153 ‘These experiments … drew much of their inspiration from the long-established Amerindian villages of Canada East’ such as the Huron village at Lorette.154 Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 70. Ibid., 74. 148 Ibid. See also C.L. Higham, Noble, Wretched, and Redeemable: Protestant 146 147

Missionaries to the Indians in Canada and the United States, 1820–1900 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2000), 20–21. 149 Laura Stephens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 162. 150 Ibid. 151 Higham, Noble, Wretched, and Redeemable, 16. 152 Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 78. 153 Ibid., 90. 154 Olive Patricia Dickason with David T. McNab, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 4th ed. (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2009), 234.

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Mission Tradition Merges with Colonial Policy Coincident with the Methodist initiative, the colonial government planned agricultural settlements for Aboriginal people in the area of the Grand and Credit Rivers as part of its ‘policy of civilization’, which would later include training children in manual labour schools.155 For the government, settlements were an efficient and economical way to manage Aboriginal land and people: the land was needed for European settlement and the warriors were no longer required for military support. In 1826 the Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs ordered the building of twenty houses in the existing ‘Indian Village’ at the Credit River. In a manner similar to the Jesuits’ plan, ‘skilled workmen and teachers were sent among the Indians to aid in their “civilization”’.156 Additional houses and a church, school, and workshop were built by the residents with support from the Methodists, who collaborated with the government in the project.157 An 1828 report by the new head of Indian Affairs Major General H.C. Darling, also ‘advocated establishing model farms and villages, in effect a system of reserves, as the best means of civilizing Amerindians’.158 As noted above, buildings were visible evidence of the ‘machinery of Christianity’, and their construction was the main expense for groups starting new settlements during the Indian mission building boom in Canada and the United States from the 1820s to 1850s.159 The village at Credit River became a showcase for the civilization program of both the government and the Methodists. Chapter 4 details the development of its sister community on Grape Island and the additional ‘machinery’ of the infant school. Amid the Indians of the Plains A different course to accomplish similar goals was evident at the Red River settlement in Assiniboia south of Lake Winnipeg. CMS missionary Rev. John West started a boarding school for children of European fur traders and First Nations women, who were sent to the settlement from forts in the region (Figure 1.9).160 Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 86; John Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the Canadas, 1828–1858: Evolving a Corporate Memory for the Indian Department (Ottawa: Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1985). 156 J. Donald Wilson, ‘“No Blanket to Be Worn in School”: The Education of Indians in Nineteenth-Century Ontario’, in Indian Education in Canada, ed. Barman et al., 67. 157 Journals of the Legislative Council of the Province of Canada, vol. 16, Issue 6, Appendix no. 21, ‘Report of the Special Commissioners to Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada’ (Toronto: Stewart Derbishire & George Desbarats, 1858), A1858. 158 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 200. For a further discussion of Darling’s report, ‘Inquiries into Indian Conditions’, see Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry. 159 Higham, Noble, Wretched, and Redeemable, 17. 160 Jonathan Anuik, ‘Forming Civilization at Red River: 19th-Century Missionary Education of Métis and First Nations Children’, Prairie Forum 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–16. 155

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Fig. 1.9

‘The Credit River Mission, Upper Canada’. In Egerton Ryerson, The Story of My Life (Toronto: Briggs, 1882).

Rev. West travelled from his base at the Red River to evangelize Aboriginal people in the region, who, as he described, ‘rove through the woods and plains, with all the wretched appearance of Gypsies in England’.161 In his ‘flying missions’ to remote locations and fur trading forts Rev. West convinced some Aboriginal parents to send their sons to the school, telling them that they would return home at the completion of their schooling to work as missionaries and teachers amongst their people. He was hopeful that the boys would retain their traditional skills while at the school. Figure 1.10 shows Rev. West speaking with a father about the education of his young son. Ten children were enrolled at the boarding school by 1824.162 West’s plan for the students was detailed in the Missionary Register in 1823: By the example of such Young Men, the Indians will be brought, by degrees, to more settled habits than they now have; then Schools may be opened in their villages and Missionaries sent to dwell among them; and thus, in time, and under

‘North American Indians,’ MR (June 1823), 279. Katherine Pettipas, The Diary of the Reverend Henry Budd, 1870–1875, vol. IV:

161 162

Manitoba Record Society Publications, ed. W.D. Smith (Winnipeg: Hignell Printing, 1974), xvi.

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CMS missionary Rev. John West, recruiting a student for the Red River School. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1823), facing page 279. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-510.

the blessing of God, the benign influence of the Gospel will be felt all over these wide regions.163

Rev. West subscribed to the popular idea among missionary and child development circles that socializing children was easier than re-socializing adults: ‘If little hope could be cherished of the adult Indian in his wandering and unsettled habits of life, it appeared to me, that a wide and most extensive field presented itself for cultivation in the instruction of the native children.’164 At the same time he believed in the power of learning by emulation. Due to his limited success at the school with children living at or near the settlement with their parents, he was motivated to recruit children at a distance. As he explained, some parents were concerned that he would take the children to England, a rumour he claimed was started by the local priest. In another situation, two boys – ‘wild and troublesome’ – absconded from school to return home.165 He concluded, it is: … far better to obtain children for the school, from a distance than from the Indians in the immediate neighbourhood of the Colony, as all those children

‘North American Indians,’ MR (June 1823), 280. John West, The Substance of a Journal during a Residence at the Red River Colony

163 164

(London: L.B. Seeley and Son, 1824), 14. 165 Ibid., 142.

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who were under our charge, and whose parents were more remote, soon became reconciled to restraint and were happy on the establishment.166

West described food shortages that were common on the plains as an advantage for the missionaries, consistent with the idea that conversion was more likely to succeed amongst people under pressure: The cravings of hunger rouse them; and the scarcity of animals that now prevails in many parts of the country, is a favourable circumstance towards leading them to the cultivation of the soil; which would expand their minds, and prove of vast advantage, among other means, in aiding their comprehension of Christianity.167

We can see in the work of Rev. West the evolution of the missionary tradition, a foreshadowing of the shift to church-run residential schools for children instead of mission settlements for families. As European settlement worked westward, missionaries were challenged to seek converts in more remote situations. They were, however, enthusiastic about the task. In a sermon in England marking the consecration of the Bishops of Athabasca and Saskatchewan in 1874, Rev. David Anderson drew on Old Testament verse to inspire the congregation: Amid the Indians of the plains, how mighty a work to be done! Along the valley of the Saskatchewan, how many a flourishing village and settlement may we hope to see formed! And among the Esquimaux, how many have yet to be approached! How many, by means of the present converts, may be reached among those yet unknown islands of the Northern Sea.168

Missionaries in New Zealand For both its Indigenous peoples and settlers, New Zealand provides the most recent and cohesive setting of the three colonial contexts. At the time of Cook’s European discovery of New Zealand in 1769, it is estimated that the Māori population was around 100,000, which by 1840 had declined to 70,000.169 The society was tribal with lineages that traced back to the separate canoes, which brought Polynesian traveller-explorers to ‘the land of the long white cloud’ around 1300 AD. Tribal groupings developed subsequent to arrival in New Zealand and a common language survived with regional variations. The early missionary story initially concerns Northern Ngā Puhi peoples before moving southward into other tribal areas (see Figure 1.11). Ibid., 144. Ibid., 117. 168 Rev. David Anderson, The Gospel in the Regions Beyond (London: Hatchards, 166 167

Piccadilly, 1874), 9–10. 169 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1996), 178.

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‘Map of Northern part of New Zealand’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1836), p. 343. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-508a.

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The traditional education of Māori children was dependant on lineage and, in the main, the skills for living were acquired alongside adults in the task of everyday life. There were also networks of whare wānanga (a house of knowledge) which inducted the appropriate boys and youths into various kinds of knowledge such as warfare, moko (tattooing), mākutu (sorcery), whakairo (wood carving), and for girls, tāniko (weaving). The whare wānanga were tribal but there is record in precontact times of inter-regional journeys particularly for chiefly sons.170 The new knowledge from missionary schools grafted onto this tradition. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) led New Zealand’s missionary enterprise, with its first mission established in 1814. The Wesleyan Missionary Society (WMS) followed, establishing its first mission in 1821. Both societies were based in the Northland area with the WMS relegated to the western districts. This was a cautious alliance in which the CMS acted as the senior party. The New Zealand missionary enterprise was small. It was 1833 before the CMS and WMS (on different sides of the island) moved southwards. By 1839 CMS missionaries and their families numbered 139; those of WMS numbered thirty-seven. By 1845 CMS missionaries had around twenty-four missions compared with twelve of the WMS.171 The arrival of Jean-Baptiste Pompallier, a French Marist priest, in 1838,172 caused consternation for both political and religious reasons: New Zealand was not yet British, and the French were showing an interest in settlement. Overall the missionary enterprise was speeding up. By 1844, Pompallier had brought fortyone French missionaries and established twelve mission stations. Both Anglicans and Methodists, although wary of each other, were united in their dislike of the Catholics. It was, however, the CMS that led the establishment of infant schools. Church Missionary Society Endeavour The first missions in the Pacific, established in 1796 by the London Missionary Society, had floundered, as had the CMS’s first venture in Africa. A lack of infrastructure support, disease, warfare, and the poor calibre of the missionaries all contributed to these failures. Rev. Samuel Marsden, the Anglican chaplain at the convict colony of New South Wales, contemplated the possibility of a mission in New Zealand. He was frustrated by his efforts amongst the Aboriginal Australians and had been impressed with several Māori men he had met: ‘Their Ibid. James Belich, Making Peoples, 135. 172 John Morley R. Owens, Prophets in the Wilderness: The Wesleyan Mission to 170 171

New Zealand 1815–1827 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1974); Valerie Carson, ‘Submitting to Great Inconveniences: Early Missionary Education for Māori Women and Girls’, in Mission and Moko: Aspects of the Work of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand 1814–1882, ed. Robert Glen (Christchurch: Latimer Fellowship of New Zealand, 1992), 56–72.

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minds appeared like a rich soil that had never been cultivated, and only wanted the proper means of improvement to render them fit to rank with civilized nations’.173 Marsden enthusiastically promoted the case for New Zealand with the CMS, arguing that Māori aggression was an urgent reason for action: I knew that they were Cannibals – that they were a savage race – full of superstition, and wholly under the power of the Prince of darkness; and that there was only one remedy which could effectively free them from their cruel spiritual bondage, and misery; and that was the Gospel of a crucified Saviour.174

In 1807 Marsden appealed to the CMS with the enlightened tenets of evangelicalism, expressing his wish for the ‘New Zealanders’ to ‘enjoy the Sweets of Civilisation’ and the ‘Blessings of Divine Revelation’ with a view to their ‘Improvement and Advantage’.175 A Model Site for Missionary Work There were delays before Thomas Kendall, a rope maker and teacher, with William Hall, a ship builder, arrived at Rangihoua in June 1814. This was an exploratory visit, after which Kendall and Hall returned to Sydney. For their arrival in New Zealand they carried a letter from Marsden to the Ngā Puhi chief, Ruatara. The letter promised that ‘Mr Kendall will teach the boys and girls to read … They will come to live in New Zealand if you will not hurt them; and teach you how to grow Wheat and make Houses, and everything’.176 Meetings with chiefs such as Ruatara had convinced Marsden of the potential of New Zealand as a model site for missionary work. Marsden noted the chiefs’ interest in European technology and in adopting the ‘Arts of Civilization’: ‘I am fully convinced that they would soon become a great nation, if the Arts could be introduced among them, without the ruinous vices and prevalent diseases of Civilized Society.’177 There was a contradiction in Marsden’s appraisal of Māori: they were, he considered, highly intelligent but when viewed through his evangelical lens, they were also ignorant and uncivilized. Marsden urged that civilization must precede Christian conversion; hence his recruitment of ‘mechanic’ missionaries who could model the ‘arts of civilization’ in their everyday work. In December 1814 Kendall, Hall, and John King, a blacksmith, and their wives and children, arrived at Rangihoua.

173 Quoted in Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Māori and Europeans 1773–1815 (Auckland: Viking, 1997), 406. 174 John Rawson Elder, ed., The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, 1765–1838 (Dunedin: Coulls Somerville Wilkie, Ltd and A.H. Reed, 1932), 60. 175 Ibid. 176 MR (1815), 155. 177 Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society 3 (London, 1810), 123.

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In re-examining the arrangement between Ruatara and Marsden that led to the first schooling of Māori by missionaries, Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins remind us that this was not the one-sided engagement it might appear to be in subsequent popular missionary histories and imagery.178 Ruatara had to persuade the other chiefs in the region, as well as determine the terms of the missionary presence and the level of protection and resources they would need. Ruatara saw special opportunities arising from this role that would be unavailable to other tribes in terms of acquiring new knowledge and technical skills. This strategy held risks. Jones and Jenkins suggest that Ruatara later regretted the encouragement he had given, citing an eyewitness report that ‘Ruatara said he had been warned by someone in Australia that the white people would take over New Zealand, as they had Australia.’179 The mission did not flourish. Māori elder and scholar Ranginui Walker notes, ‘a farmer would have been more useful in getting the mission self-sufficient in producing its own food’.180 This led to Kendall’s involvement in musket trading for provisions. Kendall’s letter to the CMS outlining his plans to establish a school illustrates the charity school model blueprint that missionaries applied: It is my intention to take about forty children under my care. These must be clothed and fed. Such brown cloth as used in Charity Schools in England would suit very well … Each scholar might have two suits per year of clothing of English manufacture … the children might also wear native clothing, if at any time they should be inclined to pay a visit to their parents, or be employed about dirty work.181

Further, the Bible would be the path to literacy; and behaviour would be shaped towards eliciting a ‘civilized’ demeanour of humility, sobriety, and ordered industry. The missionary premise that such outcomes were what Māori wanted from schooling was flawed. Jones and Jenkins write that ‘To “make Māori be like us” (rather than enabling Māori to be better at being themselves in the new world) was at the heart of Pākehā [European] desires for schooling.’182 This misunderstanding later led to Māori disaffection with missionary schooling, although they used the technical knowledge acquired for purposes beyond the confines of the biblical missives missionaries intended.

Jones and Jenkins, ‘Invitation and Refusal’. Quoted in Jones and Jenkins, ‘Invitation and Refusal’, 195. 180 Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: 178 179

Penguin, 1990, 2000 ed.), 81. 181 MR (1817), 524. 182 Jones and Jenkins, ‘Invitation and Refusal’, 197.

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School Beginnings There were hard lessons learned at Kendall’s Rangihoua school, but the venture provides clues to the methods and intentions of missionary schooling in New Zealand that eventually included separate schools for adults, boys, girls, and infants. In 1815 Kendall produced the first Māori primer reader.183 The elementary portions, modelling the monitorial school methods, were printed on separate cards for the younger children.184 In 1816 the school was finally underway with thirtythree children, increasing to seventy in 1817. Keeping the interest and attention of the children was a challenge. The ‘kindness and patience’ of Kendall, who overcame the ‘wild habits’ of his ‘vagrant scholars’, was reported in the Missionary Register: … A teacher amongst the heathen (for it could not be endured in a civilized society) is surrounded by a number of children, and perhaps while one is repeating his lesson, another will be playing with his feet, another taking away his hat, and another his book, and all this in a friendly manner, he cannot be angry with them …185 My little wild pupils were all noise and play during the first months. We could scarcely hear them read for their incessant shouting, singing and dancing. The first month they attempted to repeat their lessons in the schoolhouse very well, but we soon had to follow them into the bushes … I had no command over them.186

These feisty children characterized early missionary schooling in New Zealand. After the late arrival of ‘beads, ear-rings, combs, scissors, thimbles, knitting needles, fish hooks and small toys made of iron’ for use as rewards in monitorial schools, Kendall’s ‘authority and influence’ improved.187 These were the conduits to developing the internalized moral code necessary to ‘monitor’ civilized Christian living. In 1818 Kendall reported that thirty children could read at his school. The day was divided into formal lessons, singing, and prayers, alongside the work of preparing food and ‘useful work’ such as fence making, flax dressing, and gardening for boys, and domestic tasks for girls. This routine became the pattern in mission schools more generally, although providing the materials and/or 183 Thomas Kendall, A Korao no New Zealand; or the New Zealander’s first book; being an attempt to compose some lessons for the instruction of the natives (London: Church Missionary Society, 1815). 184 MR (1820), 500. 185 Kendall to CMS 1816, quoted in Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall (Auckland: University of Auckland & Oxford University Press, 1968), 43. A shortened version of this statement was included in MR (1819), 464. 186 MR (1819), 464. 187 Ibid.

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persuading the children that ‘useful work’ must be done was not easy. Kendall’s hope of ‘charity’ uniforms was not realized. Instead, ‘The girls made their own apparel after their country fashion … a number of mats for clothing, made of the flax of the country, the first manufacture of the female Scholars, have been sent to the Society’.188 The ‘wild New Zealand child’ successfully schooled was, thereafter, commonly reported by missionary teachers, but so too was the literacy ability of Māori children. Kendall sent thirty copybooks to the CMS in London that, he suggested, ‘show a degree of skill quite equal, if not decidedly superior to that of a School of English Boys under similar circumstances’.189 Kendall’s school closed in 1818. There was conflict within the mission, already alluded to, and it also faced difficulties in getting supplies to feed the children as Māori preferred to sell their produce to visiting ships for muskets. New Directions The arrival, in 1823, of the Rev. Henry Williams (Figure 1.12) with his wife Marianne to lead the CMS mission and establish a settlement at Paihia brought new impetus to the missionary endeavour.190 Williams was charged to better organize the business of schools in the missions, with the main object to: … direct this people to the law of God. How is this to be accomplished? Through the knowledge of the language by which alone communication can be made. Here it would appear to me, should be the weight of our artillery. With regards to adults, they should be visited far and near, the children as many as can be collected, be brought to school, under the regulation of a school where they would learn everything we may be capable of instructing them in.191

Williams shifted the emphasis of mission work onto preaching the gospel and ‘Christianization’, with schooling acting as a key instrument in this task. He also sought to break the missionaries’ economic dependence on Māori. In 1828 Henry Williams held a school examination in the presence of local chiefs. One hundred and seventy pupils were examined in catechism, reading, dictation, and arithmetic. The day concluded with a feast for missionaries, pupils, and their families. Prizes were distributed to the best scholars and for good conduct, carpentry, sewing, and straw-hat making, as well as to a man who

Ibid. Ibid., 465. 190 Robin Fisher, ‘Henry Williams leadership of the CMS Mission to New Zealand’, 188

189

New Zealand Journal of History 9, no. 2 (1975) 142–53. 191 Henry Williams’ papers, quoted in Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘In a Different Voice. A Case Study of Marianne and Jane Williams, Missionary Educators in Northern New Zealand 1823–1835’ (PhD dissertation, University of Auckland, 1995), 12.

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Henry Williams portrayed in ‘The power of God’s Word’, 1856, by unknown artist. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. PUBL-0151020013.

had plastered himself a house!192 Annual examinations became a feature of the mission schools, modelled on the English National Education Society schools where children were examined in the presence of the Archbishop. In 1830 one thousand people gathered for the examination. In 1832 infant school children were also examined. During the 1830s the tide turned towards Christianity. From a Māori perspective Walker describes how: [… when the missionaries] became economically independent and influential as teachers of new knowledge as well as peacemakers, whole tribes began converting to Christianity. Besides the new God of the Pakeha was more appealing because it seemed his Pakeha followers were blessed with greater power and wealth than the Māori in the form of ships, weapons and an amazing quantity of goods.193

The catalyst was literacy, promoted by missionaries and sought after by Māori. Patu Hohepa acknowledges that ‘the greatest gift England gave Māori was literacy’.194 Marsden reported that Māori ‘are all fond of reading, and there are MR (1829), 466. Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 86. 194 Quoted in Jones and Jenkins, ‘Invitation and Refusal’, 196. 192 193

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many who have never had an opportunity to attend the schools who nevertheless can read. They teach one another from the North to the East Cape.’195 In 1839, when William Williams , the brother of Henry, arrived in the remote East Coast to establish a mission he found people there already reading and writing. From the missionaries’ perspective, introducing Māori people to the Bible was the priority, to the extent that ‘The mission was even prepared to delay baptism until the candidate was instructed and literate.’196 A printing press for supporting this purpose was established at Waimate in 1834 and turned out half a million pages of religious material before 1840. Slates and books were keenly acquired items of exchange amongst Māori. A report in 1838 to the British House of Lords optimistically claimed the success of missionary education to the extent that the ‘great majority [of Māori] can read’, and that the ‘power of acquisition [of Māori children to read and write] is greater than our own, almost’.197 The extent of Māori literacy was possibly exaggerated;198 nevertheless Māori interest in schooling was driven by their interest in literacy, which was spread at the behest of Māori themselves and used in everyday life. The issue of the language of literacy, which for missionary purposes was Māori, became contentious. Dissatisfaction became a reason for Māori to drift from mission influence during the 1840s to opportunistically eye the arriving settlers. Walker sums up the ‘advance party of cultural invasion’ of the engagement between Māori and missionaries: Unlike the traders, who were motivated only by commercial gain, the missionaries were the cutting edge of colonialism … Underlying this mission were ethnocentric attitudes of racial and cultural superiority … The assumed superiority of the incoming Europeans was built into the institutions of the new society. The first institutions to be transplanted and take root were the mission schools … While the musket wars [between Māori tribes] were physically debilitating, conversion to Christianity led to further erosion of Māori culture and power. The missionaries condemned polygamy, slavery, the tohunga [priest] and tapu [sacred knowledge].199

During this heyday of missionary enterprise, literacy explosion and conversion in the 1830s and early 1840s, the infant school became part of the enterprise. This story is told in Chapter 5.

John Rawson Elder, ed., Marsden’s Lieutenants (Dunedin: Coulls Somerville Wilkie, Ltd and A.H. Reed for the Otago University Council, 1934), 522. 196 Robert Glen, ‘Those Odious Evangelicals: The Origins and Background of CMS Missionaries in New Zealand’, in Glen, Mission and Moko, 20. 197 ‘Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords Appointed to Inquire into the Present State of the Islands of New Zealand’ (London, August 8, 1838), 123.3. 198 Belich, Making Peoples. 199 Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 85–6. 195

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Conclusion The contexts of missionary endeavour across India, Canada, and New Zealand are different in scope and kind. However, it is apparent that during the early years of the nineteenth century there was much commonality regarding the Enlightenment ideas about education, the missionary message, the recipe for missionary enterprise, and the kind of people attracted to these early endeavours. These threads of commonality across different settings made possible the export of infant schools designed for the urban poor child of Britain as a strategic site for refashioning and re-socializing Indigenous children in accord with European values of civilization. Both were perceived as ‘Othered’ children, being ‘heathen’ (or ‘heathen-like’) and savage (or savage-like). Also made apparent in this chapter is the wider panorama of colonial interests across the respective colonies that variously supported and collided with missionary interests. These themes are illustrated in the three case study chapters. The next chapter traces the roots of infant education in Britain that was transported to the colonies around the same time as the expansion of missionary efforts outlined above. The ‘Nurseries of discipline’ were meant to combine ‘useful instruction’ with ‘necessary recreation’ to shape the character of the very young children, be they of the poor in Britain or of the ‘heathens’ in the colonies.

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Chapter 2

‘Nurseries of discipline’: Infant School Experiments in Britain They are nothing but the kindness of parents judiciously administered. In fact, the term School, does not convey a proper idea of them; they might better be called Nurseries of Discipline, combining useful instruction with necessary recreation.1

Harold Silver called ‘the story of the early infant school foundations … a series of fresh starts’.2 In his view, infant school pedagogy and theory of the nineteenth century were not a unitary development from a single starting point. Rather, the common element amongst the various models, types or systems was concern for the education and welfare of young poor children. On establishing the first infant school in Britain, Robert Owen set out general principles for teaching very young children in groups. These principles included the importance of play and kindly treatment grounded in an idea of development and learning that stressed the malleability of children and the key role the senses played in acquiring knowledge about the world. Learning in the schools was planned to be informal via play and thus pleasurable for children and embedded in social relationships.3 These ideas reflected Enlightenment thinking regarding childhood and were a novel approach to teaching very young children. However, Owen did not initially claim that his schools were in any way remarkable in terms of their approach to instruction. When he was asked, ‘Is there anything peculiar in your system of education?’ he responded that there was not: ‘it is a combination of what appears to me the best parts of the Bell and Lancastrian systems, with some little additions which have suggested themselves’.4 Owen’s writings on education were mainly concerned with explaining his ideas on social theory. His plan for New Lanark, as described in A New View of Society, was based on what he called the principle of prevention, which followed on the notion that environment directed behaviour. Desired behaviours could be established by changing the circumstances in which negative behaviours arose. ‘Infant School Society’, The Newcastle Courant (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England), February 19, 1825. 2 Harold Silver, The Concept of Popular Education: A Study of Ideas and Social Movements in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 145. 3 Robert Owen, A New View of Society (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), 82. 4 ‘Report of the minutes of evidence, taken before the Select Committee on the State of the Children Employed in the Manufactories of the United Kingdom,’ Parliamentary Papers (1816), 26. 1

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This required a rational plan based on ‘a close, accurate, and undeviating attention to facts’.5 However, as Owen described: A partial application of the principles is of far less importance than a clear and accurate account of the principles themselves, in order that they may be so well understood as to be easily rendered applicable to practice in any community, and under any circumstances. Without this, particular facts may indeed amuse or astonish, but they would not contain that substantial value which the principles will be found to possess.6

The application of the principles was left to others, and the beginnings of a practical ‘infant system’ were first worked out by James Buchanan and Mary Young, the teachers he recruited to lead the youngest class. Over time, Owen’s vision for a practice well grounded in theory gave way to a bricolage approach, as infant educators and educationists working in other contexts articulated their own ‘little additions’ in a quest for the one best way, which was often considered to be the cheapest and most efficient route, to achieve their goals. Whereas the aim for the youngest children was to keep them clean and content, the priority for four- to six-year-olds was formal learning. Manufacturers recognized the value of such schools in providing basic training and discipline for children during the few years prior to their employment. This chapter outlines the history of infant schools over the course of the first few decades of their development in Britain. It begins with Owen’s school at New Lanark for factory workers’ children before turning to experiments with the schools in urban centres. The chapter identifies essential elements of infant school architecture and pedagogy and explains them in relation to contemporary thinking on child development and educational and social theory. A Factory Infant School The school for young children at New Lanark was initially established in 1816 in the building used as the community social centre called the Institute for the Formation of Character. The institute housed a library and education and recreation facilities for youth and adults, but Owen designated that the main use of the building was to be for a school for children aged two to ten years. Classrooms for older children and a hall used for dance instruction and lectures occupied the top floor of the institute, and rooms for younger children – termed ‘the infants’ – were on the ground floor. The infant school combined a child care service with an early learning program for youngsters ‘from the time they can walk alone until they enter school’ at about 5 Robert Owen, ‘Letter published in the London Newspapers, July 30th 1817’, in Robert Owen, A Supplementary Appendix to the First Volume of The Life of Robert Owen (London: Effingham Wilson, 1858), 68. 6 Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813), 58.

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age five.7 Children aged five to about age ten were divided into two classes where they were ‘instructed in the rudiments of common learning’.8 The oldest children were instructed using the methods of Joseph Lancaster, including the use of older pupils as teacher assistants, called monitors. At age ten, most children went to work in the mills. Though the infant school was a single small-scale experiment, the venture was widely discussed, stimulated by Owen’s writings and lectures and reports of visitors to New Lanark. Owen’s factory village was a popular tourist destination in the early nineteenth century. A highlight for many visitors was observing the youngest children at play, and the older children’s lessons, drills, and dancing. Figure 2.1, reproduced in an 1825 publication by M. Egerton, shows visitors observing the older children dancing in the large hall on the top (first) floor of the institute, with their teachers on the right nearest the wall map.9 The original text accompanying the illustration describes the children’s exhibition, though not their dancing, in more detail: A portion of the children (the school usually consisting of about three hundred) have received their daily instruction in Geography;– the word “silence” being previously given,–on which, clapping their hands, they stand at ‘attention’ – à la militaire: – when the teacher puts questions to them, which are answered collectively, quickly, and with correctness; and, afterwards, selects a few singly, whom he examines – with reference to maps – of Europe, etcetera; they – in some cases – replying, – in others, pointing with a wand to the several countries, rivers, – or whatnot. The pupils subsequently changing their position, pasteboards on which are printed the words of ‘The Life-boat’ – ‘Green grow the rushes O’ – ‘We’re a’ noddin’ – ‘ Twist ye, twine ye’ – and ‘Vive Henrico,’ etcetera are handed to the company, and others retained by the children themselves, who all unite in singing such as may be selected by the teacher. Visitors are seated at the bottom and sides of the room, – one wall of which is partly covered with subjects suited to a Lecture on Natural History; – etceteras on the opposite.10

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 14. 9 M. Egerton, Airy Nothings; or; Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-Cum-Shorts; in 7 8

a Circumbendibus Hop, Step, and Jump. By Olio Rigmaroll (London: Thomas McLean, 1825). Egerton is described as an ‘amateur caricaturist’ in Mark Bryant and Simon Heneage, Dictionary of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, 1730–1980 (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1994), 70. The date of creation of Egerton’s illustration is unclear. It was included in an 1819 publication by Henry Grey Macnab, The New Views of Mr. Owen of Lanark Impartially Examined (London: J. Hatchard and Son). In the version in Macnab, the boys were shown wearing tunics with a tartan design. 10 Egerton, Airy Nothings, 51.

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Fig. 2.1

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‘Quadrille Dancing, first floor school room’, by G. Hunt, New Lanark, 1825. Mr. Owen’s Institution, New Lanark. (Quadrille Dancing). In M. Egerton, Airy Nothings; or; Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-Cum-Shorts; in a Circumbendibus Hop, Step, and Jump. By Olio Rigmaroll (London: Thomas McLean, 1825). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Geography was a core subject in the infant school for children in all age divisions. Large wall maps, portable maps on stands, and globes were teaching technologies supporting visual learning and suited to whole class teaching aimed at rote learning.11 Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen explained that geography lessons helped children develop an understanding of human diversity and subsequently tolerance for diversity.12 For example, when they learned about children in other countries, they were supposedly brought to understand that without the benefit of a Christian education they might have grown up as ‘Cannibals or Hindoos, just as the circumstances of our birth should have placed us’.13 The study of geography was therefore used for teaching the notion of ‘imperial citizenship’, whereby 11 Rex Walford, Geography in British Schools, 1850–2000: Making a World of Difference (London: Woburn Press, 2001). 12 Robert Dale Owen, An Outline of the System of Education. 13 Ibid., 48.

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‘children learned by heart negative stereotypes of other peoples as if they were lists of rivers or towns’.14 Visitors included educationists such as David Goyder, who had been teacher at the first infant school in Bristol. Goyder toured New Lanark after leaving his teaching position in 1825. He recalled that he ‘took memoranda of everything connected with them, as well as purchased a large quantity of apparatus’, and commented on the large size of the school rooms. Along with a group of visiting Quakers, he took in a ‘children’s ball’ of the sort depicted in Figure 2.1.15 The performance, which started at 6:30 a.m. and lasted ninety minutes, took place in the ‘children’s ball room’ where ‘everything was conducted with the most exact order’:16 The Master of the Ceremonies was a boy of about eleven year of age, the musicians about the same age. The children, boys and girls, were all bare-foot, but they were all exceedingly clean and neat; in particular, the girls had a most tasty appearance; their hair was very beautifully arranged and they wore a tartan tunic of the clan McGregor. Besides the ball, we were regaled with some very beautiful singing. One of the superintendents was present. But he never interfered in the arrangements; he was a mere looker on like ourselves.17

School normally started at 7:30 a.m., suggesting that the performance was planned to end about the time regular lessons would begin. Thousands of tourists and other visitors to New Lanark were treated to such exhibitions in the period 1815 to 1825.18 These performances served to showcase the children’s achievements and the approach to curriculum and pedagogy at the school. Written accounts by visitors to New Lanark frequently note the order and discipline of the children as they undertook their drills and dances, and some were critical. Robert Southey, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, who was a visitor in 1819, was critical of the children’s ‘puppet-like motions’ in the drills, though he conceded that ‘the children seemed to like it’.19 The school employed a teacher for dance and singing, which were considered essential aspects of the curriculum. The children were taught ‘Scotch reels, country dances, and quadrilles’ and, as a 14 Wong Yuk Yong, and W.E. Marsden, ‘Continuity and change in Geography’s contribution to citizenship education in the 19th and 20th Century’, Paedagogica Historica 29, no. 2 (1993): 484. 15 David Goyder, My Battle for Life: The Autobiography of a Phrenologist (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1857), 188. 16 Ibid., 188. 17 Ibid. 18 Ian Donnachie, ‘Historic Tourism to New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde 1795–1830: The Evidence of Contemporary Visiting Books and Related Sources’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 2, no. 3 (2004): 150. 19 Robert Southey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, introduction and notes by C.H. Herford (London, John Murray, 1929), 262–3.

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related activity, they were led in marching indoors and in the playground in order to ‘improve their carriage and manner of walking’.20 As explained by Robert Dale Owen, these activities were included both for the children’s ‘moral refinement and improvement’ and also because they were enjoyable for the children. ‘The best method of making a people virtuous is to begin by rendering their situation comfortable and happy’.21 Moreover, dance education was consistent with Enlightenment thinking. Dance was advocated by John Locke for its civilising influence and ‘cultural and health-giving role’.22 The children’s performances in the ballroom were thus a practical demonstration of Enlightenment ideas on education, which emphasized children’s malleability. It was believed that given the opportunity, ‘children of the industrial classes could demonstrate the same sense of refinement and civilisation as the aristocrat’.23 However, Scottish dancing was also a common tourist entertainment, and Goyder’s comments on the girls ‘most tasty appearance’ in the quote above revealed the appeal of the spectacle apart from its educational value. The older children normally wore a school uniform of ‘strong white cotton cloth’, no doubt made in the New Lanark mills. Elsewhere, Robert Dale Owen described the use of tartan in the uniform, which was in the style of a Roman tunic: knee-length for boys and ankle-length for girls.24 In the drawing by M. Egerton, the girls’ tunics are mid-calf, and the boys’ are above the knee. Neither Robert Owen nor his son outlined reasons for the uniform. However, the type of dress used at the New Lanark schools, though odd-looking to modern eyes, was not entirely novel. Inspired by Rousseau, the physician Bernhard Christoph Faust proposed dressing children in loose-fitting Roman-style tunics as an alternative to the constricting adult-like clothing that he believed was damaging to children’s moral and physical development.25 The New Lanark school for younger children was based on principles similar to those of the school for older children – e.g., children’s malleability – though it followed a more informal curriculum. In the school for younger children, which was eventually called the infant school, children had as ‘their chief occupation ...

20 Robert Dale Owen, An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (Glasgow: Wardlaw and Cunninghame, 1824), 71. 21 Ibid., 69. 22 Anne Bloomfield and Ruth Watts, ‘Pedagogue of the Dance: The Dance Master as Educator in the Long Eighteenth century’, History of Education 37, no. 4 (2008): 606. 23 Bloomfield and Watts, ‘Pedagogue of the Dance’, 617. 24 Ibid., 33; Robert Owen at New Lanark; Two Booklets and One Pamphlet, 1824–1838 (New York: Arno Press, 1972). 25 Inés Dussel, ‘School Uniforms and the Disciplining of Appearances: Towards a History of the Regulation of Bodies in Modern Educational Systems’, in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 230.

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to play and amuse themselves’ indoors or in the attached playground.26 The playground had a roofed area ‘under which in stormy weather, the children may retire for shelter’.27 The infants shared the playground with older children who used it before and after school. It was also used as a ‘drill ground’ and for ‘manual exercise’ for the older boys during the day.28 The dual roles of the school yard for free play and formal exercise will be explored in detail below as part of the discussion of infant school playgrounds. Little more than these details are known about the New Lanark infant school in the period 1816 to 1818. The latter date is significant. In 1818 the infant school moved into its own building, teacher James Buchanan, whom historians have closely associated with the development of the new play-based mode of teaching infants, left New Lanark to establish a school in London, and Robert Owen undertook a tour of the continent, including visits to the schools of J.F. Oberlin, Johann Pestalozzi, and Phillip Emanuel de Fellenberg.29 All of the descriptions of the New Lanark schools in the reports cited below are based on observations after that time. Whereas details regarding the classes for older children are found in a number of accounts, the class for infants was more often described in general terms. Descriptions tended to focus on the novelty of teaching infants rather than the particulars of what exactly went on in the school. As one example, Robert Dale Owen, writing in 1824, noted simply that the two- to five-year-olds attended for a half-day and then played under the supervision of a young woman who managed them ‘without harshness or punishment’.30 Additional fragments of information are contained in reports from visitors to the school. The American Quaker and educator John Griscom visited the school in March 1819, then housed in its new building. He reserved his comments to the class comprised of the youngest children, noting the value of what he called the ‘baby school’ as a service for mothers working at the mill: One apartment of the school afforded a novel and pleasing spectacle. It consisted of a great number of children, from one to three or four years of age. They are assembled in a large room, under the care of a judicious female, who allows them to amuse themselves with various selected toys, and occasionally collects the oldest into a class, and teaches them their letters … This baby school is of 26 Robert Owen, ‘An Address Delivered to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, on the First of January, 1816, at the Opening of the Institution Established for the Formation of Character’ (London: Richard and Arthur Taylor, 1816), 13. 27 Robert Owen, A New View (1813), 85. 28 Ibid., 113. 29 Oberlin established schools for young children in Alsace in the 1770s. The schools combined child care with literacy education and training in vocational skills. Pestalozzi and de Fellenberg were Swiss educators and reformers who established separate residential schools for poor children in the early 1800s. 30 Robert Dale Owen, An Outline of the System of Education, 32.

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Griscom’s rationale for the New Lanark child care service roughly followed that of Owen in his New View of Society published in 1816: mothers could increase their family’s quality of living by earning a wage; the care provided was higher quality than could be obtained from neighborhood caregivers; children could learn good ‘habits’ from an early age.32 The child care service therefore tied in two ways to Owens’ need for a ready supply of factory workers; one was immediate – in 1816 the majority of employees were women33 – the other was preparatory, helping infants acquire proper habits for their role as future workers. Henry Grey Macnab cited two reports in his book on New Lanark.34 One was from a visitor from Leeds in September 1819, who observed the youngest children at play: ‘There were some bowling hoops, some drumming on two sticks – all engaged in some infantine amusement or another. Not a tear not a wrangle. Peaceful innocence pervaded the whole group’.35 The children apparently spent almost their entire time outdoors, moving inside to the ‘playroom’ only ‘when the weather will not permit them to be out of doors’.36 Owen explained it somewhat differently: that ‘when beginning to tire of their play-ground, they should be taken within the school room, and amused by the teacher, by showing and explaining some useful object within their capacity to comprehend’.37 Once in the playroom, or the schoolroom as Owen called it, children were divided into two classes according to their age and ability, and play was combined with formal lessons. In addition, some children were sent to the ‘upper school’ at age four, ‘having attained the learning necessary for their advancement’.38

31 John Griscom, A Year in Europe, vol. 2 (New York: Collins & Co. and E. Bliss & E. White, 1823), 385–6. Griscom advocated the start-up of a similar facility in New York City upon his return to the United States. 32 Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813), 13. 33 Ian L. Donnachie and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark: The Dale & Owen Industrial Community Since 1785 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 87. 34 Macnab was a physician. His visit to New Lanark was commissioned by his employer, the Duke of Kent and Strathearn. H.S. Torrens, ‘Macnab, Henry Grey (1760–1823)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online ed., January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17702 (accessed October 18, 2012). 35 Report from a Deputation from Leeds (author unknown), cited in Henry Grey Macnab, The New Views of Mr. Owen of Lanark Impartially Examined (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1819), 104. 36 Cited in Macnab, The New Views, 105. 37 Robert Owen, The Life of Robert Owen, vol. 1 (London: Effingham Wilson, 1857), 175. 38 Cited in Macnab, The New Views, 105.

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An account of the visit by the Leeds delegation in The Times (London) noted that the children were viewed indoors, and were supervised by one ‘young woman’: There were upwards of an hundred children, from two to four years of age, in the infants’ room, under the management of a young woman, who kept them in tolerable order. They were a very fine healthy set of children, clean and decently dressed; and seemed perfectly happy and content.39

The report referred to the children’s disposition, physical health, and appearance, although nothing is said of their activities. Information is provided that there were quite a lot of children, and that they were managed rather than taught by a single caregiver. This matched Robert Southey’s description of the infants’ room as a child care facility. Southey was highly favourable of the children’s treatment: children ‘too young for instruction of any kind, were brought together while their parents were at work, and left to amuse themselves, with no more superintendence than is necessary for preventing them from hurting themselves’.40 The second description of the school that Macnab included was from a report by the head master, which provides more detail on how arrangements had shifted from the original plan, which had been to group all children under the age of six as one class. The head master revealed that children from two to four formed a separate group called the infant school, consistent with the age group of Griscom’s ‘baby school’: The centre room on the ground floor is set apart for the exercise and amusement of children from two to four years of age. In fine weather they generally prefer the large area which is in front of the building, and regularly walled in, and kept shut during the hours of teaching. The children of this class, as soon as they have acquired habits of speaking, are taken in rotation in classes of ten or twelve, into the room on the left hand, where they are taught the letters of the alphabet, monosyllables, etc. They have a teacher and three female attendants, who train them up in the paths of virtue and watch over their growing infancy. This class is called the infant school. The room on the left is occupied by children from four to six years of age. They are taught to read short and easy lessons, adapted to their capacities; they are permitted to amuse themselves, and to receive lessons alternately during the day.41

Thus by 1819 the youngest children were separated from the four- to six-yearolds for all or part of the day, with precocious four-year-olds moving directly to the upper class. It could be supposed that the latter children were few, and that the majority of their peers were not yet ready for the formal academic work of the upper school, but it was recognized four- and five-year-olds were too mature for ‘Visit to New Lanark’, The Times (London), September 9, 1819, 4. Southey, Journal of a Tour, 262. 41 Macnab, The New Views, 221–2. 39

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play amongst the very young children. In 1816 Robert Owen called this older class a ‘preparatory training school’ when he appeared before the House of Commons Committee on the State of Children Employed in Manufactories.42 Later, the infant school would include both the older and younger class of children. The language used to describe the experiment – playroom, infants’ class, infant school – and the approach to teaching and learning, were still being worked out in these first few years.43 It was not long, however, before a formalized ‘infant system’ developed, a process helped along by missionary experiments at home and abroad, as described in later chapters. Owen’s Views on Child Development and Education Another description of the New Lanark infant school is found in Barbara Buchanan’s history of the Buchanan family. Barbara Buchanan, who was teacher James Buchanan’s granddaughter, related the family story that Owen ‘simply supplied a bare room without even seats, much less toys, pictures, or anything else to occupy, instruct or amuse the children’.44 However, a lack of toys was part of Owen’s understanding of child education in which social relations were the key. Owen claimed that ‘thirty to fifty infants, when left to themselves, will always amuse each other without useless childish toys’.45 As noted earlier, by 1819 a few toys were provided, but in the main the children were kept occupied through activities that did not require materials, such as singing, dancing, and marching – activities that included the very youngest children. In the preparatory class for fourto six-year-olds, there were the wall maps, and Buchanan was instructed in their use. Lessons in geography and reading were planned for children’s amusement, along with the more active pursuits. Because there were many more children than thirty to fifty, teaching practices evolved to instruct large numbers of children, but in consideration of child development ideas. Owen expressed a clear child development viewpoint in writings, tying children’s capacities to their age. There were two schools, for example – one for children under six years, and the other for children aged six to ten – and the school for the younger children was subdivided further. Individual children who showed some precocity were promoted ahead of their peers to the other classes. However, overall the children were organized into their classes by age. A similar notion of age-related development was at the heart of Owen’s decision not to hire children under ten years of age as factory labourers. He believed working in the mills ‘Report of the minutes of evidence, taken before the Select Committee on the State of the Children Employed in the Manufactories of the United Kingdom,’ Parliamentary Papers (1816), 22. 43 Owen first used the term ‘infant school’ in an 1818 edition of New View of Society (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818). 44 Barbara Buchanan, Buchanan Family Records: James Buchanan and His Descendants (Capetown: Townshend, Taylor and Snashall, 1923), 2. 45 Owen, The Life of Robert Owen, 175. 42

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caused children physical and mental problems – ‘their growth and their minds were materially injured’ – whereas, in his view, the same was not true for youth or adults in properly managed factories.46 The school-leaving age at the New Lanark schools was therefore set as the age at which they were considered able to work full-time in the factory, for twelve hours inclusive of two meal breaks. Robert Owen’s schools at New Lanark were ‘part of an overall program of change’ in his factory village, involving improvements in the functioning of the mill, in the living conditions of the workers and their families, and in their attitudes and moral thinking.47 His ideas concerning education were set out in four essays that were compiled in A New View of Society. His essay ‘On the Formation of Character’ opened with a statement on the power of the environment to control development: Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.48

Owen considered himself to be one of those with influence, and that it was only left for him to devise the ‘proper means’ for shaping character, and thereby ‘relieve and re-moralize the poor’.49 Because he believed children especially were mouldable – they could ‘be trained to acquire any language, sentiments, beliefs, or any bodily habits and manners, not contrary to human nature’ – they were targeted for special treatment.50 The age of school entry was set extremely low: children were admitted ‘from the time they can walk alone’.51 Removing them to the schools early was important: the school at New Lanark was expressly designed as an alternative means of socialization for the children to ‘prevent children from imbibing the bad habits of parents’.52 Inculcating good habits in the young was believed to be easier than undoing the effect of bad habits acquired over time via social – in this case, familial – contagion. For Owen and for later infant school advocates, early childhood education was a preventative measure. Of course, some parents may have viewed the schools as interfering in family life, while Owen believed they were a necessary and positive intervention. Quoted in ‘Minutes of Evidence before Select Committee on the State of the Children Employed in the Manufactories of the United Kingdom’, Parliamentary Papers (1817), 20. 47 Silver, Concept of Popular Education, 112. See also Dennis R. Mills, Lord and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980). 48 Robert Owen, A New View of Society, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817), 9. 49 Robert Owen, ‘To the Editor of the Times’, The Times (London), July 30, 1817, 3. 50 Owen, A New View (1817), 20. 51 Owen, A New View of Society (1813), 12. 52 ‘Meeting on Mr. Owen’s Plan’, The Times (London), June 28, 1819, 3. 46

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Infant Schools for Workers’ Children Elsewhere Following the example at New Lanark, other factory owners established infant schools. Factory towns were full of children who had a high economic value for families and were required as industrial workers by factory owners. For example, when adults who worked in the pin-making industry applied for employment in pointing and cutting pins, their letters often referred to ‘their quiverful of children ready for service’ as pin-headers.53 Historian Michael Sanderson observes that the factory infant schools were ‘an ideal way of exerting the social control of the firm over its workers and of raising up young labourers in obedience if not in scientific skill’.54 Infant school graduates were sought out as docile workers – happy workers, in Owen’s terminology. In 1833, when the Royal Commission on Employment of Children in Factories asked mill owner Henry Ashworth about the ‘practical effects’ of the infant schools, he responded that his workmen ‘always prefer a child who has been educated at an infant school, as those children are most obedient and docile’.55 Another mill owner noted that the infant school was specifically used for recruiting child labourers. Children attending the school were promised ‘preference of employment when fresh children are taken on’.56 To Henry Ashworth, who modelled his school on Owen’s example, the schools were an ‘economic investment’.57 His infant school at the New Eagley cotton mill was attended by any of his adult workers’ children who were between the ages of two and nine. Their time in class decreased in stages as their status shifted from scholar to worker. At age nine, they went to work at the mill for reduced hours, dividing their days between eight-hour work shifts and two hours of study at the mill school for older children. This arrangement was called the short-time system. From thirteen to eighteen years of age, they worked a full shift of twelve hours and, with adult workers as their teachers, undertook forty-five minutes of schooling.58

T.S. Ashton, ‘The Records of a Pin Manufactory, 1814–21’, Economica 15 (1925):

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Michael Sanderson, ‘Education and the Factory in Industrial Lancashire, 1780–1840’, Economic History Review 20, no. 2 (1967): 256. 55 ‘Royal Commission on Employment of Children in Factories: Second Report, Minutes of Evidence; Reports of Medical Commissioners’, Parliamentary Papers (1833), vol. 12, 200. 56 ‘Royal Commission on Employment of Children in Factories. First Report, Minutes of Evidence; Reports of District Commissioners’, Parliamentary Papers (1833), vol. 12, 35. This may have been the owner of a factory in Staffordshire described by Samuel Wilderspin in Early Discipline Illustrated (London: Westley and Davis, 1832), 27. Wilderspin noted that there was considerable prejudice against the school at the start. 57 Rhodes Boyson, The Ashworth Cotton Enterprise: The Rise and Fall of a Family Firm, 1818–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 127. 58 Ibid., 129. 54

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A version of the short-time system was replicated in some plantation settlements in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the colonies, where schooling was organized to fit work routines.59 From the perspective of the plantation owners, this approach was a useful way of schooling slaves as it provided basic education and care for very young children prior to their use as full-time labourers. Appearing before the Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery in 1831, James Beckford Wildman described the system on his Jamaican estate, which was designed to provide basic schooling while maintaining profits. For younger children, early schooling held appeal due to their low value as workers in the present, but high value in the future. Wildman explained: I established an infant school and I kept the little children all day; the gang or class above them I took for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon; the second gang I took for one hour a day out of my time, and endeavoured to induce them to stay one hour out of their time; as they did not work for themselves, it was rest to them being in the school; then the adults were under no regular system of instruction.60

Historians have variously interpreted Beckford Wildman’s plan, which was one of a number of similar initiatives, as conservative or radical: instruction was both a form of moral control and discipline for slaves, and a step towards their freedom.61 Prior to emancipation, colonial authorities and most planters strongly opposed mission-operated schools, which they believed weakened the power relationship between slave-owner and slave.62 Infant schools were established in greater numbers in the British West Indies after emancipation in 1833, as a means of Christianizing the children of former slaves, and as an enticement for parents to remain working on the plantations for the sake of their children’s education.63 Many of the schools were organized by Thomas Bilby, who had trained under James Buchanan in London and worked as a lead teacher at the Chelsea Infant School, the model school operated by the

Olwyn M. Blouet, ‘Earning and Learning in the British West Indies: An Image of Freedom in the Pre-emancipation Decade, 1823–1833’, Historical Journal 34, no. 2 (1991): 396. 60 ‘Select Committee on Extinction of Slavery in British dominions, Report, Minutes of Evidence, appendix, Index’, Parliamentary Papers (1831–32), vol. 20, 533. 61 Olwyn M. Blouet, ‘Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies, 1823–33: The Role of Education’, History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1990): 625–43. 62 Patricia Rooke, ‘Slavery, Social Death and Imperialism: The Formation of a Christian Black Elite in the West Indies, 1800–1845’, in Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990): 23–45. 63 Frank J. Klingberg, ‘The Lady Mico Charity Schools in the British West Indies, 1835–1842’, Journal of Negro History 24, no. 3 (1939): 291–344. 59

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London Infant School Society.64 At the model school and in his writings with R.B. Ridgway, Bilby promoted a version of infant schooling as a form of evangelism. He travelled to the West Indies in 1834, and was appointed superintendent of Lady Mico Charity Schools in Trinidad in 1838. The aims of conversion were combined with academic instruction. Visitors to the schools noted, ‘The children sing frequently during school hours short hymns suited to their youthful understandings, with the several arithmetical tables’.65 Back home in England in 1841, Bilby was appointed inspector of infant schools for the Home and Colonial Infant School Society.66 In sum, the development of infant schools in the period 1816 to 1830 was caught up in rhetoric over industrial child labour in Britain.67 However, as Peter Kirby points out, ‘very few children below 10 were ever engaged in productive labour’ in Britain in the period 1750 to 1870, ‘whereas the vast majority of people had entered into a life of labour by the age of 16’.68 Some factory and plantation owners nevertheless viewed the schools as a means to secure and stabilize their workforce, both present and future. The provision of the schools, therefore, had diverse aims: as child care for working mothers, as a training program for future workers, and as evidence of the rightness of Owen’s social theory. In this last view it was a scheme for refashioning the common view of childhood to emphasize the malleability of human nature. Urban Infant Schools The infant school approach was first adapted to an urban setting in 1819. Called The Westminster Free Day Infant Asylum, it was established in London by 64 Brief biographies of Bilby are found in a number of sources on hymn writing in the period. An example is Charles Rogers, Lyra Britannica: A Collection of British Hymns (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1845), 62. On Bilby in Trinidad, see Flingberg, ‘The Lady Mico Charity Schools,’ and Patricia T. Rooke, ‘Papists and Proselytizers: Non-denominational Education in the British Caribbean after Emancipation’, History of Education 23, no. 3 (1994): 257–73. A good description of the Chelsea School, which opened in 1827, is in Thomas Faulkner, An Historical and Topographical Description of Chelsea and its Environs, vol. 2 (Chelsea: Nichols and Son, 1829). The operation of the school in its original location is described in ‘Infant Schools’, Times (London), May 13, 1826, 4. 65 George Truman, John Jackson, and Thomas B. Longstreth, Narrative of a Visit to the West Indies, in 1840 and 1841 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1844), 75. The legacy of the introduction of infant school methods is discussed in Carl C. Campbell, The Young Colonials: A Social History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago, 1834–1938 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1996). 66 Missionary Register (London: L. & G. Seeley, 1842), 64. 67 Peter Kirby, Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 68 Ibid., 4.

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social reformers Henry Brougham and Benjamin Leigh Smith and evangelicals including Joseph Wilson. It represented a second ‘fresh start’ in the story of infant schools after their factory beginnings. At first it was not called a school at all. In a discussion of the Charitable Funds Bill, Brougham reported on the early success of what he called the: ‘Infant Asylum,’ in which from 160 to 170 children received instruction, from the age of 3 to 5 or 6 years of age. … Any member might there see what advantages were to be obtained by such a system. Any suggestion for improving it would, however, be most gratefully received. Teaching was there used as an instrument rather than as an object. The object was to keep the children out of harm’s way, and from the baneful example which many of them would unhappily be exposed to at home. In a few months the progress of the children was not beyond expectations, for [Brougham] had seen the effects of a similar plan, under Fallenburg [de Fellenberg], in Switzerland, and under Owen in Scotland, but it was highly satisfactory.69

Reformers like MP Henry Brougham were motivated by a general interest in the education of poor children, together with a fear of the possible consequences of doing nothing: an increase in crime and social unrest. Keeping children ‘out of harm’s way’ was, in this regard, a self-serving aim. Brougham was knowledgeable about educational reforms in Britain and on the continent. He had visited New Lanark and Phillip Emanuel de Fellenberg’s agricultural school in Switzerland, and was impressed with the latter’s approach to vocational education for poor children.70 Children lived at de Fellenberg’s school apart from their parents. Brougham believed Owen’s day school was superior, that there was ‘good done to parents by the education of children’. Owen’s system, he believed, ‘where education alone is given to children, without any food or clothing, tends also, by a sort of reflex operation, to improve the habits of the parents themselves’.71 Brougham’s views on child development and learning were similar to Owen’s in many respects. Like Owen, he highlighted the importance of early experience – ‘If a child is neglected till six years of age, no subsequent education can recover it’; and children’s natural inclination to learn – ‘An infant is in a state of perpetual enjoyment from the intensity of curiosity’.72 However, his views on education for ‘House of Commons, Tuesday, July 6’, The Times (London), July 7, 1819, 2. G. Jeffrey Machin, ‘The Westminster Free Day Infant Asylum: The Origins of the

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First English Infant School’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 20, no. 2 (1988), 45. 71 Henry Brougham, ‘Debate on Mr. Owen’s Plan, Dec. 16, 1816’, in Opinions of Lord Brougham, on Politics, Theology, Law, Science, and Education, Literature, etcetera, etcetera: as Exhibited in His Parliamentary and Legal Speeches, and Miscellaneous Writings (London: H. Colburn, 1837), 94. 72 Henry Brougham, ‘Early Formation of Good Habits, June 28, 1820’, in Opinions of Lord Brougham, 117.

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the very young were less expansive than Owen’s. For Brougham, the educational purpose of the infant asylum was mainly to effect children’s moral development: In the establishment at Westminster, none but children between three and five years of age are admitted, and there they are kept out of the streets, and taken care of by a parental indulgent dame, while their mothers are set at liberty to go out and work. Whether the children learn less or more is of little consequence. The moral discipline is the great consideration.73 [emphasis added]

While Brougham was impressed with the infant asylum as a means to shape children’s moral thinking, he did not agree with the principles on which Owen’s scheme was based, stating, ‘I conceive the theory on which it is founded to be wholly erroneous’.74 Brougham sided with Malthusian population theory, which predicted that food and other resources could not support the continued growth of an underclass, while Owen was a vocal critic of Malthus’s ideas.75 Brougham would champion the theory in debates over the Poor Law in the 1830s.76 The urban and factory schools shared the aim of providing a child care service for working mothers. The New Lanark school served the children of workers in a factory town, and was an enticement for mothers of young children to seek employment in the mill and then to remain; the school in London was set in a slum and was meant to serve poor families in which mothers laboured outside the home. However, the factory and urban infant schools were set in vastly different contexts, serving to test the transferability of the schooling model. In New Lanark, families were compelled to send their young children to their employer’s school; there was no such pressure in London where the school was unfamiliar to the families and initially not welcomed by them, causing Buchanan to go about the neighbourhood in search of students. As related by Brougham in the report cited above, Buchanan was successful in this search and attendance grew considerably in a period of six months. There were other differences that shaped developments at the urban infant school. In New Lanark, the school was situated in the expansive facilities of the factory town, and was conceived as the first step in a larger education program. In London, the school was initially housed in the former quarters of a coachspring and axel tree manufacturer on Brewer’s Green.77 Moreover, as Brougham Ibid. Henry Brougham, ‘Debate on Mr. Owen’s Plan’, 94. 75 Russell Dean, ‘Owenism and the Malthusian Population Question, 1815–1835’, 73 74

History of Political Economy 27, no. 3 (1995): 579–97. 76 James P. Huzel, The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Martineau, Cobbett and the Pauper Press (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); Peter Dunkley, ‘Whigs and Paupers: The Reform of the English Poor Laws, 1830–1834’, Journal of British Studies 20, no. 2 (1981): 124–49. 77 The Two Goliaths (pseudonym for Thomas Bilby and R.B. Ridgway), ‘To the Editor of Educational Magazine’, Educational Magazine, July 1835, 57.

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described, the children’s education was of no great importance, being under the management of a ‘parental indulgent dame’, a phrase that aligned schooling at the Westminster Free Day Infant Asylum with neighbourhood dame schools. However, there is a variety of evidence that there was more going on at the infant asylum than Brougham described: he may have been referring only to the activities of the youngest children. The committee had hired James Buchanan from New Lanark as their first teacher and, except for a brief period in the 1820s, he continued at the school until 1839. As at New Lanark, Buchanan had a role in determining the way teaching was organized at the school. It could be supposed that Buchanan had developed teaching strategies at New Lanark in line with Owen’s general principles through his three years’ teaching experience in the preparatory training school with the four- to six-year-olds, with a female assistant in charge of the younger children. The grouping of children and the gendered division of teaching responsibilities were replicated at the school in London, where Buchanan’s wife Isabella managed the smallest children. In London, however, Buchanan worked without the support of his colleagues in the school for older children, and without the resources provided by Owen. Buchanan used music, marching and games to amuse and teach the children, leading them in singing the alphabet to the tune of Auld Lang Syne for example.78 The Brewer’s Green school initially had few materials: fellow teacher Samuel Wilderspin recalled that in 1820 there were only ‘some little penny books’ and ‘some inch cubes’.79 It is not clear, however, that additional materials – particularly for individual children’s use – were considered a necessary part of Buchanan’s approach. As reviewed later, infant education was largely achieved via visual learning along with oral instruction.80 The school’s original supporters lost interest in the venture, apparently put off by Buchanan’s odd teaching, and the Brewer’s Green school closed in 1822. It was re-established by Radical politician and Unitarian Benjamin Leigh Smith in the same year in a school built by Smith on Vincent Square, a short distance away. In order to distinguish between the two schools of the same name, in this chapter they will be subsequently referred to by their location. Newspaper editor Edward Baines made a report of a typical day at the Vincent Square school in 1824. Writing in his newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, he observed at the noon break, finding the children at play. When the class commenced, the 78 The alphabet song was included in a collection of tunes for infants by Thomas Bilby, who studied with Buchanan and was later head of a training institute: Thomas Bilby, A Course of Lessons Together with the Tunes, to which they are usually sung in Infant Schools, 3rd ed. (London: J.G. & F. Riving, 1836), 4. 79 Samuel Wilderspin, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Educational Magazine (July 1835), 149 [emphasis in original]. 80 Jill Shefrin, ‘“Adapted for and Used in Infants’ Schools, Nurseries, etc.,” Booksellers and the Infant School Market’, in Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009): 163–80.

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140 pupils were divided by gender, with Buchanan teaching the older boys and Isabella the girls and the younger children. Baines observed that the approach ‘resembles the Lancasterian plan, but has more variety’.81 Buchanan started the afternoon with all of the children marching about the room. They then recited the Ten Commandments and prayed, likely while assembled in the gallery.82 Small groups gathered around alphabet frames attached to the wall to recite their letters, after which Buchanan took the oldest boys to another room for instruction in arithmetic, writing, and object lessons using pictures. Isabella remained with the girls and the youngest children, teaching a few of the older girls sewing while the youngest children played with toys. Older girls working as monitors instructed some of the children in the alphabet, but most did ‘nothing except talk to each other, and play with their toys’.83 Although Baines did not write about the outdoor play, the school had a playground attached, which was equipped with swings.84 The Brewer’s Green school hosted many visitors, including some from abroad, notably from France. Some stayed for longer training, which involved periods of observation along with some practical teaching experience under the supervision of Buchanan. In this way the approach to teaching young children developed at New Lanark and continued by Buchanan in London was spread throughout Britain and into Europe. There was not yet, however, anything that could be called a system of infant education. Establishing a system was largely the work of Samuel Wilderspin through his work as agent of the Infant School Society. In 1824 the Infant School Society was formed to promote the cause of infant schools in Britain, and included amongst its members Henry Brougham, Benjamin Leigh Smith, and Joseph Wilson, who had been among the founders of the Westminster Free Day Infant Asylum five years earlier. Wilderspin’s work for the society involved travelling throughout England and Scotland giving lectures and teaching demonstrations as a means of sparking community interest in the schools. He also authored a number of publications on infant education, beginning with On the Importance of Educating the Infant Children of the Poor in 1823. Other books about the infant school closely followed Wilderspin’s, freely borrowing from his approach. Some were written by teachers trained by Wilderspin or who had observed his work at the Quaker Street (Spitalfields) Infant School, such David Goyder in Bristol and the vicar William Wilson in Walthamstow. A major distinguishing feature of the books and the systems was their treatment of religious instruction. Infant schools were therefore characterized by a polyvalence of practices drawing on Lancaster’s methods and with some attention to child development Edward Baines, Leeds Mercury, July 31, 1824, 3. The school was equipped with ‘baths, gallery, playground, etc.’: Pam Hirsch,

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Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827–1891 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 7. 83 Ibid. 84 Samuel Wilderspin, Infant Education; or, Practical Remarks on the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 4th ed. (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1829).

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ideas. The biggest departure from Owen’s scheme was a shift from learning by doing to instruction via words and observation. In this way ‘the infant school instrument was being adapted to techniques hitherto reserved for older children’, as described by Harold Silver.85 The Brewer’s Green and Vincent Square schools were therefore distinct from Owen’s, and the plans of Wilderspin and others presented further variations. Wilderspin was keen to promote his version as the true infant school, which placed him in opposition to the growing number of educators promoting their own systems. In Silver’s assessment, ‘Wilderspin can only claim credit for having founded and disseminated his version of the infant school’.86 It was Wilderspin’s version, however, that dominated the scene. An Infant System As Silver put it, there were ‘ambiguities involved in adapting Owen’s total concept of infant education’.87 The infant school system as it developed in the 1820s was grounded in paradoxical ideas: children were meant to be free in their play within a system of teaching and learning that to modern eyes was restrictive. Wilderspin, for example, was definite in his belief in the importance of free play for development: ‘If [children] play at what they choose they are free beings, and manifest their characters; but if they are forced to play at what they do not wish, they do not manifest their characters, but are cramped and are slaves, and hence their faculties are not developed’.88 The call for freedom existed alongside the requirement for order. William Wilson told teachers, ‘The first thing which you will have to do on opening an Infants’ School will be properly to arrange the children’, sorting them into separate classes according to the type of instruction, their abilities, and by age.89 Ordering of children and managing their activity were necessary for efficiency as well as being an aspect of the curriculum. Numerous manuals on infant education were published in the 1820s and 1830s. Most offered a consistent view of how to arrange a school to meet the purposes of the moral, religious, and literacy education of small children. Many were by teachers with brief or no training, but with direct experience in organizing a school. The manuals described the building itself as ordered and divided into a schoolroom, gallery and playground, and the plans for each were generally included, as in Figure 2.2. In these plans the playground was placed adjacent to the indoor space, and indoor space divided into a large schoolroom and a smaller 87 88 89

Silver, The Concept of Popular Education, 143. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 141. Ibid. William Wilson, A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools, adapted for the Infants’ Schools in the United States by H.W. Edwards (New York: G. & G. & H. Carvill, 1830), 12. 85 86

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‘The school room and playground in Wilson’s infant school’. In William Wilson, A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools, adapted for Infants’ Schools in the United States by H. William Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830). Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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classroom, with a gallery for each one. Scottish educationist David Stow, who claimed to have invented his own ‘training system’, highlighted the importance of the gallery and playground in particular by calling these spaces ‘covered’ and ‘uncovered’ schoolrooms.90 In this way the playground was identified as essential to the infant system, a theme that Wilderspin echoed: The gallery being the theatre upon which it is expected the intellectual stimulus will be given and maintained, will, nevertheless, be defective in its tendencies on the moral condition of the pupils, unless the genial influence of a kindly and affectionate control be extended to the playground.91

In some manuals, like Wilderspin’s, the plans included a teachers’ residence and part of the schoolroom was sectioned into classrooms. The combined space was generally rectangular with a ratio of outdoor to indoor space of about two to one. Stow recommended this ratio as the ideal, emphasizing that despite the cost of land in larger cities, ‘elbow-room must be provided for children in both the covered and uncovered classrooms’.92 Most manuals supplied a single plan, leaving little to chance. However, Wilson offered a second version with a different configuration of the gallery, and Bilby and Ridgway had three ‘approved plans’.93 As described above, Owen stressed the importance of forming social relationships in the infant school. Such relationships were to be developed via the teachers’ behaviour, use of language, and constant presence, bringing the children to love their teacher and thus to learn. Surveillance, as a tie between the teacher and children, was necessitated by the size of the groups and concerns for the children’s slide into bad behaviour if not watched constantly. In a Foucauldian view, surveillance is a tool to achieve disciplinary power, involving the techniques of enclosure, partitioning, functional sites, and rank.94 The ‘enclosure’ of the walled compound of the infant school enabled the surveillance of the entire group of students, helping students to maintain ‘controlled concentration’; ‘partitioning’ occurred as students were separated into classes by age or ability; ‘functional sites’ were specialized learning spaces – for whole-group and small-group lessons in the gallery, classroom, or playground – with distinct teaching strategies used in each space; ‘rank’ marked the status of students by ability, serving as a motivation for students who desired to become monitors or progress to higher ‘ability groups’. David Stow, The Training System (Edinburgh: Blackie and Son, 1840). Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, Applied to all Faculties

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(London: James S. Hodson, 1840), 300. 92 Stow, The Training System, 78. 93 Thomas Bilby and R.B. Ridgway, The Infant Teacher’s Assistant, 3rd ed. (London: Widow Tilling, 1834), 162. 94 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). The following section on disciplinary techniques is drawn from Lizbet Simmons, ‘The Docile Body in School Space’, in Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 57–64.

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Child Development Ideas An assortment of child development ideas and principles of teaching and learning guided infant school pedagogy. These were more often simply described rather than explained. Reflecting Owen’s ‘principle of prevention’, infant school educators emphasized the importance of manipulating circumstances to change behaviour: removing temptation in some cases, and strategically arranging it in others. Children were seen to be malleable while young, driven to be active and curious, and playful by nature. Specific pedagogies were developed to exploit these characteristics to advantage. Moreover, children were seen positively to be cooperative and industrious so long as they were kept happy and active. William Wilson characterized the infant system as ‘instruction by amusement’, in which ‘the periods of learning are short, and frequently changed’, the latter being necessary to fix children’s attention through novelty and surprise.95 The main pathway to learning was via observation. A ‘child receives a great deal of knowledge from the eye,’ Wilderspin explained, and the eye required training.96 Learning via the senses was the keystone of Johann Pestalozzi’s educational method, which was directed at developing all aspects of a child’s personality in harmony with its essential nature.97 His educational method was worked out at his boarding school in Yverdon, Switzerland, attended by children from age six to twelve. Sensory learning was later formalized by other educators in Pestalozzian object lessons, in which students gained information from the guided observation of objects or pictures printed on cards.98 The approach was influential in infant education. Visitors to Yverdon included Henry Brougham in 1816, Richard and Maria Edgeworth in 1812, and Maria again in 1818, and Robert Owen in 1818 as noted in Chapter 1. The English mystic and educator James Pierrepont Greaves spent three years at the school starting in 1818. Greaves was mainly interested in children’s spiritual development along the lines of his own peculiar theosophical beliefs. Upon his return to London he promoted Pestalozzi’s ideas in infant schools through his work as honorary secretary of the Infant School Society.99 Another follower of Pestalozzi, Dr. Charles Mayo, advocated for the use of object lessons and teaching via catechetical dialogues as a means of evangelism William Wilson, A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools (London: George Wilson, 1829), 22. 96 ‘Report on the Select Committee on Education in England and Wales’, Parliamentary Papers (1835), vol. 7, 16. 97 Michael R. Heafford, Pestalozzi (London: Methuen, 1967), 53. 98 Sarah Anne Carter, ‘On an Object Lesson, or Don’t Eat the Evidence’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3, no. 1 (2010): 7–12; and Sarah Anne Carter, ‘Object Lessons in American Culture’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2010). 99 Jackie E.M. Latham, Search for a New Eden: James Pierrepont Greaves (1777–1842): The Sacred Socialist and His Followers (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999); and Jackie E.M. Latham ‘Pestalozzi and James Pierrepoint Greaves: A Shared Educational Philosophy’, History of Education 31, no. 1 (2002): 59–70. 95

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with young children. For Charles Mayo, ‘the Infant School should be a sacrifice to the Lord’.100 Mayo was a supporter of the Home and Colonial Infant School Society, along with his sister, teacher and author Elizabeth Mayo. The Mayos stressed the match between object lessons as pedagogy and young children’s intellectual development: Considering the state of the infant mind, its susceptibility to impressions made through the outward sense, – we may, I think, infer, that either an actual object or a picture presents the most suitable means of awakening attention and calling up interest.101

There was nothing in these ideas, however, that could be identified as a unifying theory of child development, or of teaching and learning. The teachers who popularized infant school ideas were not known for theoretical expositions: phrenologist James Simpson described Wilderspin as being ‘utterly unembarrassed by theory’.102 Some ideas were doubtless influenced by Swedenborgian teachings – James Buchanan, Samuel Wilderspin, and David Goyder were all members of the New Church – though the precise influence is difficult to detect. A review of Goyder’s manual in The New Jerusalem Magazine and Theological Inspector was critical of some elements of his approach, namely his use of stocks and handcuffs as punishments, but was otherwise favourable. Of note for the reviewer was Goyder’s ‘plan of developing the faculties … in order to open a passage to the heart’.103 According to Swedenborg, ‘a man’s mind is his spirit’, an idea consistent with intellectual training in the infant school.104 Evangelicals writing on the infant system such as Wilson and Thomas Bilby considered the child as needing salvation. Literacy in this case was a strategy for saving souls. A complicating factor in teasing out infant school ideas was the attachment of phrenological theory to infant school pedagogy. Infant schools figure prominently in histories of phrenology, while phrenological theory has received less attention in infant school histories.105 Phrenologists, however, made early attempts to place the infant system on a theoretical footing, in spite of the uneasy relationship they Charles Mayo and Elizabeth Mayo, Practical Remarks on Infant Education (London: Home and Colonial Infant School Society, 1837), 6. 101 Ibid., 10. 102 Cited in Stephen Tomlinson, Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Thought (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 175. 103 Review of A Manual of the System of Instruction Pursued at the Infant School, Meadow Street, Bristol, 4th ed., by D.G. Goyder, in The New Jerusalem Magazine and Theological Inspector 1, no. 1 (1826), 18. 104 Emanuel Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1852), 54. 105 On infant schools in the history of phrenology, see David de Giustino, Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1975); Tomlinson, Head Masters. 100

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had with Swedenborgians. There was considerable debate at the time regarding the degree to which the ideas of the two groups were sympathetic: Swedenborgians protested against the phrenologists’ portrayal of Swedenborg’s early writing on the brain as foreshadowing phrenological ideas; and phrenologists denied the existence of a spirit because it could not be scientifically proven.106 Phrenology was a pseudoscientific theory of mind, popular in the nineteenth century as a practical approach to social improvement, in which behavior and personality could be changed by training the mind. While the theory was subjected to criticism and ridicule, phrenological ideas were nevertheless significant for the developing infant system, providing teachers with a language and a tool for children’s assessment by which ‘the mind could be read anatomically’.107 In phrenology, different mental faculties as well as general dispositions were mapped onto the brain; their degree of development was visible on the skull in the form of bumps or protrusions. Faculties ranged from ‘number’ to ‘wonder’ in George Combe’s scheme, and were housed in various ‘organs’ in the brain. A knowledgeable practitioner of phrenology could assess development through a visual check, or by measuring or ‘manipulating’ the skull to feel the ‘organs’ beneath.108 Dispositions and the upper limits of intellectual ability were fixed at birth. In the words of ‘professional phrenologist’ Cornelius Donovan, ‘no Education will work a natural small Brain into a large one’.109 This view was at complete odds with Owen’s idea, cited above, that ‘children can be trained to acquire any language, sentiments, and belief, or any bodily habits and manners, not contrary to human nature, even to make them, to a great extent, either an imbecile or energetic characters’.110 Owen nevertheless favoured the phrenological idea of the heritability of characteristics over religious explanations of original sin.111 There were indeed ambiguities in the application of infant school ideas, as Harold Silver noted. Phrenologists believed that the mental faculties needed training and that this was ideally accomplished through a rational education. In Combe’s words, ‘An

106 S. Noble, ‘Pretended Ascription to Swedenborg of Explicit Statements on the Subject of Phrenology’, The Intellectual Repository and New Jerusalem Magazine 5, no. 51 (1838): 143–6; A. Cameron Grant, ‘Combe on Phrenology and Free Will: A Note on Nineteenth-Century Secularism,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 1 (1965): 141–7. 107 Sasha Grishin, ‘Realism, Caricature and Phrenology: Early Colonial Depictions of the Indigenous Peoples of Australia’, in The World Upside Down: Australia, 1788–1830 (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000), 16. 108 Cornelius Donovan, A Handbook of Phrenology (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), 135. 109 Ibid., 172. 110 Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813), 10; On Owen and phrenology, see A. Cameron Grant, ‘New Light on an Old View’, Journal of the History of Ideas 29, no. 2 (1968): 293–301. 111 Angus McLaren, ‘Phrenology: Medium and Message’, Journal of Modern History 46, no. 1 (1974): 86–97.

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uninstructed man is one in whom all the organs work at random’.112 Instruction provided children with knowledge, first of objects, and then with them through language. ‘The true plan,’ as described by Combe, ‘is, to present the object to the children; let them examine its form, size, colour and other particulars, and afterward tell the name, and spell it’.113 As an example, he described the effect of his experiment: ‘I dissected, before two girls and a boy, the heart and lungs of a sheep. Their delight was great, the impression made on their minds vivid and lasting’.114 Phrenologists saw much that they admired in the systems of early childhood education described by Wilderspin and Stow, and later by Friedrich Froebel.115 There was, for example, a concern for moderation so as not to strain ‘the organs of the brain’, and the use of objects in teaching which matched the phrenologists’ belief in the benefits of learning via experience.116 Playgrounds provided fresh air and exercise and the necessary balance between physical and intellectual stimulation, as well as serving as ‘the theatre for moral training’ in Combe’s words or a site for ‘moral exhibition’ as Stow described it.117 This matched Robert Owen’s view of the role of community in managing social behaviour. Writing about the need of punishment in an Owenite community formed in 1825, Abram Combe, George Combe’s brother, proposed to ‘make the action known … The Eye of the Community, and the inward feeling produced, will soon either create a change of conduct, or make the individual retire from the Society’.118 Of course, in the context of the school, the option was to change behaviour. Another of the Combe brothers, Andrew Combe, included a full chapter on the need for a balanced approach to the ‘moral and intellectual management of infancy … to give due exercise to all the faculties, and not to cultivate any to excess, while others are allowed to languish from inactivity’.119 Thus the training of the senses, physical exercise, singing, and the combined activities of chanting the times tables while marching or playing on the swing were recommended as in Wilderspin’s and Stow’s infant systems.120

114 115 116 117 118

George Combe, Lectures on Phrenology (New York: Samuel Colman, 1839), 342. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 344. Donovan, A Handbook of Phrenology, 177. Combe, Lectures on Phrenology, 344. Ibid., 345; Stow, The Training System. Quoted in ‘Letter from Abram Combe’, The Register for the First Society of Adherents to Divine Revelation, at Orbiston 1, no. 27 (1827): 9–10. 119 Andrew Combe, A Treatise on the Physiological and Moral management of Infancy, 8th ed. (Edinburgh: MacLachlan and Stewart, 1854), 153. 120 John van Wyhe provides a general summary of the influence of phrenological naturalism in education in Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 112

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Historian David de Giustino argues that any similarity between infant school pedagogues and phrenological theory was accidental on their part. Wilderspin, for example, simply ‘borrowed theories and methods, often without realising their derivation’.121 Wilderspin did, however, come to be a ‘semi convert’ to the ideas in the 1830s, following his close association with Edinburgh phrenologists.122 George Combe invited him to lead the creation of the Edinburgh Model Infant School, which opened in 1831.123 Some infant school teachers were devotees of phrenology, seeing in it the potential for more efficient and scientific teaching. One was David Goyder, who, after attending a lecture by George Combe, began a study of phrenology which he applied in his work with children at his school in Bristol. Monitors, for example, were given duties according to their assumed specialization – music, arithmetic, geography, and so on. In 1820, the children at the New Lanark school were examined by George Combe, in order to study their ‘talents and dispositions’: He began at one end of the apartments and proceeded to the other, selecting extreme cases both of the deficiency and endowment of cerebra organization, and pointed out the mental defects in qualifications which he supposed them to indicate. Mr. William Ballantyne, the teacher, who, from a close intimacy with the children, was acquainted not only with their talents but with their dispositions, bore ample testimony to the general correctness of the observations; so much so, that in consequence of this demonstration of its truth, he commenced the study of the science without delay.124

As this account indicates, Ballantyne was so impressed by the experience that he became a serious student of phrenology, undertaking a longer study of it on his own. A letter from Ballantyne was included in the New Edinburgh Review in 1821: I can now with ease trace the different organs as they are marked out on the plate at the end of the [George Combe’s] Essays on Phrenology, and understand the faculties connected with them, and have acquired more knowledge of human nature by this study in 6 months, that I had been able to acquire in the 6 years preceding (during which I have been in Mr. Owen’s school) without such assistance.125

de Giustino, Conquest of Mind, 178. McCann and Young, Samuel Wilderspin, 116. 123 Stephen Tomlinson, ‘Phrenology, Education and the Politics of Human Nature: The 121 122

Thought and Influence of George Combe’, History of Education 26 (1997): 1–22. 124 George Combe, Essays on Phrenology (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1822), 341–2. Combes’ visit is described in J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World, new ed. (New York: Routledge Revivals, 2010). 125 Quoted in ‘Spurzheim on Education’, The New Edinburgh Review 1, no. 2 (1821): 331–2.

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The infant mind could thus be ‘read’ as teachers’ attention turned to understanding individual children’s development and its deviance from the norm. Gathering children together in large groups opened the way for new opportunities for scientific investigation. However, evangelical infant school pedagogues, who were the majority, set themselves apart from such initiatives. Teacher James Brown, who worked at the Spitalfields Infant School, recalled of this period: For though we were then thronged with professors of gymnastics, (or, jumping gentlemen, as some of our children called them,) lecturers on phrenology, (or, phrenzyology,) with some teachers of metaphysics, who covered our school slate with their indescribable diagrams, we had but few to exhibit Jesus, and the plain way of salvation, through faith in his blood.126

Infant School Teaching Devices Pedagogues such as Stow and Wilderspin were largely unconcerned with such debates. Their aim was the efficient teaching of large numbers of children at low cost. Historian Ian Hunter credits them with developing strategies that retain the essential and intimate pastoral relationship of teacher to student, while contending with upwards of 200 children: It was pastoral technicians like Wilderspin and Stow who solved the crucial problem confronting the development of a government school system in England in the early nineteenth century: how to adapt the intimate pastoral guidance of souls to the needs to a large-scale bureaucratic system of social training oriented to ‘state-building’. They did so by developing the classroom as a purpose-built learning environment, overseen by an ever-smiling but ever-vigilant pastoral teacher.127

The two aspects of the learning environment that are most strongly associated with the infant system – the playground and the gallery – are detailed below. Playground In Practical Education, published in 1801, Maria Edgeworth and Richard Edgeworth described the tension between setting limits for children and setting them free. The Edgeworths developed this theme in their discussion on ‘play grounds’, which, as a functional site for children’s informal activity, was a new idea:

126 James R. Brown, The Infant School and Nursery Guide, 2nd ed. (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1843), 14. 127 Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 140.

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Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Children are sometimes injudiciously restrained with regard to exercise; they are required to promise to keep within certain boundaries when they are sent out to play; their promises are often broken with impunity, and thus the children learn habits of successful deceit. Instead of circumscribing their play grounds, as they are sometimes called, by narrow inconvenient limits, we should allow them as much space as we can with convenience, and at all events exact no promises. We should absolutely make it impossible for them to go without detection into any place which we forbid. It requires some patience and activity in preceptors to take all the necessary precautions in issuing orders, but these precautions will be more useful in preserving the integrity of their pupils, than the most severe punishments that can be devised.128

In this view, children were by their nature unable to stay within the prescribed space and to be truthful about their escapades. They required adults to either constantly supervise their play or to restrict their activity, thereby removing all temptation.129 In the infant school playground, children were both supervised constantly – at least in the ideal – and restricted in their activity. This system did not, however, extend to removing temptation as it was perceived to have value in this protected environment. Temptations such as picking low-hanging fruit or colourful flowers were planned as potential learning experiences. A youngster picking the fruit or flowers was regarded by infant school promoters, such as David Stow, as performing a ‘moral exhibition’. The teacher observing this deed would say nothing at the time. Later, the situation would ‘form the groundwork of a training lesson’.130 As Stow explained, ‘A jury trial is afterwards instituted in the school gallery, the whole school being jurors, so that the discovery of the offender may prove a lesson to all’.131 This was similar to the plan described by Lancaster for meting out discipline by student jury. ‘Never … overlook a fault’ was Wilderspin’s ‘fourth rule’ for infant school teachers.132 Even children’s accidents could be made a training lesson. As Wilderspin described it, once children knew the rules of behaviour, any injuries they received were entirely their fault. A boy injured on the playground, for example, could be brought before the children in the gallery as a lesson to others to take better care: If [the child] appears hurt, all will pity it; let then the question be put, How did this happen? And the answer will be, perhaps, ‘Please sir, because he did not make use of his eyes’. Here, then, is full opportunity to inculcate caution, and 128 Maria Edgeworth and Richard Edgeworth, Practical Education, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1801), 313. 129 William Pitt Scargill, Recollections of a Blue-Coat Boy, or, a View of Christ’s Hospital (Swaffham: F. Skill, 1829), 53. 130 Stow, The Training System, 50. 131 Ibid., 305. 132 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 106.

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to inform and benefit the whole. For example: the master may say, ‘How many senses have we?’133

Children were expected to be active for at least part of each day. As Stow described it, vigorous play could occur indoors if there was no alternative: ‘A large, empty, or unfurnished hall, may be made a playground, when better cannot be had’.134 In bad weather Wilderspin recommended having ‘several swings in the school-room, made of cord only, on which the children swing, two at a time’.135 The preference, however, was for a playground outdoors, with all children engaged in activity. As Wilderspin explained, a child in the playground is ‘either doing, or watching others doing, which is invariably the case, unless he is indisposed or asleep’.136 This suggested that children had greater agency in the playground than the schoolroom, where their attention was required for their formal lessons, and they were expected at least to stay awake. The range of playground activities and the physical setup are depicted in an illustration in Wilderspin’s 1840 manual, A System of Education for the Young (Figure 2.3).137 The wooden bricks and swings would not actually have been used at the same time.138 Wilderspin drew attention to the need to supervise children in his commentary on the illustration, pointing out that the teachers are ‘both represented as being with the children in the playground’.139 Children can be seen in the foreground using wooden bricks to construct buildings and practise geometry – forming squares, pentagons, and hexagons. The bricks were larger than the counting cubes used in the schoolroom, measuring ‘four inches long, an inch and a half thick, and two inches and a half wide’.140 Children copied patterns on the ground which had been laid out by their teacher or a monitor. Wilderspin explained that playing with bricks was an ideal educational activity, with the potential to prepare children for emigration and prevent delinquency: The bricks ‘combine amusement with instruction, all of which may be of great use, to the boys especially, in after life; and should they emigrate, as many at this time do, its uses are evident; besides, it keeps them out of mischief, and prevents idleness, the product of much evil and misery’.141

133 Wilderspin, The Infant System for Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of All Children from One to Seven Years of Age, 7th ed. (London: James S. Hodson, 1840), 87. 134 Stow, The Training System, 378. 135 Samuel Wilderspin, On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 2nd ed. (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1824), 54. 136 Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, xi. 137 Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young. 138 Ibid., 42. 139 Ibid., xi. 140 Wilderspin, The Infant System (1840), 85. 141 Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, 42.

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Fig. 2.3

Outdoor play. In Samuel Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, Applied to all Faculties (London: James S. Hodson, 1840). Author’s collection.

Bricks were supplied in a quantity of about 1,000, and the small cart was provided ‘to enable the children to take the wood bricks away, and place them in their proper place, as on no account are they to be left out’.142 They were to be put away in perfect order. This requirement was set partly with an eye to training them for future roles as workers. Wilderspin estimated that ‘half the complaints against servants of both sexes arise from want of attention to those things’.143 Wilderspin elaborated on care of the bricks cautioning that ‘care must be taken not to let the children throw the bricks about, which at first they are sure to do, if not prevented’. He further warned that children ‘must never be allowed to take them into the privies, which they are apt to do if not repeatedly told to the contrary’.144 Their small transgression was away from the surveillance of the teacher and monitor in the only private space in the playground. Wilderspin had initially provided hoops, balls, and other toys for the children in the playground, as at the playground at New Lanark which was furnished with a variety of playthings: ‘balls, trundling hoops, marbles, tops, etc.’.145 However, he removed all but the blocks after he found the children constantly fighting over the use of the toys and suffered injuries as a result of their use. Other infant schools, as Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young. Ibid. 144 Ibid., 42. 145 The Working Bee and Herald of the Hodsonian Community Society, I, no. 34, 142 143

March 7, 1840 (CUL/1250), a letter from Alexander Ross, cited in Silver, The Concept of Popular Education, 118.

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Fig. 2.4

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The ‘uncovered schoolroom’. In David Stow, The Training System (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1840). Author’s collection.

described by Stow and Wilson, used a greater range of playthings. Jumping ropes and other equipment are seen in the playground in the illustration from Stow’s 1840 publication of The Training System (Figure 2.4). The swings, however, are the dominant feature in the illustrations of playgrounds in the publications of both Wilderspin and Stow, which depict separate swings for girls and boys. In Figure 2.3, girls can be seen using a ‘vaulting rope’ – a rope attached at one end to the centre pole, and pulled tight by a child at the other end. This activity was provided as an added challenge, requiring advanced skill, and the children may have been instructed in it by the ‘jumping gentlemen’ whom James Brown mentioned. The boys are seen ‘swinging in the usual way, without the vaulting rope’.146 As planned learning spaces, playgrounds mimicked the natural world and were a great improvement over the city streets beyond the wall, with fruit trees and flowers along the border and structures erected to provide physical challenges. As folklorist Janis Rosenberg observed in her study of urban playgrounds, ‘if trees, branches, and hills are unavailable, they must be created. Hence, the swing, slide, monkeybar, giant stride [rotary swing] and hillock’.147 It was believed that controlled physical activity, through dance as at New Lanark, or on the equipment in Wilderspin’s playground, could impact minds as well as bodies. Rosenberg Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, 42. Janis Rosenberg, ‘A Landscape of Enculturation: The Vernacular of Elementary

146 147

School Buildings and Playgrounds, 1840–1930’ (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1984), 257.

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proposed further that there was a connection between using industrial-type play equipment, and the preparation of children for future roles as industrial workers: The human body, as it is required to be more and more connected to the occupation of industry signified by the machine, is first ‘farmed out’ to the swing, slide, and giant stride. As if the user cannot do enough with his or her own body, an appliance, used in childhood, will take action to its fullest extent, maybe to its breaking point.148

Earlier descriptions of the infant system identified two styles of swings in infant school playgrounds: the circular or rotary swing as in the illustrations, which Wilderspin called a ‘gymnastic pole’, and swings with seats upon which children sat alone or in pairs.149 The ‘gymnastic pole’ was an: upright pole, firmly fixed in the ground; to the summit of which is attached a cross piece of wood, turning on a strong pivot; from which each end of this cross piece hangs a piece of rope, by which the children can swing themselves round; and which affords a method of exercise at once healthful and safe.150

Four separate sets of swings with seats were available: one ‘for boys who are between five and six years old, another for those between four and five, and another for the very little children, and another for the girls’.151 Wilderspin warned that ‘on no account are children permitted to swing on the wrong swing, because if this were suffered, the strong would overcome the weak’.152 Seated swings featured at the New Lanark school and were at Buchanan’s school in Vincent Square. Gymnastic poles were also at de Fellenberg’s school in Hofwyl, where students used the playground on breaks from their studies and as part of their physical and moral training. A visitor described the scene: ‘Two or three run to the circular swing, another climbs the pole, while a party of the little ones jump on the horizontal tree, and commence a sport I have never seen before … Some are off to the gardens’.153 The technology was exported to the colonies, and a circular swing was standard equipment in infant schools in Upper Canada by mid century as noted by Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education, who believed it was expensive yet essential. Ryerson quoted de Fellenberg in his 1847 Report on Public Instruction in Upper Canada to explain the importance of gymnastics in schools: ‘the

Rosenberg, ‘A Landscape of Enculturation’, 257–8. Wilderspin, Infant Education, 245. 150 Ibid., 246. 151 Ibid., 245. 152 Ibid. 153 Louisa Mary Barwell, Letters from Hofwyl by a Parent on the Educational 148 149

Institutions of de Fellenberg (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1842), 64.

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gymnastic exercises, in all their forms, are a powerful aid to the practice of design, in cultivating the taste for the beauty of form or motion’. Ryerson observed: It has accordingly been remarked, that one reason for the pre-eminence of the ancients in sculpture, was the patronage bestowed upon the public gymnasiums, in which the artists could form his models from every variety of development of which the human form is susceptible. However this may be, there can be no doubt whatever that gymnastics do contribute materially to the aesthetic training of the mind.154

The swing out of doors, as the gallery within the schoolroom, was adapted as a teaching device by infant school teachers, though the children who used it were much younger than was originally intended. Others in the nineteenth century regarded the swing as a therapeutic device for treating idiots or lunatics. In 1866 Edward Seguin outlined the benefits of swings in his ‘idiot gymnasium’, in which physical training was tied to mental development. The key was to develop children’s physical activity via a specially developed ‘spring swing’. Seguin contrasted this device with the ‘the ordinary swing’, which he called ‘dangerous as a depressor of the nervous system, and consequently more greedily wished for by those children it injures the most’.155 In contrast, inhibition of the nervous system was the desired effect of the swing designed for use with lunatics: beginning in the 1820s various types of ‘circulating swings’ were used as a calming treatment for patients who were violent or agitated.156 In the infant school, swings were not a passive activity. Children were forbidden to help one another up on swings with seats.157 The infant school version of the circular swing likewise required children’s full mental and physical involvement. Play on the circular swing was devised to develop discipline and strength. Wilderspin advised ‘that the children are to be taught to swing both ways’. Whereas in Figure 2.3 ‘the children are represented as going with the right hand upwards; but to strengthen the left side of the body, the left hand should be above, and the children’s faces turned the opposite way from that represented in the picture’.158 The undisciplined use of the swing could be dangerous, taking children’s bodies to their breaking points as described by Rosenberg. The author of a manual on gymnastics in schools warned children to ‘take care not to lose your balance, Egerton Ryerson, Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada (Montreal: Lovell and Gibson, 1847), 58–60, cited in ‘Physical Training in Schools’, Journal of Education (Upper Canada) 5, no. 5 (1852): 66. 155 Edward Seguin, Idiocy and its Treatment by the Physiological Method (New York: William Wood, 1866), 120. 156 Nicolas J. Wade, ‘Cox’s Chair: “A Moral and a Medical Means in the Treatment of Maniacs”’, History of Psychiatry 16, no. 1 (2005): 73–88. 157 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 84. 158 Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, xii. 154

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or you will turn round, and grind yourselves on the ground very unpleasantly’.159 Swinging children could also collide with those who were walking about. Wilderspin devoted a full chapter of A System for the Education of the Young to explaining rules for behaviour on the playground, which mostly concern the use of swings, listed as ‘Rules for Management of the Swing’.160 Children waiting their turn at the swing recited the multiplication table for their ‘mental improvement’ and as a way to fix the turn of the swinging children. While waiting, children also stamped their feet or clapped in time: ‘This will secure exercise and amusement to the lookers on, as well as to those that are swinging, which will tend to order, regularity, and justice’.161 The swing as a pedagogical device and support for the teacher’s pastoral power controlled play on the playground in significant ways: the giant rotary swing, designed for older children, was a high-risk activity, requiring complex rules and teacher supervision; it created a group of players and onlookers in which children admired the performance of others while waiting their turn; and when in use it was the sole activity on the playground, fixing the children’s attention on the spectacle at hand. Finally, it made the playground visible to the community in the urban context as its high pole with children in transit rose above the playground walls. The rotary swing and other mechanical play equipment have largely disappeared from contemporary school playgrounds. This has partly been due to the risk factors and the equipments’ requirement for high-level physical skill so valued by earlier educationists. However, there have also been changes in thinking regarding the value of intense sensory stimulus for learning in ordinary circumstances. The ‘mechanical excitement’ offered by the rotary swing is available instead in the amusement park as a leisure time activity.162 Infant Gallery Indoors, the key elements of organization were the gallery, lesson posts, and classrooms. The focus here will be on the gallery, which Wilderspin popularized to the extent that he is generally credited for its widespread use in schools. As Wilson explained, in the gallery ‘children are occasionally arranged in successive rows, in such a manner as to place them in one mass immediately under the eye of the master’.163 Wilson placed responsibility for children’s behaviour on the teacher, portraying children as quite easily moulded. In their class work, for example: 159 George Forrest, Every Boy’s Book: A Complete Encyclopaedia of Sports and Amusements (London: G. Routledge & Co., 1855), 58. 160 Ibid., 42. 161 Ibid. 162 Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Palaces in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 60. 163 Wilson, A Manual of Instruction, 27.

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… whilst you are engaged in the large room, you must yourself never appear to be negligent or inattentive to the children, and then they will not be inattentive to you … Occasionally take your stand on some elevated spot, and there let the children know that your eye is wandering over the whole company, and observing by turns every individual amongst them.164

Wilson’s schoolroom was arranged in various elevations as in the illustration of his school at Walthamstow, which was operated in a converted barn when it opened in 1824 (Figure 2.5). Wilderspin’s gallery reversed this arrangement by situating the children above the teacher. This alternative layout distributed the teacher’s attention evenly, with all children at a more or less equal distance from the teacher.165 The distance between the youngest children seated lower and closest to the teacher and the oldest, higher and furthest away, was approximately14 feet (4.3 metres). Evidently, then, children were for most purposes arranged in rows – in the gallery, in their classwork, and in the playground where they waited their turn at the rotary swing. This system was efficient, allowing the teacher to refocus children’s attention as a group as they shifted from one activity to the next, as well as being important for their surveillance by the teacher and child monitors. Lined up in rows for their lessons, the children could also be observed from behind without being aware of it, a technique Wilderspin learned from Buchanan. Wilderspin advised that while children take turns reading, ‘the teacher walks behind them, so that if any child is inattentive, he is sure of being detected’.166 Not being able to see the teacher meant that children could never know when they were being watched, encouraging the children’s self-surveillance; the opposite was true in gallery lessons where the children met the teacher’s gaze. The physical positioning of the teacher during gallery work was therefore important, as Stow described precisely: Stand at least six or seven feet from the gallery – pace along very little – let your position in general be with your left foot rather behind – your head perpendicular, so as to move it easily from side to side, to secure the eye of the children, the rest of your body forming an obtuse angle, quite a la Francaise.167

According to Malcolm Seaborne, ‘whereas Lancaster recommended a sloping floor so that the master could see the children clearly, Wilderspin and Stow altered the floor-level for an exactly opposite reason’.168 However, the effect was the same

Ibid., 18–19. Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of

164 165

Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993), 74. 166 Wilderspin, On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 39. 167 Stow, The Training System, 379. 168 Malcolm Seaborne, The English School: Its Architecture and Organization, 1370–1870 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 144.

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Fig. 2.5

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St Mary’s Infant School on Church Commons in 1824. Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest.

in each case. In the infant school, what children could clearly see from the gallery was the teacher. The children, as they observed the teacher watching them, were meant to learn to manage their own behaviour. There was a similar arrangement in their class work, during which the monitor sat on a stool facing the small group. In this way surveillance was diffused.

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Fig. 2.6

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A gallery lesson. In Samuel Wilderspin, A System for the Education of the Young, Applied to all Faculties (London: James S. Hodson, 1840). Author’s collection.

An illustration of a gallery lesson was included in Wilderspin’s A System of Education, which he noted reflected an actual scene in a school recorded by the artist (Figure 2.6). It shows a high gallery with ten rows, each seating twenty children. Children are having a geography lesson using a large map which has been strung across two poles, set in sockets in the floor. One child points at locations on the map, and children indicate they know the name of the location by raising their arm. The teacher used a blackboard, which is not shown in the illustration, to record correct answers. To allow all children to have a more or less equal turn and to maintain their interest and attention, the teacher called them to answer from one row at a time, starting at the lowest row with the youngest children. The teacher was in charge of managing the lesson, acting as the ‘medium between the monitor pupil, and the scholars in the gallery’. A similar plan was used in ‘every kind of lesson which is visible to the faculties of observation’.169 This approach followed Wilderspin’s principle that ‘every object that can be seen with the eye, is a fit object for a gallery lesson’.170 The female teacher used the piano at the side of the gallery to accompany singing and as a signal for marching exercises. The gallery as a pedagogical device controlled learning indoors much as the rotary swing controlled learning in the playground: it was constructed on a monumental scale, providing children on the topmost row with a bird’s eye view of proceedings while at the same time containing them, the oldest children, within Wilderspin, A System of Education, xv. Ibid., 294.

169 170

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Fig. 2.7

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Infant school, 1898. ‘“Which is Your Right Hand?” A study in an infant school, drawn from life by Paul Renouard’. In The Graphic, London, March 19, 1898. McGill University Library, Montreal.

its structure; ascending into the gallery required order and discipline as children marched to their places up the steps led by a monitor; it defined the relationship of children with one another, and between children and teacher. In time, galleries become lower, and teachers joined with the children in a more intimate way as in Figure 2.7, in which the teacher sits with the children in a ‘low gallery’ and Froebelian materials can be seen. For most of the nineteenth century, however, the ‘high gallery’ was a requirement for teaching in the infant system in the manner of Wilderspin and Stow. Conclusion The epigraph to this chapter presented the idea that infant schools were ‘nothing but the kindness of parents judiciously administered’, which properly should be called ‘Nurseries of Discipline’. These words were spoken by William Chapman at the inaugural meeting of the Infant School Society in Newcastle in 1825. Chapman had visited William Wilson’s school in Walthamstow where he had observed children at their play and lessons. He contrasted the activity of infant school children with that of ‘the children of the labouring poor at home; wallowing in dirt, an obstruction to their parents, frequently hit in passion, and punished in

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vexation’.171 In this view the infant school provided children an alternate ‘nursery of discipline’ from the home and the negative socialization by their parents. Reformers were thus drawn to the schools by their promise to resocialize children in line with middle-class expectations for the lower classes. As described by Wilderspin, an infant school education could change children’s thinking and behavior, building children’s ‘habits of cleanliness and decorum, of cheerful and ready subordination, or courtesy, kindness and forbearance, and of abstinence from everything impure or profane’.172 They would achieve these habits and attitudes through their play and lessons under the direction of a teacher acting in loco parentis. As Wilderspin explained, ‘the children are invited to regard their master as one who is desirous of promoting their happiness by the most affectionate means, and this point being once gained, they invariably submit with great willingness to his direction’.173 Another version of this idea, in a report of the British and Canadian Infant School Society, raised the stakes to speak of love: ‘In as much as the fundamental principle of the Infant School system is love, it should be the constant endeavour of the Teacher to win the affection of the children, and then cause them to feel pleasure in submission to his will’.174 However, behaviour could not always be changed by these means, and teachers’ authority sometimes needed to be supported by school rules. In early editions of Wilderspin’s manual, rules pertained to children’s physical presentation and punctuality. Being as much rules for parents as they were rules for children, they were meant to resocialize parents’ behaviour and attitudes.175 Parents were ‘to send their children clean washed, with their hair cut short and combed, and their clothes well mended, by half past eight o’clock in the morning, to remain till twelve.’176 In later editions, ‘cleanliness’ was made a requirement for entry to the school.177 While a concern for hygiene and punctuality had the practical purpose in school to limit the spread of disease and promote learning goals, these points were also used as a negative commentary on community practices. As observed by Wilderspin of the Irish with reference to punctuality: ‘In Ireland, where the value of time and punctuality is least understood, the thing was accomplished, – whilst no better lesson can be given to those who have to work for their daily bread, than punctuality. If a child cannot attend school at nine, how can it attend work at six in

‘Infant School Society’, The Newcastle Courant (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England), February 19, 1825. 172 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 3rd ed. (1825), 42. 173 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 3rd ed. (1825), 275. 174 British and Canadian Infant School Society, Annual Report of the British and Canadian Infant School Society (Quebec: British and Canadian Infant School Society, 1834), 4. 175 Wilderspin, On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 2nd ed. (1824). 176 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 3rd ed. (1825), 49. 177 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 4th ed. (1829). 171

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the morning?’178 The rules in the manuals increased in number, and consequences became more severe in subsequent editions. By the 1832 edition children needed to have a reason for absence or they would ‘not be permitted to return again to the school’.179 Wilderspin obviously believed the program’s benefits required regular participation over a longer period of time, but he also had confidence that parents were so convinced of the program’s value that the threat of its withdrawal would cause them to ensure their child’s attendance. In short, the impact of infant school was amplified and diffused outward from individual toddlers to their parents and the larger community. This was the ideal. Discipline learned in school transferred to the neighbourhood where children modeled their newly acquired behaviour for their ‘heathen playmates’. Of his walks in the slum, Wilderspin wrote: ‘I have observed some things very pleasing, such as children playing at keeping a school, with a number of strange children, and observing the same rules and discipline as if they were really at school’.180 Thus the infant schools were believed to truly be ‘nurseries of discipline’, through which discipline was nurtured and subsequently dispersed to the world beyond the playground gates.

Wilderspin, The Infant System, 8th ed. (London: J.S. Hodson, 1840), 153–4. Wilderspin, The Infant System, 5th ed. (1832), 117. 180 Wilderspin, Infant Education, 3rd ed. (1825), 146. 178 179

Chapter 3

‘A fine moral machinery’: Infant Schools in British India We understand that the Bishop of Calcutta is making arrangements for the establishment of an Infant School in the Bow Bazar. Experience elsewhere has shown that such institutions may be made instruments of incalculable benefits to the rising generation, by laying the foundation at an early age of moral and religious character; and it is therefore to be hoped that the one now in contemplation will be the model for many others.1

Fig. 3.1

‘Plan of Calcutta’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1832), p. 535. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509g.

1 ‘Asiatic Intelligence – Calcutta’, The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australasia 3 (New Series) September–December (1830): 186.

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The first infant school in British India was started in 1830 in Calcutta by John Mathias Turner, the fourth Bishop of Calcutta.2 It marked the beginning of a story of struggle – a struggle to mould the minds and lives of young children of India amid clashing demands of missionary agenda and ‘native agency’, traditional worldviews and ‘public apathy’ towards new ideas about raising young children outlined in the preceding chapters, ‘official neglect’ and perpetual lack of funding. Throughout the nineteenth century, several beginnings were made towards educating very young Indian children, each initiative starting as if anew – the old story barely visible in historical fog. This chapter shines a light on some episodes of this story and traces the tenuous links among them. It begins with a focus on the work of Church Missionary Society (CMS), the initiator of infant schools in the Bengal presidency in the early nineteenth century.3 Three infant schools are discussed in relative detail: two earliest attempts in Calcutta spearheaded by CMS and another in Hooghly influenced by these CMS initiatives in Calcutta. Later, other missionary societies as well as the government came to play significant roles in shaping the education of young children alongside a concerted effort towards female education in different parts of British India.4 Infant education and female education have overlapping and intertwined histories in the beginning of the nineteenth century. These are outlined next, concluding with a brief comment on legacies of these initiatives for early childhood education in the twentieth century and beyond. Missionary writings and government reports make up the bulk of the primary sources drawn on for this chapter. Representations of India in missionary writings, whether in the form of reports to the parent societies or journals, magazines, and travel accounts for Christian readers ‘at home’, were meant to further the missionary agenda. As Anna Johnston argues, these texts ‘introduced contradictory, conflicted knowledge into the imperial archives’.5 Infant schools seldom received more than a fleeting reference in most records, missionary or

2 The term ‘British India’ has had different meanings across time. Here, it is used to represent what was often referred to as ‘India within Ganges’ in the missionary registers. The comments in this chapter are confined to areas within today’s nation-state of India. The See of Calcutta and the bishopric were established in 1814 following the Charter Act 1813. Calcutta is now called Kolkatta. 3 The reason for focus on CMS is two-fold: Given the voluminous missionary efforts in nineteenth-century India, the task of reporting on all missionary societies is unrealistic for the present book; given that the primary concern here is with the education of young children, it is reasonable to focus on the society that was the initiator of infant schools in India and the most influential among its contemporaries. 4 W.W. Hunter, ‘Report of the Education Commission 1882’ (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884), 2. 5 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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government.6 Their establishment in India coincided with a period when a large number of educational institutions along the lines of the British education system were being opened across the country at all levels – schools, colleges, and, a little later, universities – to bring ‘enlightenment’ to the Indian people, and to serve ‘the contemporary needs of the ruling classes’.7 The infant school for the younger child, while aligned with such thinking, was not the focus of these educational initiatives. Contemporary historians of education in India, too, have concentrated on older children and youth. Nevertheless, the passing references that are available in historical records attest to the existence of infant schools in India during the same period as in Europe and other British colonies – a fact usually ignored in the prevalent knowledge about early childhood education in India.8 It is important to set the record straight as the infant school story helps us understand the colonial project by highlighting the significance of moulding the very young child, both for the colonizers aiming to re-make whole societies anew and for the missionaries for whom saving the younger children meant dedicating themselves to the ‘good work from love to Him who said Feed my lambs’.9 The Beginnings Bishop Turner arrived in India on December 10, 1829 and passed away on July 7, 1831 in Calcutta.10 The Bishop travelled extensively throughout the vast area under his bishopric in the Indian subcontinent and beyond, often visiting schools and colleges run by the missionaries, examining students, and providing them

6 Except that towards the end of the century, when infant classes were introduced into lower primary schools, the government records carried more details in line with the more general colonial impulse to sort, label, categorize, and count. 7 Sitaram Yechury, ‘Educational Development in India’, Social Scientist 14, no. 2/3 (1986): 11. For a nuanced discussion on the interface of caste, class, religion, and later gender with the politics and economics of educational changes under the British rule and their intended and unintended consequences, see Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas (New Delhi: Sage, 1991, 2005). 8 See Baljit Kaur, ‘Early Childhood Education in India from 1830s to 1940s: Leapfrogging through a Century’, in Early Childhood Care and Education: Theory and Practice, ed. Prerana Mohite and Larry Prochner (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2009), 144–65. 9 Helen Douglas Mackenzie, Six Years in India: Delhi, the City of the Great Mogul, with an Account of the Various Tribes in Hindostan; Hindoos, Sikhs, Affghans, Etc., A new edition of The Mission, the Camp, and the Zenana by Mrs. Colin Mackenzie (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), 9. http://books.google.com/books?id=gVwBAAAAQAAJ&sourc e=gbs_navlinks_s. 10 Missionary Register (hereafter MR) (London: L.B. Seeley and Son, 1830); MR (1832).

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with books, materials, and instruments imported from England.11 Shortly before his death, he expressed his views on ‘native education’ to the clergy of the Indian Church in Bombay. He argued for a significant role for the Church in educating the Indians, even if it initially meant furthering a secular form of education: We know that many things which are first in point of importance are not first in point of time; and, however anxious we may be to sow that seed which is the Word of God, we must not knowingly cast it by the way-side, or in stony places; but rather wait, in the hope that by waiting we may find a prepared soil, which will give back twenty or fifty or a hundred fold.12

Bishop Turner was well connected to various religious, charitable, and philanthropic associations in England.13 It can be assumed that he was aware of the Church-supported infant schools and infant school societies functioning in England where Samuel Wilderspin’s ideas held sway (see Chapter 2). There were reportedly some 2,000 infant schools in England by 1835.14 Soon after his arrival in Calcutta, the bishop established an infant school, the first of its kind in India. Given his belief in the instrumentality of education for the spread of Christianity, an infant school might have appeared well positioned to serve as a tool for preparing ‘soil’ for ‘the Word of God’. No detailed records pertaining to everyday life in the infant school – the teacher, pupils, or curriculum – seem to have survived. However, it attracted much interest and positive comment in missionary publications of the time, for instance: The Lord Bishop of the diocese has established a native infant school, which promises interesting results. From the last number of Christian Intelligencer, we

The jurisdiction of the Bishop of Calcutta until 1835 extended over very large and distant territories in Australasia (which later came to constitute fifteen independent dioceses), posing a huge workload on successive bishops. By the early 1830s, a strong concern about the poor health and early deaths of bishops was one of the reasons for the creation of several separate dioceses and resulting in new bishops being designated for territories within India as well as in Australia and New Zealand. Prior to 1835, the territories under the See of Calcutta included: Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Colombo, Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle, Adelaide, Perth, Tasmania, Brisbane, Whaiapu, Wellington, Nelson and Christchurch. See Josiah Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of India, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1861), 168. 12 MR (1832). 13 Bishop Turner had been educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and was a private tutor in the family of the Marquis of Donegal, displaying an early interest in education and gaining direct experience that he later extended to his work in India. Prior to his arrival in India, he had been the Rector of Wilmslow in Cheshire and Chaplain to his brother-in-law, the Bishop of Chester. 14 Samuel Wilderspin, Infant Education: or Remarks on the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor From the Age of Eighteen Months to Seven Years, 3rd ed. (London: W. Simpkin & R. Marshall, 1825). 11

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learnt that it is flourishing as well as can be expected, considering the novelty of the thing in this quarter of the world. The children, we have heard, are those of the poorer classes, whom their parents have scarcely the means of subsisting, much less of educating, ‘There are about forty-eight children in daily attendance, from two years old to eight, and the neat and clean appearance of the youthful group, as well as their progress, do great credit to those in superintendence of the establishment. The children are brought to the school about nine o’clock in the morning, and remain until five in the afternoon; they get a good dinner of curry and rice at one o’clock P.M.’15

Evidently, the infant school was seen to serve the children of ‘the poor and the needy’, giving them food along with habits of order and cleanliness, making it similar to the British infant schools detailed in Chapter 2. The children attending it were in all probability those of Portuguese, Eurasian, or Christian converts or sympathizers, although their gender, caste, or religious affiliations remain ambiguous in these comments:16 It is highly gratifying to see the facility with which some of the children add & subtract by means of the Abacus, & the progress the elder ones have made in reading, writing and needle-work is quite surprising. Indeed, altogether the scene is highly interesting. Every human heart must rejoice to see so many infants snatched like burning ‘brands from the fire’ and placed in an institution where their innocent and tender minds will be trained up in the fear of the Lord, and in habits of order, cleanliness and usefulness. The Bishop of the Diocese has, me think, done much for the rising generations in establishing this interesting institution, and we trust the example will be followed not only in all the parochial districts of Calcutta, but likewise in other large towns and also in other Presidencies of India.17

The emphasis in the first infant school was on training the ‘innocent and tender minds’ of young children ‘in the fear of the Lord’, and to develop in them the habits of ‘order, cleanliness and usefulness’. These are recurrent themes in the comments lauding the infant schools throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, whether the subject was the virtues of the adults working with the children or the conduct of young children. The infant school did not survive long after the death of Bishop Turner. He had been supporting it out of his own pocket. Perhaps there was not sufficient time or energy to build up the financial or logistical resources required for its independent ‘Asiatic Intelligence – Calcutta’, The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australasia 4 (New Series), January/April (1831): 179. 16 ‘Eurasian’ was one of the terms used at that time for the people of mixed European and Indian descent. 17 William S. Birney, ‘Early Bishops of Calcutta’, in Birney’s Records (File 1) Bishop’s College Archives (Calcutta: n.d.). 15

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functioning before his death. The reach of this first attempt at bringing very young children into the orbit of formal instruction and Christian influence was limited on all counts. However, it did create an awareness of infant education amongst the educated classes for the children of the poor as well as for their own children. The issues of whether Indians would let their children attend such schools and whether this initiative should be aimed only at Christian children were matters of public debate: The John Bull has of late been ably advocating the cause of Infant School; and the editor promises to favour the public with still further information on the subject. … One grand obstacle to the general and immediate success of any such scheme as that of Infant Schools in this land, will be found in the hitherto almost unconquerable domestic prejudices of the Natives. … Much however may be done among the Christian population. The late Bishop Turner had his head quite full of schemes of enlarged philanthropy; and Infant Schools did not escape his practical comprehensive mind.18 [original emphasis]

Entrenched in their ‘prejudices’ and ‘ignorance’, Indians were expected to resist the education for young children. It was a convenient stance, adopted often by the colonizers and the missionaries across the British empire, reflecting their own beliefs and prejudices about the ‘natives’. Contrary to this popular ‘official’ view, when infant schools became an option from 1830s onwards, they proved to be quite popular among Indians of diverse backgrounds. But as Krishna Kumar argues, taking the case of girls’ education under the British rule, ‘The idea of native resistance is so satisfying and so self-serving that its validity needs no further evidence than the slow rate of progress of education.’19 The reasons for the popularity of infant schools among Indians did not coincide with the intended objectives of the missionaries, though each was seeking ‘betterment’ through them. For Indians, the infant schools’ attraction was often pragmatic and a means for economic betterment. Infant school, as a first step towards English education, had the allure of serving as a status symbol and leading to better job prospects in the wake of the policy changes instituting English as the language of the administration.20 For the missionaries, the purpose was the

‘Missionary and Religious Intelligence: The Calcutta Infant School Society’, Calcutta Christian Observer (hereafter CCO), July (1833): 286. 19 Kumar, Political Agenda of Education, 109. 20 English education and knowledge of English was proving to be popular at this time among Indians of certain classes and castes in the wake of policy changes that saw English replace Persian as the language of the administration and the courts in 1837, and the colonial government adopted a policy of encouraging English education in 1835 after a decade-long controversy about the best medium of instruction to promote in India. By 1844, it was the official policy to give preference to English-educated Indians for government jobs (Civil Services). Sitaram Yechury, ‘Educational Development in India’, 1986. 18

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shaping of the Indian character to render it more pliant and open to its spiritual upliftment through Christianity: The object of the Infant School system is to form the habits and to instruct the mind, at a period when our natures are most docile, and most easily impressed with either good or evil; and by the influence of early instruction, communicated very much in the form of amusement, and thus rendered a source of pleasure, we may hope the mature man may be rendered subservient to the great object for which he was created – constituted a happier being in this world, and fitted for more exalted capabilities of enjoyment in the world to come.21

The Calcutta Infant School Society and the Second Infant School The second attempt at opening an infant school was made by Bishop Turner’s successor, with more enduring results. Bishop Daniel Wilson was 54 years old when he arrived in Calcutta on November 5, 1832. He was to serve this See for over 25 years till his death in 1858. From a wealthy family in Spitalfields,22 he had an influential presence in the Church scene in England before he came to India and was well connected to men of repute and influence in the government as well as the Church.23 His brother, William Wilson, had opened an infant school in 1824 after training with Samuel Wilderspin. On his way to India, Daniel Wilson, travelling with his daughter Ann, had stopped over in Cape Town and visited the infant schools run by James Buchanan’s sons.24 Within six months of his arrival, he had resolved to establish an infant school society with a longer-term vision than his predecessor for sustaining the existence and spread of such institutions. Accordingly, about fifty eminent ‘gentlemen’ were invited to the Bishop’s Palace in June 1833. At the end of that meeting, the Calcutta Infant School Society had been established, with objectives similar to those of the London Infant School Society set up in 1824. In Calcutta, it was resolved ‘that the object of the Society be two fold’:

James Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions in Connexion with the Church of England in North India (London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1848), 408. 22 Samuel Wilderspin taught in an infant school in Spitalfields in 1820, which was used as a model school for the training of teachers in the 1820s and 1830s (see Chapter 2). 23 Daniel Wilson was born on July 2, 1778 in Spitalfields, the eldest son of a prosperous family. His father was a silk manufacturer in Spitalfields till 1798. He had been interested in the appointments of successive bishops to India prior to his own appointment, had invited Bishop Turner to a meeting before he left for India, and offered to provide any support for his work in India. Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson. 24 See Chapter 2 on James Buchanan. Also, Larry Prochner, A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009). 21

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Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods 1. To bring up children, from the age of two to seven years, in habits of order and obedience, connected, so far as may be possible at so tender an age, with moral and religious instruction. 2. To extend the plan as far as possible by gratuitously instructing in the Central School, Masters and Mistresses for other schools in Calcutta, and in Outer Stations.25

It was a high-profile society with the Bishop as its president and the GovernorGeneral as the patron. Archdeacon Corrie and the Principal of the Bishop’s College were among the vice presidents. Significantly, there was no Indian ‘gentleman’ on the committee, whether any were invited to the meeting is not known. It was envisaged, ‘That this Society consist for the present of a Patron, President, VicePresident, Committee of Gentlemen, and Secretary; and that when its operations actually commence, a lady patroness and a ladies’ committee be requested to lend their aid in furthering the Society’s objects’.26 Whether the ladies’ committee was subsequently formed is unclear. What is clear is that women were considered more properly suited to be associated with infant education, but only after the men had done the ground work. The committee had an ambitious vision. At the outset, it was decided to open a central infant school in Calcutta as soon as properly trained ‘master and mistress’ could be brought in from England, who were to train Indian masters and mistresses while teaching ‘the nominally Christian children of the Portuguese, and East Indians’. The results were then to be exhibited for the Indians as an example of what could be accomplished with young children through infant education. ‘If they approved, branch schools might be scattered over Calcutta under masters trained at the central school. Thus, in the process of time, and by the aid of Government, the system might, it was hoped, penetrate the length and breadth of India.’27 Further, the Bishop was authorized to engage from England the services of a duly qualified master and mistress ‘thoroughly conversant with the whole system’ and ‘to pay for their passage to this country, to offer them dwelling and a salary, the Master of £200, the Mistress of £150 per annum’.28 Thus, the committee was keen to start with ‘properly trained’ staff, and it was willing to pay adequately (the passage, living arrangements, and salaries comparable to the teachers in mission schools) in order to attract a good candidate. It is of note that ‘the master’ had to be married and ‘the mistress’ did not deserve equal pay, both points reflecting the extant societal beliefs and missionary practices

25 ‘Missionary and Religious Intelligence: The Calcutta Infant School Society’, CCO, July (1833), 350. 26 Ibid., 349. 27 Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, 183. 28 CCO, 1833, 350.

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apropos gender roles. In the meantime, the committee was ‘to purchase or erect suitable premises for the purposes of the Central School’.29 As to the means of sustaining this initiative, ‘a subscription’ was started to pay for some of the initial costs entailed by the above recommendations ‘and for the purchase of the books and machinery essential for the full development of the system’.30 A sum of Rs. 2,000 was raised by the founding members in the first meeting.31 The initial financial support from the committee subscription and a recommendation to request for help from the government notwithstanding, the school was expected to be partially funded through nominal fees over time. ‘Eventually it is hoped that the School in some measure will support itself, as it is intended that each child shall pay one anna per week’.32 This suggests that children this time around were expected to come from families with better means than those served by the first infant school. Given his connections with the infant school developments in England, the Bishop readily engaged a trained master and mistress. By the end of 1833, Mr. W.H. Perkins and Mrs. Ann Perkins had arrived in Calcutta and started an infant school.33 By then, the total donations amounted to Rs. 4,563. However, the donation in 1836 was not much larger, amounting only to Rs. 4,726.34 And the implementation of the plan did not run smoothly. Initial difficulties in the Perkins’ attempts to communicate with children of two to seven years of age, who knew little or no English, led the society to close the school for a few months and initiate an inquiry to find a way forward. The school was reopened on May 1, 1834 with seventeen pupils. Attempts were made to convey ‘… the instructions of Mr. Perkins, through the medium of a native teacher, in the Bengali language. … A native teacher was engaged, lessons were prepared by Mr. Perkins, and names of objects or figures represented in the Lesson Cards printed in Bengali characters’.35 The strategy of translating their message into Indian languages and seeking the active support of ‘native’ speakers for translating extempore had been tried and tested by the missionaries for preaching. However, it did not work well for the young children. After a further three or four months ‘with a fluctuating, but generally small attendance’, the idea had to

31 32 33 29

Ibid., 350. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 350. One Anna was equivalent to one-sixteenth of an Indian Rupee. In a report on ‘Shipping Intelligence’ in Calcutta Christian Observer, November 1834, the list of passengers includes Mr. and Mrs. Perkins on board a passenger ship departing from London, Portsmouth on June 29 and arriving in Madras and Ennor on October 13, 1833. 34 Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions, 406, 407. 35 Ibid., 406. 30

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be abandoned.36 Finally it was decided to restrict the original school to Christian children. The results of this ‘experiment’ (teaching Christian children only) were deemed so successful that after a public examination of the children, conducted in the Town Hall in June 1835 and presided over by the Bishop himself, it was decided ‘… to open a second school, for native children, in connection, but not fused with the first’,37 initially under Mr. Perkins’ direct control. The new infant school opened in a house on Chitpur Road (see Figure 3.1) in November 1835, with twenty-eight children aged from two to seven years, and was moved to a temporary building in 1836.38 This time, the missionaries met with more success in terms of attracting larger numbers of Indian children as well as the ‘quick progress’ that the children made in their learning. Daily attendance quickly rose to between seventy and eighty, with 140 children on the list: … in four months the children were ready for the examination. It was held, as before, in the Town Hall, and a large audience assembled … No sight could be more interesting. One hundred native infants, clad in the splendid dresses of the east, and decked with the ornaments of the harem, crowded the platform, and went through all the exercises usually displayed at home. They spoke English fluently, they sang hymns, marched, clapped hands, examined one another, showed wonderful intelligence, and elicited universal admiration. No infant school in England could have surpassed these little brighteyed, dark-skinned Indians.39

A few points might be noted in the above description. First, the Indians were not shy to send their young children to the infant school, despite contrary speculations in popular media and in the official and missionary circles. Second, the description of children’s attire and adornments hints that at least some children were not from very poor families. Perhaps the infant school had captured the imagination of Indians of ‘better classes’. Third, it is evident that the ‘bright eyed, dark-skinned’ Indian children were eager learners and performed impressively, almost as well as children in England. Yet, one wonders about what counted as being ‘fluent speakers’ of English in such a short time. By 1836 Mr. Perkins had trained six young men, but only one had found an infant school to work in.40 The names or any other identifying details of these newly trained teachers are not on record. As Durba Ghosh argues, taking the case of ‘native’ women, such recording practices indicated their lower status, and

38 39 40 36 37

Ibid., 406. Ibid., 407. Ibid., 408. Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, 184. Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions, 408.

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make it hard to trace their roles and contributions.41 One of the Indian trainees of Portuguese descent, Mr. T.M. Gomez,42 is named, perhaps due to his relatively prominent role in infant schools in the later years. He assisted Mr. Perkins first as an assistant teacher and then as a head teacher between 1835 and 1838. In the decade of the 1830s, at least three infant schools were opened in mission stations at Burdwan, Chinsurah, and Vizagapatnam in the Bengal presidency. However, most functioned only for a brief period in the absence of any material support from the Calcutta Infant School Society.43 The Calcutta ‘native’ infant school continued to function under Mr. Perkins’ guidance until 1839. On January 22 of that year Bishop Wilson recorded his evident satisfaction at the success of the infant school as well as some anxiety in regard to its continuation: We had an Infant School anniversary this morning – a greater crowd than ever! There were four or five hundred natives to witness one of the most perfect exhibits ever made. The impression on the audience was enthusiastic. One hundred infants were present. We are struggling for funds. But I hope we shall get on.44

Later in 1839 two significant events led Mr. and Mrs. Perkins as well as their most highly trained Indian master, Mr. Gomez, to depart from Calcutta almost simultaneously. Their departure marked an end to the era of the effective functioning of the Calcutta infant school. First, the Bishop had to dispatch Mr. and Mrs. Perkins to Kanpur to help save the female orphan asylum that was reported to be in ‘a languishing state for want of a proper superintendent’.45 Second, he was obliged to send Mr. Gomez to Hooghly to head a new infant school; its story is told later in this chapter. In their absence, the Calcutta school continued to function for several years under the guidance of an unnamed ‘native master’ trained by Mr. Perkins, but the results were less than satisfactory. The public interest in the spectacle had waned, although children were reported to perform adequately. By 1844 a report on the annual examination, conducted by the Venerable Archdeacon and others at the Town Hall, presents a stark contrast to the initial enthusiasm: ‘the attendance of visitors was very thin; the little people acquitted themselves with much credit. … The Society appears to be in a languishing condition’.46

Durba Ghosh, ‘Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity, and Historical Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India’ in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 297–316. 42 Also spelt Gomess or Gomes. 43 The Infant School Society, ‘Education and Schools’, CCO VII, no. 70 (1838): 175. 44 Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, 184–5. 45 Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions, 294. 46 ‘Missionary and Religious Intelligence: Annual Examination of the Infant School’, CCO IX (1844), 223. 41

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The repeated public displays of ‘native’ children’s eagerness and prowess at new learning early on gave much reason for hope and rejoicing to the advocates of the infant school pedagogies of firm but gentle discipline. These infant schools embodied a blend of ideas from Locke, Owen, and Wilderspin discussed in the first two chapters. Children were malleable, curious, and playful by nature, and their minds and behaviours could be moulded through ‘right kind of education’. The idea of re-making the child, and thus society, through Christian education was at the core of their functioning. Further, engaging children through activities more than toys and materials and emphasis on teaching a large number of children at low cost both aligned well with notions of the appropriateness of austerity for the ‘natives’ espoused by the missionaries and other functionaries of the Raj. The missionary aspirations of extending the infant schools throughout ‘the length and breadth of India’, however, met with official inertia and lack of funding. The Infant School Society applied to the General Committee of Public Instruction (General Committee henceforth), to adopt and foster the infant school system, citing the success of this ‘experiment’ and the interest of Indians in sending their children to attend. The General Committee was set up in 1823, a decade after the Charter of 1813. It had resolved to set aside some funds to improve the provision of education in the British territories of India,47 with the expressed objective of: … considering, and from time to time submitting to the government the suggestion of such measures, as it may appear expedient to adopt, with a view to better instruction of the people; to the introduction of useful knowledge, including the sciences and arts of Europe; and to the improvement of their moral character.48 [emphasis added]

The Calcutta Infant School Society obviously considered the infant schools to be in line with these objectives: The Infant School system is, we think, very applicable to and much needed in India: it is important that the minds of the youth of India should be saturated with pure and useful knowledge at the earliest age, and no system can we think be so effectual in arresting and instructing infant minds as the mode of instruction adopted by this Society.49

However, its case for extending the system that had ‘proven its worth’ in steeping the minds of young Indian children ‘with pure and useful knowledge at the earliest age’ proved ineffective. The General Committee ‘received the

47 Ten thousand pounds a year, equivalent of one million rupees at the time, had been set aside for education of Indian people since 1813 but was barely used till the establishment of the General Committee of Public Instruction in 1823. 48 CCO VII (1838), 175. 49 Ibid., 175.

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memorial thus submitted to them: – acknowledged, approved, and forgot about it. Nothing was done for three years.’50 The missionaries’ disappointment at this turn of events is mirrored in Bateman’s comment that, ‘the spark which had been lit with so much care, and which seemed to kindle into so bright a flame, went out’.51 However, he ended on an optimistic note. ‘The system has been tried’ and found to be ‘successful’. Therefore, he surmised that it held the potential to effect epic transformation in the moral and social fabric of the Indian society without much anxiety, resistance or ‘friction’: If ever Government desire to raise all India one step, without friction; if they would wean her from idolatry, without the charge of proselytism; if they would teach English, without trouble; introduce a system of education, without rousing party spirit: they have but to adopt and to apply the Infant School system. The second step would doubtless in due time follow; but this might be the first.52

Thus in Bateman’s view, the agenda of civilizing and Christianizing the Indians could have been furthered without raising doubts or questions about their motives and modus operandi by teaching the very young children English and Christian ways. Infant schools could have served as a strategic first step for the second step, that of conversions that ‘would doubtless in due time follow’. The First Government-Supported Infant School – Extending the ‘Fine Moral Machinery’ The General Committee sanctioned an infant school in 1839. It was to be opened at the Hooghly College in the Bengal presidency using funds of a private endowment from a benefactor, Haji Mohammed Muhsin.53 Bishop Wilson was requested to send one of the ‘native’ masters trained at the Calcutta Infant School. The Bishop welcomed the news of government support for a new infant school, commenting that ‘This step revives the hope of India being ere long filled with this fine moral machinery’ [emphasis added].54 The best-trained Indian teacher, Mr. T.M. Gomez, was immediately sent off to Hooghly to teach there using ‘the adapted system of infant schools’ developed in Calcutta by Mr. Perkins. Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, 184. Ibid., 185. Josiah Bateman was Rector of North Cray, Kent, and Bishop Daniel

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Wilson’s son-in-law and his first chaplain in Calcutta. 52 Ibid., 185. 53 Hooghly is variously spelt as Hoogly or Hugli. At times Mohammed was spelt as Mohamed and Muhsin as Mohsin. For a comprehensive account of the history of the Hooghly College (the Mohammed Mohsin College), and on how an infant school got funded out of Haji Mohsin’s endowment more than three decades after his death, see Zachariah, K., History of Hoogly College 1836–1935 (Alipore, India: Bengal Government Press, 1936). 54 Bateman, The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, 185.

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The impetus for an infant school ‘for boys of from three to seven years of age’ at Hooghly, which already had a college and two branch schools, came from the principal of the college, Dr. Thomas A. Wise.55 Dr. Wise, the civil surgeon of the general hospital in Chinsurah, was additionally appointed the principal and professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the Hooghly College when it opened in 1836. In the very first year of his appointment to the college, Wise presented a case for an infant school to the General Committee of Public Instruction: It would encourage parents to send their children to school at an age when they are now spending their time in idleness, and would thus remove them, in some measure, from the contaminating influence of their ignorant and superstitious relations. It would also, I conceive, accustom them to early habits of discipline, while it would exercise their senses, at a period of life when the mental perceptions are most vigorous, in a manner highly beneficial to their morals and understandings.56

Wise’s argument echoed the extant concerns of the advocates of infant schools in Britain and its colonies: removing children early from ‘the contaminating’ influences of their homes and neighbourhoods and instilling in them ‘habits of discipline’. The young boys could be taught effectively, Wise argued, ‘by oral instruction, with the assistance of delineations of the most common and useful objects, which might be explained to them with their most important applications; in fact by the establishment of an Infant school’.57 However, this was not an evenly popular proposition.58 Thomas Babington Macaulay, then the secretary to the General Committee, firmly opposed it. In his view, it was entirely inconsistent with the government’s education policy for India. ‘Neither in the Act of Parliament, nor in any of the instruction which we have received from the Government, is there any expression which can be twisted into a permission to set up schools of this sort. We might as well give our funds to a riding school’.59 He argued that infant schools in England were largely meant to keep the children of the working poor ‘safe, cheerful and harmlessly, if not profitably, employed’.60 He did not think it to be a place of much learning for them: 55 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal for the Year 1836’ (Calcutta: Department of Public Instruction, Baptist Mission Press, 1837), 129. 56 Ibid., 130. 57 Ibid., 130. 58 For details, see Baljit Kaur, ‘“Keeping the Infants of Coolies out of Harm’s Way”: Raj, Church, and Infant Education in India 1830–1851’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 5, no. 2 (2004): 221–35. 59 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Education in India: Macaulay’s Minutes, ed. H. Woodrow (Calcutta: C.B. Lewis, 1862), 47. 60 Ibid., 45.

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But instead of being locked up in close rooms or abandoned to the society of all the idle boys in the street, they play, and pick up a little smattering of knowledge, under a very gentle discipline, which is yet sufficient to keep them out of harm’s way.61

However in India, he went on, it was not the concern of the British to educate the children of the poor:62 ‘We do not at present aim at giving education directly to the lower classes of the people of this country. We have not funds for such an undertaking.’63 As for the idea of opening infant schools for the children of wealthier Indians, the idea struck Macaulay as totally inappropriate. He did not think that ‘respectable Hindoo and Mahomedan parents would be inclined to send their children just beginning to walk and talk from under their own roof’.64 Moreover, reflecting the prevalent views on motherhood, he argued that the best place for these young children was their home and the best teacher their mother, since she had the ‘leisure and the means’ to carry out her ‘sacred’ duty of caring for her family. It is noteworthy that Macaulay was willing to credit Indian women from high castes and wealthy families with attributes and ‘duties’ similar to those ascribed to the women of better classes in England: The relation of parent and child is the foundation of all society … to break without necessity the closest of all ties, to substitute the school-master for the mother as the guardian of an infant hardly able to lisp; and that too, when the mother has the leisure and the means to perform what all over the world is considered as her sacred and peculiar duty, is not in my opinion a wise course.65

Other committee members such as Charles Trevelyan sided with Wise. In their view, the benefits of the proposed institution outweighed Macaulay’s objections as well as the additional expenditure the infant school was expected to incur. Wise suggested using ‘one of the Bungalows annexed to the College’ for the infant school, ‘until more suitable arrangements can be made’, and he urged ‘that an intelligent master, duly versed in the system, and supplied with the necessary apparatus should be immediately appointed for the purpose’.66 After two years of arguments and counter-arguments, the infant school was finally sanctioned. All the suggestions put forth by Wise for location and personnel Ibid., 45. Macaulay was a staunch advocate of teaching a few ‘better class’ Indians in English

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so that they could serve as a link between the British rulers and the Indian ‘masses’. His argument won the day after a protracted debate in the mid-1830s, around the time when he was presenting these arguments against infant schools for the children of the poor. 63 Macaulay, Education in India: Macaulay’s Minutes, 45. 64 Ibid., 45. 65 Ibid., 46. 66 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal for the Year 1836’, 130.

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were accepted. The Calcutta Infant School Society and the Bishop were contacted to send a suitably trained person as noted above. Mr. Gomez was appointed at a salary similar to that paid for the branch school teachers. A Bengali Pundit, ‘Nobo Coomar Gupto’,67 was duly hired to assist Mr. Gomez in implementing the infant education system that Gomez had learnt in Calcutta.68 And, the new infant school was housed in one of the Bungalows on the Hooghly College campus: ‘The building in which the infant school is held, is a small bungalow of matted and bamboo work, and is situated in the same compound as the Hooghly Branch School, and is distant from the latter about 20 yards.’69 The Hooghly college campus boasted a splendid building for the main college with several smaller well-built mat and bamboo bungalows dotting a spacious compound situated on the banks of river Hooghly. While there are very few details about the daily routine or facilities for the infant school, it stands to reason that its location in the spacious college compound would have allowed ample scope for outdoor play.70 There is no record that the infant school ever moved from the ‘temporary’ bungalow into a purpose built facility or acquired the materials and equipments that were seen to be important for the full functioning of infant schools in England (see Chapter 2 for details). The infant school attracted students from families of considerable wealth, mostly Hindu and some Muslim, who sent their boys, some aged above seven, to the infant school. In 1839, there were 163 admissions. Fifty-four students left within that year. Of the remaining ninety-two boys: … two are Christians, eight are Mosulmans, and the remainder Hindoos. The seventeen Scholars promoted to the Branch School [at the end of that year] promise to be among our best scholars, having acquired a facility of speaking the language, a pleasure in its study, and a considerable stock of words and ideas.71

The first official report triumphantly expounded the success and popularity of the initiative, belying Macaulay’s concerns and fears: ‘The trial which has been made in the establishment of this School has been successful. It has proved the great advantage of such early instruction, and that the Natives have no Also referred to as Nobocoomar Mazoomdar. For example, see General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces 1845–46’ (Calcutta: Public Instruction, 1846), 88. 68 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction for 1840–41 & 1841–42’ (Calcutta: William Rushton & Co., 1842), 260. 69 Ibid., 260. 70 Ibid. For a fine engraving of the Hooghly college made in 1848 by the well-known London landscape engraver, Robert Wallis (1794–1878), see the General Committee Report, 261. 71 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal for the Year 1839–40’ (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1841), 112. 67

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disinclination to send their children to School at a tender age.’72 Within a couple of years, prominent residents of the neighbouring town of Chinsurah petitioned to shift the infant school to their town. Theirs was a bigger town, they argued, so the infant school would attract more children by reducing the travel time for most. However, Hooghly was equally keen to keep it. Despite several petitions back and forth, the school was not relocated. The infant school as well as the branch schools were attended by students in a much wider age range than originally envisaged. In 1840, the college moved to regulate admission age to its various institutions. Boys below five were not permitted entry to the infant school,73 and none below eight were to be admitted to the branch school.74 This was meant to ensure that boys attend the infant school for about three years and learn the rudiments of English language before entering the branch school. In practice, however, age was not enforced as a strict criterion of admission. Several examination reports in the 1840s record the age of infant school children as ranging between three and a half or four and seven years instead of the stipulated five to eight years, though Dr. Wise reported otherwise as mentioned below. The boys on an average were older than those in European infant schools. They were taught using ‘infant school methods’, as evident from the ‘examination’ reports, such as: ‘They explained clearly the various properties of several objects presented to their notice, as glass, india rubber, bamboo, etc. They sang several nursery rhymes, and explained both through Bengalee and English the words and passages contained in them.’75 In 1846, Dr. Wise noted that the infant school was ‘sufficiently advanced’ in its programme to keep the children engaged, and the children were allowed more freedom of space and movement than junior classes in ‘traditional’ schools. Consequently, they ‘appear much more orderly and better behaved than the junior classes of the college’.76 He went on to conclude that: ‘Although, therefore, the school does not resemble an infant school in England, as the ages range from 5 to 8 instead of from 2 to 6 years, it is in many points of view an example for imitation wherever young children are being educated.’77 Nevertheless, Dr. Wise felt that despite its good work and popularity, the infant school tended to be rather mechanical in its pedagogy, focusing on ‘the

Ibid., 112. General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in Bengal

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Presidency 1843–44’ (Calcutta: 1843), 101. 74 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal for the Year 1839–40’ (Calcutta: 1841), 115. 75 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency 1845–46’ (Calcutta: W. Ridsdale, Military Orphan press, 1846), 86. 76 Ibid., 86–7. 77 Ibid., 87.

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mere scaffolding of the edifice of infant instruction’.78 He requested the Education Committee to arrange for a visit by ‘some Gentleman practically familiar with the working of Infant Schools in Europe’, in order to ‘favour him with his opinion on the subject of its present condition’.79 It is not known whether such a visit eventuated, but the annual reports continued to laud the work of Mr. Gomez, ‘whose system appears to be good, and whose rolls and records exhibit great neatness and order’.80 In 1848–49, there were 43 to 46 boys aged between threeand-a-half and seven years. One Captain Richardson reported an improvement on examining the infant school: I examined this school on the 13th September, and was much pleased with its condition. I think it has improved since the last annual examination. Mr. Gomess and his Pundit have been very zealous and attentive, and the little boys have not only made a fair progress in their studies, but are in a state of discipline that was hardly to be expected considering their extreme juvenility. The discipline is not however at all too rigid, for the little fellows go through their lessons with great cheerfulness and vivacity.81

Most of the yearly reports, while positive, are rather general in their comments. The details of the curriculum remain largely unstated. One rare glimpse is afforded for the curriculum used by Mr. Gomez in the mid 1840s: Reading and Spelling – The ‘Reading Disentangled’ to lesson 5.82 The easy primer, cards of letters, sounds and simple sentences composed of monosyllabic words, and explanation in Bengalee. Arithmetic – Numeration and addition as far as 100. Simultaneous Instruction – Lessons on number and mental calculation by way of questions, tables of money, weight and time. Lessons on objects and pictures, and nursery rhymes with the explanations in Bengalee.83

General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in Bengal Presidency 1842–43’ (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1843), 116. 79 Ibid., 116. 80 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for 1843–44’ (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1844), 81. 81 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces 1848–1849’ (Calcutta: W. Palmer, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1850), 78. 82 The reference is presumably to a publication with this title by the Home and Colonial Infant School Society. 83 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces 1845–46’, 87–8. 78

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As noted above, an ‘adapted system’ was being followed in Hooghly that used English along with the local language, Bengali, to convey word meanings and numbers to children. Further, children were taught about common objects in their environment. An emphasis on exercise, physical movement, nursery rhymes and songs was retained, though it does not appear that the content of ‘nursery rhymes’ was ‘adapted’. A sense of discipline, order and cleanliness was seen to be imparted without punishment or harsh treatment of the children. For instance: They sang several pretty little nursery rhymes among which was the well known ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star’, followed by ‘March, march altogether, March, march away,’ at which they literally suited ‘the action to the word’ and marched in a body round the school room. This was no task, but a recreation. There was a smile on every face. … They were as quiet as could be expected, exhibiting, of course, the usual and not uninteresting restlessness of young children. Mr Gomes has no easy task to keep them in order, but by kindness, patience and firmness he succeeds very well.84

Despite not being under the aegis of CMS, it is clear that the Hooghly infant school was heavily influenced in its existence and functioning by the CMS initiatives in Calcutta. The infant school closed in 1851 following the accidental drowning of Mr. Gomez. The General Committee, in deciding to ‘abolish’ this infant school, commented that ‘provision for the education of Infants now exists in the Hooghly district’.85 The report did not provide specific information on where and since when did such provision exist in Hooghly. However, by the mid-1840s, a brief mention of an ‘infant class’ or a ‘class for the youngest children’, often made in tandem with comments on female schools or in the work of missionary women, was not restricted to the CMS reports or to the missionary activities in big cities.86 For example, The Banares Auxiliary, under a section titled ‘Christian and Orphan Girls’ Education’ in its 1846 report to the London Missionary Society, stated that, ‘An infant class of six or eight has lately been formed. They are the children of Native Christians in the Mission Compound.’87 A proposal was put forward in Gorakhpur in 1844 for the education of ‘… the most promising boys of the village schools, together with the mission orphans and children in the city, [where they] may enjoy the means of obtaining a sound and 84 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces 1849–50’ (Calcutta: 1851), 115. 85 General Committee of Public Instruction, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces 1850–51’ (Calcutta: 1852), 61. 86 For a ‘List of Christian Missionaries at Work in Bengal 1793–1833’ of various missionary societies active at the time, see Kanti Prasad Sen Gupta, The Christian Missionaries in Bengal 1793–1833 (Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971), Appendix A, 195–200. 87 ‘The Sixth Annual Report of the Banares Auxiliary to the London Missionary Society’, The Oriental Christian Spectator VIL (1846): 356.

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practically useful religious education’.88 An integral part of the proposal was to establish an ‘infant school for younger children and a girls’ school’. Infant school ‘pedagogy’ was advocated for all three institutions. Object teaching was to be included and ‘corporal punishment except in cases of gross moral delinquency’ was to be avoided [original emphasis].89 Among other conditions generally in line with infant school pedagogy were: ‘Children should not be confined in school too long at a time. Memory should not be exercised to the neglect of judgment. The school should be a Normal Institution for the education of village teachers, translators etc.’90 In 1852, John Spratt, a CMS missionary, reported the opening of three infant schools at ‘Nallunpuram, Athescyapuram and Anuragapuram’ near Tinevelly in South India, catering to over 200 infants, ‘their ages ranging from three to five’.91 The schools were for the ‘native’ Christian children. ‘The sympathies of the catechists and people are entirely with us in our attempts to bring their children under the influence of Christian instruction and discipline’.92 The ‘course of instruction’ aimed at giving the children, ‘as early as possible, a clear and simple knowledge of the Saviour and of the way of salvation through Him’.93 In addition, the children were taught ‘to read, and are daily put through a variety of manual and bodily exercises…to form in them habits of order’.94 A Roman Catholic infant school at Kamptee95 in the Central Provinces finds mention in the context of an application for fee exemption for the infants of soldiers in 1868.96 The infant school at Poona received a substantial grant from the Bombay Educational Society for its establishment in 1858, and later for ongoing functioning till 1871 when it was amalgamated with the main school at Byculla.97 The above examples, although by no means exhaustive, suggest that infant schools run by missionaries belonging to different denominations in various parts 90 91

CCO XIV (1845): 148. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 149. John Spratt, ‘Institution of Infant Schools in Southern India’, Church of England Sunday School Quarterly Magazine, vol. 5 (Dec 1852): 365. 92 Ibid., 366. 93 Ibid., 366. 94 Ibid., 366. 95 The current equivalent of this place name is unclear. British spellings for a number of places in India were inaccurate renderings of Indian languages. Many have been corrected since the Independence of India in 1947. 96 ‘Index to the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Department for the Year 1868’, ed. Home Department (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printers, 1894). 97 E.W. Ravenscroft, ‘Alphabetical Index to the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Department for the Year 1872’, ed. Home (Education) Department (Calcutta: The Home Secretariat Press, 1872). Poona is now spelt Pune, Bombay is known as Mumbai. 88 89

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of British India were relatively common around the middle of the nineteenth century. They juxtaposed conflicting ideas about the humane treatment of children and a focus on the individual child with the need to habituate them to moral sanction and discipline of a religious collective. The simultaneous emphasis on ‘play, freedom and enjoyment’ in learning on the one hand, and ‘discipline, order and obedience’ in behaviour on the other, was repeatedly noted with approval. As noted earlier, the Hooghly infant school was meant for boys only, perhaps due to its affiliation to the Hooghly College and the branch schools, all of which were institutions for boys. In general, there is no evidence of gender restrictions in the missionary infant schools in Calcutta or elsewhere, though girls of any age in India were less likely to be sent for education than boys, then as now. As noted in Chapter 1, missionary initiatives to educate females in India, in part led by Mary Ann Wilson, predate those to develop infant schools. Girls from the orphanages operated by missionaries, and schooled in mission schools, often went on to work with infants, either before or upon marriage to an ‘eligible Christian native’ or after being widowed. The story of Rabee, ‘the pious Teacher of Mrs. Weitbrecht’s Infant-school’ is a case in point.98 Rabee was raised in the orphan school at Burdwan, married a ‘Native-Christian’, Philip, and was sent by the mission to England to get training at the ‘excellent Institution for training Teachers for Infant-School, the Home and Colonial Infant-School Society’.99 On her return, she served as the infant school teacher in the Burdwan mission for nearly three years. At her passing in 1849, Rev. J.J. Weitbrecht gave a moving account of her Christian beliefs, her ‘earnest concern for the improvement and spiritual welfare of the orphan girls’, and her infant school work: Her gentle influence with those little ones was indeed for good; and they loved her in return. She introduced that which is the life and essence of an Infantschool, a sweet spirit of happiness and hilarity. Though she is gone, it seems as if her sweet melodious voice were still sounding in our ears when she struck up the song, ‘Here we suffer grief and pain, Here we meet to part again, In heaven we part no more.’100

Infant Schools and Female Education Mary Ann Wilson (née Cooke) came to India in 1820 as a governess with the family of the Earl of Mulgrave, who was sent to India to assist the Calcutta School Society. She enrolled as a member of the Church Mission Society in 1822, and

Church Missionary Intelligencer I, no. 6 (1849): 129–30. Ibid., 129. 100 Ibid., 130. 98 99

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married a missionary, Isaac Wilson, in 1823.101 She was in charge of several girls schools in Calcutta, which were eventually amalgamated into the Central Girls School Calcutta at her behest. She served as the principal of the Central School for several years. Wilson was concerned to steep the girls in the ‘proper’ Christian traditions – particularly child widows as well as those rendered ‘destitute’ due to natural disasters, such as famines, droughts, and floods, whom she gave shelter in her orphanage. The following excerpt, from one of her appeals for more missionary women from England to join her struggles in India, is illustrative of her concerns: These famines are of frequent occurrence in India: and, were Christian Females stationed in every large town, prepared to watch opportunities for collecting such poor little outcastes, in a very few years, hundreds, nay thousands, might be brought under Christian influence; and finally, they would make our best teachers, and become respectable heads of families.102

Wilson championed the ‘Infant System’ along the lines advocated by Wilderspin, making a case for the effectiveness of the system for ‘teaching large numbers at once by pictures, objects, &c.’ with little expenditure of ‘time and strength’.103 Her plea for assistance in infant education was full of practical advice and a note of urgency. ‘The Ladies’ [the prospective infant school teachers] ‘should be acquainted with the Infant System’,104 she recommended, through observing the practice of others. There was no need for them to have the actual experience of infant school teaching prior to their arrival in India. This advice was meant to ensure that they ‘come to the field of labour with the least possible delay’ and it signalled her awareness that the Indian situation was quite different to that in England. ‘It is here only that we can learn our work, or the exact pronunciation of the eastern Languages’ [original emphasis].105 She listed a number of items that each of ‘the ladies’ should bring with her to India. The list suggests that it was meant for younger girls (pictures, alphabets) as well as the older ones (reading books in English and material for ‘needle work’): 1. A large supply of pictures: I mean, especially, the little half-penny ones, which, besides being used in the schools, might be given as a reward. I have seen many respectable Natives much gratified by these little presents to their children. 2. One or two hundred slates without frames, with rulers, pencils, pens, and copy-books. A good store of English Alphabets and easy reading books, as the younger orphans and children of Native Christians will of course be taught English; and as this language becomes more in use, we may hope that respectable 101 Anderson, Gerald H., ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1998), 743. 102 MR (1835), 409. 103 MR (1835), 410. 104 Ibid., 410. 105 Ibid., 410–11.

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natives will wish their daughters to learn also. Probably this will take place first in small Stations. 3. A stock of brass thimbles (or any cheap ones), needles, scissors, all sorts of marking canvas, with cotton and silks for the same.106

How and whether these materials were actually used in the infant schools is not known. Some glimpses of infant schools or classes for the youngest children can occasionally be found in personal diaries or letters written by missionary or military wives or sisters. For instance, Mrs. Helen Mackenzie, second wife of Lieutenant-General Colin Mackenzie, travelled extensively in India for six years from 1846.107 Less than a week after her arrival in Calcutta, she had met the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff, who was active in the educational scene in Calcutta. Within a few days, accompanied by Duff, she visited the Free Church College and the Female Orphan School attached to it.108 On her return to England in the mid 1850s, she published, in multiple editions, detailed accounts of her travel experiences throughout British territories.109 During her visit to the Free Church College, Mackenzie found the method of teaching ‘the two youngest classes’ worth a description. The children’s age in the ‘youngest classes’ is not known. Since Mackenzie occasionally did mention visiting an infant class, it can be assumed that these children were slightly older that those in infant classes: The monitor puts an O on the stand, and tells them that letter is called O, they all repeat it. He then puts up an X, tells them its name, and then teaches them that these two letters form the English name of an ox. He makes them describe the ox, and tells the English word for every part of it. This he did before us, asking them in Bengali what has an ox on his head, they cried, horns, ears, eyes, and

Ibid., 410–11. In 1843 Helen Catharine, daughter of Admiral John Erskine Douglas, of the

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Queensberry family, married Colin Mackenzie, then Brigadier and later LieutenantGeneral. She died in 1881 without any children. See Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Mackenzies with Genealogies of the Principal Families of the Name. New, Revised, and Extended Edition (Second) (A. & W. Mackenzie, 1894). http://www.fullbooks.com/ History-Of-The-Mackenzies10.html (accessed February 22, 2010). 108 Calcutta Free School the oldest charity school in Calcutta was established around 1750. See James Long, Handbook of Bengal Missions in Connexion with the Church of England in North India (1848). 109 Various editions and volumes of travel journals were published under the names of Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, Helen Douglas Mackenzie and Mrs. Helen Mackenzie. The books, too, were titled somewhat differently in different editions/volumes. For instance, Mackenzie, Helen Douglas, “Mrs. Colin Mackenzie”, Life in the mission, the camp, and the zenáná; or, Six years in India (vol. I and II) (New York: Redfield, 1853); Life in the mission, the camp and the zenáná or Six years in India by Mrs. Colin Mackenzie, 2nd ed., Revised. In two volumes. (London: Richard Bentley, 1854); Mackenzie, Six Years in India, 1857.

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mouth, &c. in English. He cross-questioned them about it. “What are its feet for?” “To walk” shouted they. – “Why, then, does not this (pointing to the stand_ walk?” – “Because it has got no life,” was their answer.110

The above description offers a glimpse into the ways in which the missionaries used the local languages in order to teach English to younger children. The method might not be dissimilar to that employed in the ‘adapted system of infant education’ used in Calcutta and Hooghly. Of her visit to an infant class at a school for Jewish and Armenian girls in Calcutta, run by ‘Mrs. Ewart, the wife of one of our missionaries’, Mackenzie made more general comments unlike the specifics noted above.111 Here her description is more emotive than informative: … we then went to the lower room, where there is a class of about forty infants; such a variegated bank of babes would astonish any English teacher, for the little bodies were arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow. One small thing of two years old had a turban, and several had patches of opium to the size of sixpence, on the forehead and temples, as a cure for colds. Two half-cast teachers assist Mrs. Ewart, both of them very pleasing. The little children answered many questions, similar to those in ‘Watts’s First Catechism’, extremely well, and then sang the ‘Infant School Hymn’, which doubtless, you know – ‘We wash our faces, we comb our hair.’ I never saw a prettier sight.112

What caught Mrs. Mackenzie’s attention at the outset were the colourful clothes of Indian children and the then prevalent use of opium as a home remedy for colds. Mrs. Ewart’s ‘half-caste’ assistants go unnamed, reflecting the lower status of ‘Anglo-Indians’.113 As for the children, they did ‘extremely well’, answering her questions and singing the hymn familiar to her and her English readers. The reference, ‘Watts’s First Catechism’ is to Isaac Watts, who argued that ‘the plainest principles of the Christian religion … may be easily learned by heart by a child … at four or five years old’.114 Helen Mackenzie also commented on an infant class taught by a Bengali female trained at Mrs. Wilson’s school, which she observed at the Female Orphan School, under ‘Miss Laing’s supervision’. The school had just moved to a new house that 112 113 114

Mackenzie, Six Years in India, 5–6. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Ghosh, ‘Decoding the Nameless’. Isaac Watts, ‘Preface to the First Catechism’ in The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts D.D. in Nine Volumes, vol. 5 (London: Edward Baines, 1813), 237. http://books.google.ca/books ?id=VsYOAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Watts (1674–1748) was a prolific writer, poet, and preacher. Many of his writings were widely distributed across the world by churches and societies, including the Church of England, the Religious Tract Society, and the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor since their original publication in the eighteenth century. See D.A. Harsha, Life and Choice Works of Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D. (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857). 110 111

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could accommodate 100 girls. At the time of her visit only 30 girls were attending. All lived in the house except for ‘one day-scholar (a country-born girl), and a little Bengali child of three years old, who comes of her own free will’.115 Miss Laing, a military daughter, had devoted herself to Lord’s ‘good work’ through her efforts to school the orphaned girls and infants.116 She had divided them into three classes, including a class for infants: The first thing that attracted our attention was the youngest class, under the charge of Mahendra’s widow Rose, the sweetest looking young Bengali I have seen. Her face is quite lovely, not only from feature, but from the sweet, modest, pathetic expression. She was dressed, like all her countrywomen, in a white sort of sheet wrapped round her head and figure. Her little girl, a beautiful child of about two years old, clung to her … Rose is well educated, her husband having taken great pains to instruct her; she is very useful in the school; they have every reason to believe her a converted person.117 [emphasis added]

This verbal portrait of ‘Rose’, the Indian woman in charge of the infants, ‘sweet, modest, pathetic’, in sharp contrast to the ‘lady-like’ ‘attractive’ Miss Laing, resembles the engraving of ‘a scholar of the native-female schools in Calcutta’ (Figure 3.2). ‘Rose’, who was ‘brought up at Mrs. Wilson’s school’,118 is given a new identity through her Christian name,119 and a new ‘usefulness’ through her dead husband’s ‘enlightened’ efforts for her ‘instruction’. Both verbal and visual images of ‘native’ women allude to the power of ‘tender ties’ in the re-making of the ‘native’ in the colonial project conceptualized by Ann Stoler taking the lead from Sylvia van Kirk.120 Rev. Weitbrecht of Burdwan, too, painted a similar picture of Rabee: ‘Naturally amiable and gentle, … She possessed no striking talents, or quickness of apprehension : she was rather slow and deficient in energy – the common defect of native females – but her conduct always gave satisfaction, and she manifested in early years a tender, susceptible heart’.121 In the missionary eyes, these ‘native’ women did not possess much by way of talent or beauty but were made worthy and admirable by their docility and surrender to the missionary teachings and the will of God.

Mackenzie, Six Years in India, 9. Ibid., 9. 117 Ibid., 9–10. 118 Ibid., 9. 119 Ghosh, ‘Decoding the Nameless’. 120 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North 115 116

American History and (Post)Colonial Studies’, The Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65. 121 Church Missionary Intelligencer, (1849): 129.

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Fig. 3.2

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‘A scholar of the native-female schools in Calcutta’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1828), p. 175. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10509e.

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Mackenzie found the accommodation for the girls at Miss Laing’s school ‘very clean and simple’. The girls lived ‘exactly like natives’ in austerity, but without contact with ‘the other natives’, to shield them from the latter’s ‘contaminating’, ‘heathen’ influences: Everything is done by the girls, who learn to wash, cook, and all kinds of household work. They have no communication with any native servants; and only one bearer is kept to clean the walls and lights. The children are brought up exactly like natives, and sleep on bare wooden bedsteads, with no mattress or pillow. The very little ones have a small pillow; in the cold season each has a blanket, and in the hot weather a sheet, to wrap herself in; they live on curry and rice twice a day.122

The cost of keeping the girls protected in this environment was ‘three rupees or six shillings a month’ not counting the ‘house-rent and teachers’ salaries’, a meagre sum that Mackenzie thought many of her readers could afford to donate, ‘and thus save an orphan from wild beasts or from men who are even worse!’123 Like Mary Ann Wilson and many others of her compatriots, Mackenzie believed that only a Christian home could secure a safe future for these girls: The only thing that can be done for them, as they grow up, is to marry them to Christians, as it is impossible to send them to service in any family, on account of the heathen servants they would be obliged to mingle with. Some have been baptized in infancy; of course, none of the others are until they give evidence of conversion.124 [original emphasis]

Gathering and helping ‘destitute’ women and children, including girls, served many purposes for the missionaries. First, they were able to find grateful and willing workers for their missions as well as a powerful way of influencing the next generation of children through ‘Christian’ home life and infant schools. Second, missionaries felt relatively free to teach these children and women their language and their religion without strong opposition from any quarters. Third, girls brought up in orphanages and girls’ schools were working in infant classes in many places even when there might not have been separate infant schools. For instance, at the annual examination of the Free School in Calcutta in 1842, it was noted that ‘In the girls’ department there was a most interesting infant school exhibition, which proved highly gratifying to all present.’125 As mentioned earlier, the residents of Chinsurah had unsuccessfully petitioned to move the Hooghly infant school to their town several times in 1840. Eventually a missionary wife, Mrs. Louisa Mundy, started an infant school in Chinsurah. Mackenzie, Six Years in India, 10. Ibid., 10. 124 Ibid., 10. 125 CCO XII (1843): 46. 122 123

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Mrs. Mundy had reached India in 1833, worked in Chinsurah for ten years and passed away in 1843.126 She was already running a school ‘under her own roof’ for ‘nominally Roman Catholic’ girls,127 who were ‘extremely ignorant’. But their ‘prejudices were overcome by her unwearied efforts and her patient kindness’.128 It can be assumed that the infant school was started in early 1840s, though the exact date or any other detail about it is not known, except for a statement on its existence: ‘In due time an infant school was added as a separate institution, and for years she could look upon eighty young immortals daily greeting her with their cheerful smiles.’129 In addition to running these ‘Christian’ schools for girls and infants, she gave separate instruction to ‘native’ Hindu girls: … her native girls’ school where little ones sat on the mats under the thatched roof of an open building, was well attended, and did its part in overcoming prejudices, and preparing the way for entrance into the houses of Hindu gentlemen. At present time native ladies willing to be instructed in this locality are numerous.130

The description of the ‘native girls’ school’ at Chinsurah is similar to that shown in the ‘School of Hindu girls in Calcutta’ (Figure 3.3). Both evince a close mirroring of the guidelines spelt out for a school room by John Dorking Pearson in Dr. Bell’s Instructions for Modelling and Conducting Schools, published in Bengali in 1819.131 Pearson recommended that the school’s roof should be thatched and walls made of bamboo or clay, with a ‘cubit of lattice work’ all around ‘to admit light and air’. At one end there should be a sand-board where the youngest children could ‘practise writing the alphabet’. The rest of the room should have rows of ‘low narrow desks’.132 Each class was to have two monitors who did most of the teaching under the master’s supervision. In Figure 3.3, older girls are depicted sitting in neat rows under a thatched roof in a light and airy room. The only feature missing is the desks. The younger children are presumably working with a monitor at one end of the room. Captain Stewart, who was instrumental in M. Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1875), 187. 127 Girls belonged to Portuguese families who, by the early nineteenth century, had settled in Chinsurah for more than two centuries due to the indigo and other trade. 128 Weitbrecht, The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana, 187. 129 Ibid., 187. 130 Ibid., 188. 131 John Dorking Pearson, Dr. Bell’s Instructions for Modelling and Conducting Schools [Bengali] (Chinsura: Calcutta School Book Society, 1819). Pearson, a Bell enthusiast, was in charge of about thirty mission schools around Chinsurah between 1818 and 1823, and implemented many of Bell’s ideas into schools, along with writing teacher’s manuals on the monitorial system. 132 M.A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 81. 126

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‘School of Hindu girls in Calcutta’. In Missionary Register (London: L.B. Seeley, 1826), p. 183. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. S10-509b.

starting the mission station at Burdwan is also known to use Bell’s system there.133 Apparently the monitorial practice and the inclusion of the youngest girls and boys were more common than the fleeting accounts of infant schools or classes admit.134 The links between female education and infant education in the early nineteenth century are, thus, evident at various levels: the missionary societies supported both initiatives; the female missionaries and missionary and military wives and daughters worked in both fields; and the girls attending these schools often grew up to be monitors and teachers in schools and infant classes. Mandatory Infant Classes: A Significant Step Forward? The period from the 1850s to 1880s marked a widespread diffusion of the notion of education for young children. Changes were evident in England in the same period with the first Froebelian Kindergarten opening there in 1851. In India, Ibid., 82. Andrew Bell’s and Joseph Lancaster’s manuals were available in various Indian

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languages in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. For instance, J.D. Pearson, Dr. Bell’s Instructions for Modelling and Conducting Schools [Hindi] (Calcutta School Book Society, 1820); J. Molesworth, A Treatise of the Management of Schools According to the Lancasterian System of Education [in Marathi] (Bombay: Bombay Native Education Society, 1825–6); J.D. Pearson, The British System of Education as Adapted to Native Schools in India (Calcutta: Mission Press, 1830).

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infant education was provided in the mission schools largely due to the interest of local communities and the initiative of the individual missionaries. Infant school attracted little overt official attention in policy or provision. The year 1854 marked a significant departure from the past in that the British government assumed responsibility for education in the Indian territories under its control.135 Consequently, education departments were set up in each province, a large number of schools were started, and universities were established. However, the policy change did not mention infant schools. Infant education thus did not disappear but equally it failed to gain any momentum outside of the missionary or European circles. In 1881, the Indian Education Commission was set up by the British government. It was a mammoth initiative with the objective of conducting an enquiry into ‘the present state of elementary education throughout the Empire, and the means by which this can everywhere be extended and improved’.136 Committees were instituted in all provinces under the colonial rule to gather evidence and testimonies from various parts of British India for over two years.137 The final voluminous report was submitted in 1883 and the government of India passed its final orders in October 1884. Infant education, while not at the forefront of the testimonies or the resultant changes, did get presented as a pedagogical advancement and a recommended method of teaching young children. By the 1880s Froebel’s ideas had well nigh taken over the way teachers for young children were being trained in England. In India, the Froebelian methods and materials were proffered as a concrete and progressive way forward on how young children could be taught instead of the traditional didactic or drill methods of teaching that were under scrutiny and criticism. Many submissions to the commission argued such points as the one below presented in Bombay: For the improvement of these girls’ schools, I would suggest that the larger ones among them should have two divisions, one of which, for children under seven years, should be conducted on the infant school system of making attendance pleasant for the pupils … It would be of great help to the education of girls if two or three certified lady-teachers brought out from England were attached to the Education Department, whose business should be to guide the Native

135 Many of the recommendations of 1854 were reversed in 1859, in part due to the political turmoil following the freedom struggle of 1857, called mutiny by the British. See J.P. Naik and Syed Nurullah, A Students’ History of Education in India 1800–1973, 6th ed. (Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 1974). 136 Hunter, 1884, 2. 137 For details on provinces in British India in 1901, see William S. Meyer et al., Imperial Gazetteer of India: Administration (vol. 4). New edition, published under the authority of His Majesty’s secretary of state for India in council (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–31 [v. 4, 1909]).

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female teachers in conducting their schools after the model of similar schools in England, and specially the infant schools there.138

Miss L.R. Collett, Lady Superintendent of the Ahmedabad Female Training College, reported to the commission that ‘the Irish Presbyterian Mission Mixed Anglo-Vernacular School in Surat’ was the only school in the Bombay presidency that was ‘conducted on the Kindergarten system’. Miss Lang, the teacher in charge, was trained in ‘the Kindergarten system for some years prior to coming to this country’ and was successful in attracting a large number of girls, ‘from 50 to 54, the greater proportion being the children of respectable Parsis; there are about ten Hindu and three or four Muhammadan girls, all from the better class families’.139 A fee of ‘8 annas’ per month was paid by each girl, which was not a paltry sum at that time. ‘Miss Lang finds that in this country the Kindergarten system is only adapted to the children of under six years of age.’140 One significant consequence of the Indian Education Commission report was that in 1885 a committee was established in the Madras presidency to revise the Grant-in-aid Code and suggest other systemic changes. Mrs. Isabel Brander, an inspector of girls’ schools in the Madras presidency and an ardent supporter of female and infant education, was a member of the committee. It was largely due to her influence that the committee resolved to institute an infant standard in all primary schools in the presidency. A large number of students in the early classes began to be examined in Object Lessons and Kindergarten Occupations; both having been classified as ‘results subjects’ qualifying for ‘payment by results’.141 These examinations had double-edged consequences. On the one hand, more children were being instructed and examined in these ‘subjects’; on the other hand, the perception of these as discrete ‘subjects’ showed that Kindergarten was not understood as a pedagogy or philosophy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Bombay and Bengal presidencies had also introduced measures similar to those in Madras. Kindergarten lessons and Froebelian gifts became commonplace terms in educational circles, and recommendations were made to introduce Kindergarten method to lower elementary classes, at least for the first three years of school beyond the infant class.142 The state of Baroda adopted the Kindergarten method for the first three classes in all primary schools. A number of ‘text books’ and 138 ‘Report of the Bombay Provincial Committee, Vol. 2’ (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884), evidence of Mr. Sorabjee Shapurjee Bengali, JP of Bombay, 258. 139 Ibid., 276. Miss Collette ran a private school for the children of the ‘better class of European residents’ in Fort Bombay prior to moving to Ahmedabad. 140 Ibid., 276. 141 ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1885–1886’ (Madras: Government of India, 1887). 142 See the quinquennial reviews, Progress of Education in India, 1887–88 to 1891–92, and 1897–98 to 1901–02, both published in by the Government of India in 1893 and 1904 respectively.

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resource manuals for teachers were prepared in Gujarati language, for instance, the Delwadakar Series.143 However, the uptake of the recommendations varied across provinces in both quality and quantity. The financial costs of introducing the new methods of teaching were not considered with sufficient diligence and the teacher training was severely lacking.144 The Madras presidency took the lead in addressing the need for specially trained teachers for young children. Mrs. Isabel Brander’s remarks on her examination of the Government Female Normal School, Madras indicate that training in ‘Kindergarten lessons’ was already a part of their teacher training by the early 1880s, and that at least some teachers were sent to England for training: Miss Bernard and Miss Shanmugam gave lessons before me when they returned from England in 1882, and I had not heard from them since, except that Miss Bernard gave a very good Kindergarten lesson in November. I found them both much improved … Miss Siromony Eleazan gave Kindergarten lessons before me when I examined the practicing school in November. I thought her a very good teacher and especially suited to infants.145

By 1890 a separate Kindergarten section had been established at the teachers’ college in Saidapet, Madras. The Kindergarten staff from the college, including Corrie Gordon and Carol Gillingham, went on to influence not only the students who trained with them, but many others through their writings about Kindergarten teaching. Gordon and Gillingham both were serving in the Kindergarten section of the college when the building was expanded to create a dedicated space for it, ‘a special block was erected in 1904 to accommodate the Kindergarten section, and a lady superintendent trained in England was placed in charge of the section’. Carol Gillingham was the superintendent mentioned here. The college also appointed ‘a specialist in Kindergarten method’, perhaps Corrie Gordon.146 There is no detail about the specific nature of the design or the facilities, except for a brief remark that, ‘The children in the pre-school stage were given individual amenities for See Gopalji Kalyanji Delwadakar, Kindergarten athwa Balshikshan: Srishti Saundrya dwara Vyaaharic Neeti Gyan (Bhag 3) [Kindergarten or Child Education, Part 3, Revised 3rd ed.] (Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1903). The inner and back covers of the book list twenty titles in Delwadakar Series ‘approved for use in the government Gujarati primary schools’. The series included titles on Kindergarten theory and method for teachers as well as workbooks, stories, songbooks, Object Lessons, drama, natural science, children’s games, drawing books, etc. 144 Naik and Nurullah, A Students’ History of Education in India. They make this point for primary education in general but it is reasonable to argue its relevance for the infant classes in particular within the primary schools. 145 ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1884–1885’ (Madras: Government of India, 1886), 110. 146 A.G. Bourne, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1906–1907, and for the Quinquennium 1902–03 to 1906–07. Vol. 1’ (Madras: Government of India, 1907), 24–5. 143

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drinking water and resting in the afternoon, in addition to common toys and play materials. … Music and dancing and other group activities were taught to the children of this Kindergarten section.’147 Mrs. Brander wrote one of the first books on Kindergarten teaching in 1899, Kindergarten Teaching in India: Stories, Object Lessons, Occupations, Songs and Games, which was translated into Tamil and was widely used in teacher training.148 Volume One was focused on infant class. She wrote two further volumes, both published in 1900, advocating the use of Kindergarten methods in the First and Second Standards, and giving practical advice on how to implement these ideas. The content in all three volumes was adapted to Indian conditions, and was abundant, so that teachers could choose the content and make materials suitable for their particular settings. Drawing on her experience at Saidapet, Carol Gillingham wrote The Indian Kindergarten in 1908, which was also used widely by teachers and teacher training colleges. ‘The methods and schemes of work laid down have all been tried, and have answered very successfully in the Kindergarten Department of the Teachers’ College. Saidapet, Madras.’149 Gillingham’s book, like the one by Brander, focused on practical details, serving as a teachers’ manual. It included a detailed account of activities, instructions on making instructional materials, and a pool of songs, stories, and games. Corrie Gordon worked at the college for over fifteen years. She wrote and edited a number of books on teaching and development of young children.150 Her views reflected the newly emerging wisdom about children’s development based on the Child Study movement in the West,151 along with her awareness of Rabindranath Tagore’s views on the innocent nature of the child, similar to those of Rousseau. Citing Tagore, she argued that ‘what we need in India for our teachers more than almost anything else, is that our teachers should cultivate the spirit of the eternal child’ [original emphasis]. 152 Gordon wanted the teachers of young children to 147 Jaganathan Iyer, Teachers’ College Souvenir (Teachers’ College, Saidapet, Madras, 1956), 64. 148 Isabel Brander, Kindergarten Teaching in India: Stories, Object Lessons, Occupations, Songs and Games, vol. I: Infant Standard (London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1899). 149 Gillingham, The Indian Kindergarten, v. 150 Corrie Gordon, Essays on the Child and His Education (Madras: Srinivasa Varadachari & Co., 1917); Corrie Gordon, ed., Teaching in Indian Elementary Schools (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1921). Gordon was also involved in developing Indian norms for standardized intelligence testing in the 1920s. 151 Child Study movement, which took shape at the turn of the century, is generally considered to have been led by G. Stanley Hall in America, though European countries such as the UK and Germany were also at its forefront. The objective was to create ‘scientific knowledge’ about ‘child nature’ based on observation. This information was to be used to plan educational and other interventions for children. 152 Gordon, Essays on the Child and His Education, 1917, 1.

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cultivate ‘a hopeful disposition, a smiling face’, and she preferred female teachers for young children because ‘as a rule women are more sympathetic with young children and are able to bring themselves down to the level of the children more easily than men’.153 Despite these developments, a basic misconception in understanding the Kindergarten approach persisted. As J.J. Stone, an Inspector of European and Training Schools in Madras commented, Kindergarten was widely recognized as a ‘“subject” rather than a system or method’: … and when the nature of the work commonly done as Kindergarten is examined it is generally found to be defective in one or more of the following ways. It is too formal, it has too much the character of lessons and too little of play. There is insufficient reliance on the spontaneous activity of the children, and the various ‘occupations’ are regarded too much as ends in themselves, so that a child is taught, for instance, paper-folding in the same spirit as that in which he is taught writing, as though the ability to produce by folding paper a form called a pair of trousers were the object in view instead of some kind of valuable effect on his mind and body.154

The views of teaching and teacher espoused by advocates of Kindergarten were at odds with the traditional images of teacher and schooling in India. Despite educational policy changes in virtually all the provinces around the turn of the century, which advocated for infant classes and the implementation of Kindergarten methods in lower primary standards, there was much opposition to the idea. The criticism came both from the public who found it hard to reconcile these ‘romantic’ notions of children’s education with the serious business of schooling that could be useful for the children’s future, and from the officials lamenting in particular the dearth of financial resources and adequately trained teachers. While the missionaries continued to offer relatively effective infant education and teacher training for ‘Europeans and Eurasians’,155 the implementation of the 1885 recommendations for most government schools perpetually lagged behind. As early as 1900, the difficulty was noted with concern in Madras: It is mostly Native Christians and European and Eurasian young women that undergo training, and they are generally employed in Christian schools … Good

Ibid., 1. J.J. Stone, ‘Introduction’, Carol L. Gillingham, The Indian Kindergarten (Bombay:

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Longmans, Green & Co., 1908), ix. 155 A separate and fairly elaborate system of education flourished in India for the ‘European’ children from the second half of the nineteenth century. Infant classes in these schools were better organized and resourced, and endured more or less consistently across time. These are not the subject of inquiry in this chapter. In the Code of Regulations for European Schools, Government of Madras, 1938, ‘European’ is defined as ‘any person of European descent pure or mixed who retains European habits and modes of life, but the local Government shall, in all cases of doubt, decide the proper interpretation of the term’.

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Kindergarten teachers are still a great desideratum, not only in girls’ schools but in boys’ schools as well. It is highly desirable that more Europeans and Eurasians should be trained for employment as Kindergarten teachers; but, as long as the emoluments offered in primary schools are as low as they are now, it is useless to expect teachers of the class mentioned to accept employment in native schools.156

Overall, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the British government take more direct control of its now expanded territories in India, undermining the ‘traditional’ education system to such an extent that the latter could never recover. The ‘new system of education’ along Kindergarten lines had neither the financial nor human resources needed to meet the increasing demand for elementary education. The missionary schools remained active as one small part of the system under the grant-in-aid schemes but their influence became more circumscribed to European and Eurasian populations. The exceptions were the remote and relatively inaccessible areas in the country such as the far eastern regions where the missionaries were able to continue their work of proselytizing and educating away from the religious and political limelight well into the twentieth century. The shift from the East India Company’s economic control to the British government’s political rule over India in the mid-nineteenth century moved the ground irrevocably in byzantine ways with far-reaching consequences in all walks of life in India. Infant schools, of little importance in this larger frame, nevertheless, were not immune to these changes. Infant Education into the Twentieth Century: Still ‘A Fine Moral Machinery’? The emphasis that Bishop Daniel Wilson had placed on infant school as ‘a fine moral machinery’ in 1830s had echoed in the arguments of Dr. Wise, that by instilling in young children habits of discipline, infant schooling would be beneficial to their ‘morals and understandings’. The echo persisted under different guises almost to the end of the nineteenth century, though less overtly. However, by the turn of the century, a cursory look at the Codes of Regulations and Educational Policies and Rules across British India makes one point abundantly clear: only the habits of discipline and order remained amongst the desirable objectives of infant and junior classes. The moral rewards of such discipline did not find mention in the secular education documents. Bible study was never favoured overtly by the official dictum, nor was it embraced by large segments of Indians. Under the European influence of Froebel, and later Montessori, and the rising awakening for national identity within India, there was further distancing from and resentment against the missionaries’ version of education among Indians. The 156 G.H. Stuart, ‘Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for 1900–1901’ (Madras: Government of India, 1902), 86.

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pragmatic focus on the ‘three Rs’, traditionally a feature of early education in India, intensified. The advocacy of Kindergarten methods and approach for early schooling was abandoned within the first decade of the twentieth century, with paucity of properly trained teachers as the commonly stated reason. As the control over elementary education devolved to provincial governments in 1919, limited funds and different policies led to further variability in provision for infant classes. Government and government-aided schools in most places continued to nominally have ‘below standard’ or infant classes, but the spirit of the approach both in the missionary sense and in the progressive educational or pedagogical sense was lost. Despite the general decline and disregard for infant education across the country, Montessori’s writings ignited a new spark in one corner of the country in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In Bhavnagar, Gujarat, a legal clerk turned school teacher, Gijubhai Badheka, was so impressed with her insights that he devoted the rest of his life to interpreting her ideas, improvising with Indian materials, and writing stories and poems in order to turn her ideas into practice relevant both for young children’s education and for teacher training in India. By 1920, almost single-handedly, he had put young children’s education, termed Bal Mandir, on the map in Western India. In 1926 Gijubhai organized a conference at Bhavnagar for teachers of young children, and the first preschool association in education, the Montessori Association, was formed.157 However, his work as well as other localized efforts in some parts of India, such as the Delwadakar series from Gujarat mentioned above, remained largely unknown outside the particular geographic and linguistic boundaries. By the time Montessori arrived in India in 1939, Gijubhai had passed away. Montessori’s training programs in various parts of the country were attended by thousands of teachers in 1940s.158 In view of the historical narrative presented in this chapter, it is reasonable to assume that these teachers were working in the government or government-aided elementary schools in junior classes, if not in infant classes exclusively. Her training programs went some way to fill a long standing need for trained teachers of young children. However, with several hundred teachers attending each of the programs, instructed through translation from Italian to English to Indian regional languages, the effectiveness of such training would have been limited. As is often the case with transplanted ideas, the spirit and letter of her work, like Froebel’s before her, were seldom followed. The potential of gaining ground in infant education and building on the earlier efforts, once more, remained untapped for young children in India. Given the chequered, albeit long, history of infant education in India, it is understandable that the report of the last major education review commissioned by the British government, the Central Advisory Board on Post-War Educational Development in India, lamented the lack of proper infant education in the country in 1944: Kaur, ‘Early childhood education in India from 1830s to 1940s’. Ibid.

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Outside India the nursery school has come into its own and has taken a welldefined place in the fabric of public instruction, but the importance of looking after the physical and mental welfare of future citizens from their earliest years has still to be brought home to the responsible authorities in this country.159

‘Public apathy’ yet again was seen as the major cause along with the ‘official neglect’. Like the earlier Wardha Scheme’s Pre-basic Education160 proposals, the 1944 report recommended that free infant or nursery classes should be made available in all primary schools, with the target of reaching at least one-third of the eligible population of three to six year old children. An initial provision for ‘10,00,000 places in Nursery Schools and classes’ was to be made with an outlay of Rs.3,18,40,000 to implement the commission’s recommendation of providing ‘young children social experience rather than formal instruction’,161 but impact on the ground was negligible, then or since. India, three-quarters of a century after gaining independence from colonial rule in 1947, is still struggling to provide free preschool education for all its children. Major advances have been made in the last fifty years or so in the quality, range and the sheer number of preschools that exist now to cater to the needs of the poor as well as the newly affluent.162 Infant education has indeed come a long way from its humble beginnings by an Anglican Bishop in Calcutta both in its scope and its objectives. However, the most recent amendment to the constitutional provision for education (86th amendment, 2002 that came into force from 1st April, 2010), while making a stronger statement on primary education and lifting 159 Bureau of Education India, ‘Post-war Educational Development in India: Report by the Central Advisory Board of Education’ (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1944), 48. 160 The Wardha Scheme of Basic Education was developed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1937. The Pre-basic component was added to it in the early 1940s to cater to the needs of younger children. The scheme never took root in India and, as Krishna Kumar has argued, it was never implemented with full support and due diligence by the Indian governments before or after the country’s political independence from the British in 1947. See Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of Education (1991). 161 Bureau of Education India, ‘Post-war Educational Development in India’, 48. Ten lakh (10,00,000) is equal to one million. One crore written as 1,00,00,000 equals ten million. 162 Presently infant education in India is called Pre-School or Pre-Primary Education, Early Childhood Education (ECE), or Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE). On developments in the area in Independent India, see Mina Swaminathan, ed., The First Five Years: A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1998); G. Pankajam, Pre-school Education: Philosophy and Practice (Ambala Cantt: The Indian Publications, 1994). India has world’s largest free preschool education system, Integrated Child Development Services, supported by UNICEF since its inception in 1975. As of September 2012, there were over 7000 ICDS projects with almost 1,32,000 functioning preschool centres (Anganwadis) providing preschool education to more than 34 lakh children in the age group of three to six years of age. http://wcd.nic.in/icdsimg/ ic1dtd07112012.pdf.

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it to the status of a Fundamental Right (Article 21A), has yet again marginalised preschool education. Article 45 of the Constitution of India, which had promised universal, ‘free and compulsory education for children until they complete the age of fourteen’ [emphasis added] ‘within a decade’ was amended.163 The amendment made ‘free and compulsory education a Right of every child in the age group 6-14 years’ [emphasis added].164 As for the education of children below six, it is still mired in public apathy, official neglect, and scarcity of resources – human and material. Thus, it continues to languish on India’s ‘shall endeavour to provide’ list of policies, with no clear mandate for its implementation.165

Constitution of India adopted by the Government of India in 1950. http://www. education.nic.in/articles/article45.htm. 164 Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India ‘Education Policy’. http://www.education.nic.in/natpol.asp. 165 Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India ‘Provisions of the Constitution of India Having a Bearing on Education’. http://www.education.nic.in/ constitutional.asp#Directive. 163

Chapter 4

‘Suited to the tastes and dispositions of Indian children’: Infant Schools in Canada Grape Island on which they have commenced their civilized mode of life, is a pleasant and healthy station, and though small … is desirable on account of being out of the way of rude visitors, some of whom have not set them the best examples either of modesty or justice.1

Canadian infant schools for Aboriginal children were limited to initiatives by American Methodists in the Bay of Quinte area in Upper Canada in the 1820s and 1830s. This chapter focuses on this story and, in particular, the schools at the Grape Island Mission to the Mississauga Ojibwa established in 1826.2 Regarded by the Methodists as a ‘showplace station’, it was the first to contain an infant school.3 Though the island was selected as a mission site for its isolation from ‘rude visitors’, its proximity to the town of Belleville made it a popular destination for visitors, who came to admire the scenery and view the village and its residents, Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (York: Printed for the Society, and the Office of the Colonial Advocate by William Lyon MacKenzie, 1827), 7, United Church of Canada Archives (UCCA), Toronto. 2 The mission is described in a number of works by historical geographers Brian Osborne and Michael Ripmeester. See Michael Ripmeester, ‘“It Is Scarcely to Be Believed …”: The Mississauga Indians and the Grape Island Mission, 1826–1836’, Canadian Geographer 39, no. 2 (1995): 157–68; Michael Ripmeester, ‘Vision Quests Into Sight Lines: Negotiating the Place of the Mississaugas in Southeastern Ontario, 1700–1876’ (PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, 1995); Brian Osborn and Michael Ripmeester, ‘The Mississaugas Between Two Worlds: Strategic Adjustments to Changing Landscapes of Power’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 17, no. 2 (1998): 259–91; Brian Osborne, Marijke Huitema, and Michael Ripmeester, ‘Imagined Spaces, Constructed Boundaries, Conflicting Claims: A Legacy of Colonial Conflict in Eastern Ontario’, International Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (2002): 87–112; Brian Osborne, ‘Barter, Bible, Bush: Strategies of Survival and Resistance among the Kingston-Bay of Quinte Mississauga, 1783–1836’, in Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Actions of Peace and the Temagami Blockades of 1988–89, ed. Bruce Hodgins, Ute Lischke, and David McNab (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), 85–104; Michael Ripmeester, ‘Intentional Resistance or Just “Bad Behaviour”: Reading for Everyday Resistance at the Alderville First Nation, 1837–76’, in Hodgins, Lischke, McNab, Blockades and Resistance, 105–26. 3 Hope MacLean, ‘Ojibwa Participation in Methodist Residential Schools in Upper Canada, 1828–1860’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 25, no. 1 (2005): 101. 1

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much as tourists did at New Lanark.4 A visitor in 1834 remarked that ‘the view of Grape Island, on sailing up the Bay of Quinte about sunrise, is very beautiful’ but expressed disappointment after seeing the settlement: ‘The houses looming away in the distance seem much larger and more numerous than they really are, and give the idea of a well built, regularly planned town. On our arrival at it, therefore, we are something disappointed’.5 By this date the mission was already in decline. Three years later, its members relocated to Alderville near Rice Lake, the Grape Island buildings sold to finance the new community. As shown in Figures 4.1 and 4.2, the designation of the ‘Grape Island Missionary Station’ disappeared from the 1837 map, as did – for unknown reasons – Sawguin Island in its entirety. In its eight years existence, however, the mission held an important place for the Methodists in demonstrating their work with the Mississauga and, through the work of Aboriginal missionaries, with ‘native’ peoples elsewhere. The present chapter begins by outlining the circumstances leading to the start-up of the mission. It continues with a description of mission life before turning to a discussion of the role and function of the school and the links with educationists in the United States. The chapter concludes by reviewing subsequent developments in Aboriginal education with a focus on young children and residential schools, and more recent initiatives in preschool education. In the three decades following the war of the American Revolution, the number of settlers in the St. Lawrence River region in Upper Canada increased dramatically, and Aboriginal people were pressured by the colonial government to make room. As one example, the Mississauga (Ojibwa) forfeited three million acres in a series of ‘land surrenders’ to the Crown over a period of fifty years.6 In 1805 the Crown purchased 250,000 acres from the Mississauga at Credit River for £1,000.7 The Crown’s strategy was to then resell the land to settlers at a profit, in a process described by historian Alan Taylor as ‘building state power from a web of private-properties’.8 The Mississauga sold land as a strategy to retain control over their future, expecting it to result in long-term rewards, whereas the British perceived the sale as a ‘one-shot commercial purchase that extinguished native title’.9 The Mississauga came under intense pressure from European settlement, and its population had fallen below replacement levels in the 1820s. The band Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (1827), 7. ‘Travels in Upper Canada’, Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, September 6, 1834, 1. 6 Peter S. Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto 4 5

Press, 1991). See also Donald B. Smith, ‘The Dispossession of the Mississauga Indians: A Missing Chapter in the Early History of Upper Canada’, in Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives, ed. J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1989), 23–51. 7 Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), 350. 8 Ibid., 407. 9 Ibid., 131.

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Fig. 4.1

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‘Map of the Prince Edward District, Upper Canada’ showing the Grape Island Missionary Station. Publius V. Elmore (New York: Stiles & Co., 1835). Archives of Ontario, Canada. Carto N-4012, F005309.

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Fig. 4.2

‘Map of the Prince Edward District, Upper Canada’, the missionary station is gone. Publius V. Elmore, Map of the Midland and Prince Edward Districts (Hallowell, Upper Canada: P.V. Elmore, 1836). Archives of Ontario, Canada. Carto N-2530-C. F005678.

living near Belleville on the Bay of Quinte numbered 216 in 1830, comprising 53 men, 81 women, and 82 children.10 In the midst of these developments, some Mississauga converted to Christianity, motivated by spiritual and pragmatic reasons including the promise of schools for their children. The region around the Bay of Quinte was a site of intense mission activity led by American Methodists such as the Reverend William Case.11 Case worked alongside First Nations preachers, most notably Peter Jones and John Sunday. The Methodist Missionary Society described its conversion Hope MacLean, ‘A Positive Experiment in Aboriginal Education: The Methodist Ojibwa Day Schools in Upper Canada, 1824–1833’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 22 (2002): 28. 11 Ruth Clarke, Before the Silence: Fifty Years in the History of Alderville First Nation, 1825–1875 (Alderville, ON: Alderville First Nation, 1999). 10

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and civilization strategy as ‘Measures for Improving the Civil Condition of the Indians’.12 Specifically these measures involved imparting: … the principles of true religion; the settlement of the Indians on lands which they may call their own, [which] appears to be an important measure to encourage their industrious habits and promote their civilization; instructions on temporal economy; and compliance with their wishes, for having their children instructed.13

The strategy in action closely followed this scheme. First, at camp meetings that could last for several days, preachers such as Jones sermonized in Ojibwa, and new converts prayed and sang. Thereafter converts were gathered into a village settlement. In this way, believers were isolated from unbelievers – the ‘rude visitors’ noted in the quote at the start of this chapter – and provided with a full cultural immersion. In the case of the Grape Island Mission, Indian converts were surrounded on all sides by intensive European settlement as shown on the maps (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The final stage in the mission strategy was to train local leaders in the mission schools who would then move to other regions as preachers and teachers. In the midst of denominational competition for converts amongst First Nations people, the Methodists were particularly successful. Historian Neil Semple outlined reasons for this, including the key role of First Nations clergy as cultural brokers between the European missionaries and local communities, and the psychological and spiritual appeal of the camp meetings.14 As interpreters of indigenous language and culture the clergy were ‘able to place Christianity in a relevant mythological context’.15 Camp meetings were effective sites for conversion with First Nations, partly due to their similarity with ‘native quests for contact with the spirit world and the formation of a new persona’.16 The Grape Island Mission The Grape Island Mission was organized by Peter Jones under invitation from Case. In 1826 the Methodists leased Grape Island and another nearby island from the Mississauga.17 The residents, initially numbering about 150, lived in tents 12 Fifth Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (York: Printed for the Society, at the Office of the Christian Guardian, W.J. Coates, Printer, 1830), 7–8, UCCA. 13 Ibid. 14 Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). 15 Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 160. 16 Ibid. 17 Frank Eames, ‘Pioneer Schools of Upper Canada’, Papers and Records 18 (1919): 101. In Before the Silence, Clarke reports the indenture date as October 16. Two versions of the Mississauga name for the island have been recorded: Zhoomin Mniss and Shaweemin

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during the first winter. In the spring, with the assistance of artisan missionaries, they built log residences and public buildings – a chapel, a general store, and a blacksmith’s and mechanic’s shop.18 By October, Case reported that ‘their crops are mostly secured; the bodies of eleven houses are up: eight of them have shingled roofs; the stone chimneys are nearly completed, and the doors and window are nearly done’.19 A school and a meeting house were also completed at this time, exhausting available materials. Additional houses would not be built till spring 1828, meaning that the tents would remain another winter. Case used the contrast of the wigwams and wooden houses to advantage in his writings, creating a ‘before and after picture’ of the community of ‘native’ converts: ‘The comfortable houses of this new village form a striking contrast with their rude wigwams, which are yet standing’.20 By 1830 there was a hospital on the island ‘kept by two widows’ who cared for the sick and oversaw almost all births.21 Mortality was nevertheless high, and was likely the cause of the start-up of the hospital: in 1830, 13 residents died, most of whom were children, while there were 18 births.22 At the height of its success, in terms of the number of residents, the eleven-acre island had a population of about 300 living in 33 log residences. The population shifted as residents came and went, not all of whom were members of the church. Converts who strayed from church teachings could be banned from the island, as in 1832 when ten members were ‘expelled for intemperance’.23 For long periods there was no resident missionary, and near the end of the mission Chief John Sunday assumed this role but he was often away preaching at other Indian communities. Men worked in the mechanical shops or the fields, tended the animals, fished, and hunted according to the season. Some hunted on the mainland, for food, and

shang. The former comes from Clarke, Before the Silence, the latter from ‘Travels in Upper Canada’, Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, September 6, 1834 (spelled as Sho-win-e-me Min-e-shah by John Benham in ‘Letter to the Editors of the Christian Guardian’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 30, 1830, 83). 18 George Copway, The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway) (Philadelphia: J. Harmstead, 1847). 19 Quoted in ‘Grape Island Mission, letter form the Rev. W. Case, Oct. 18, 1827’, The Methodist Magazine 11, no. 2 (1828): 76. 20 Quoted in William Case, Oct 18, 1827, ‘Upper Canada Missions’, The Methodist Magazine 11 (New York: Bangs & Emory for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1828): 76. 21 ‘Letter to the Editors of the Christian Guardian’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 22, 1830, 99. 22 ‘Letter to the Editors of the Christian Guardian’, Toronto Christian Guardian, November 27, 1830, 6. 23 ‘Letter to the Secretary of the Missionary Society’, Toronto Christian Guardian, September 26, 1833, 186.

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as a ‘means of paying debts’ with white traders.24 In the winter of 1830, ‘four of the brothers went out three days and brought in eighteen deer’.25 Some men also worked as labourers, clearing land for settlers on the mainland. The Methodist Society nevertheless planned for the mission to be self-sustaining through the production of foodstuffs for its own consumption, and the sale of items for cash such as mission-made sleighs, wagons, and furniture. Women manufactured handicrafts to sell to tourists as well as baskets and brooms to exchange for provisions such as flour. Proceeds from the sale of crafts were used to support the mission. The daily routine on the island centred on work in the fields and workshops, except on Sunday when no labour was permitted. The day at the mission started early: at 4:00 a.m. in summer and 5:00 a.m. in winter. Time was marked by the sound of a cow horn, blown by Case himself when he was present, which could be heard across the water on neighbouring Sawguin Island where residents cut hay and kept cattle. The missionaries aimed to impart a European time concept and ‘habits of industry’, aspects of temporal economy outlined in the ‘Measures for Improving the Civil Condition of the Indians’.26 Families – mother, father, and children – lived in individual cottages, with the adult male taking position as head of the household, meant to imitate the European family structure. Missionary John Benham described the typical household furnishings in 1830: Their cupboards, made by their own hands, are set off with a few necessary articles,—their table comforts are simple and therefore wholesome, around which the parents and children sit in a style never known in the Indian wig-ewaum. Some have a little library of books contained on shelves of their own making. These consist of the Bible, Indian Hymn Book, the translation in Chippeway of a portion of Matthew, and some others.27

To keep standards high according to missionary values there were occasional home inspections. In 1830 Rev. Peter Jones went unannounced into every home as well as the school, taking brief notes on the state of housekeeping and the women’s activities: at Joseph Skunk’s, ‘a woman was making light bread like a white woman’; at Jacob Snowstorm’s, ‘one woman making baskets – one sewing – one idle’; at John Pigeon’s (the home of a model convert), ‘everything looked like industry, and improvement in the house’.28 Making ‘light bread’ from wheat using yeast was an essential part of domestic training for the women on the ‘Letter to the Editors of the Christian Guardian’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 30, 1830, 83. 25 Ibid. 26 Fifth Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (1830), 7–8. 27 ‘Letter to the Editors of the Christian Guardian’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 22, 1830, 99. 28 Peter Jones, Life and Journals of KAH-KE-WA-QUO-NO-BY: (Rev. Peter Jones) (Toronto: Anson Green, 1860), 284–5. 24

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island, who were instructed by the wives of missionaries.29 Other changes were believed to follow as the Indian mother assimilated European customs on her path to ‘civilization’. Making European-style bread was an initial step. Other changes involved child care: American Missionary Association worker Mary Riggs writing in the 1880s believed that as the Indian mother ‘admires the thin and lightly covered head of the white baby, she closely clips her own baby’s hair so as to have it as nearly like a white baby as possible’.30 Riggs described the mother’s choice of hair style as benign. However, in the same period forced haircuts were used by boarding school administrators as an initiation procedure for Aboriginal children ‘to obtain the initial cooperativeness of the recruit’, and head shaving was used as a shaming punishment.31 Rev. William Case visited the home of John Pigeon in 1833, remarking on ‘the Britannia cups and spoons as bright as silver’, Britannia ware being a ‘cheap alternative to silver’.32 Some households also had chinaware donated to the mission by Methodists in Britain. For both Jones and Case, ‘the neatness of their houses, the luxuriant growth of their crops, and everything else showed that our Grape Island brethren had made great proficiency in the arts of civilized life’.33 There were nevertheless signs that the domestic situation of some residents did not match the missionary ideal, as Peter Jones described in his journal in 1830. After examining Potto Snake’s house where he found the ‘table and floor dusty – beds pretty good; three old fashioned chairs – cupboard poor – and no one at home’, Jones noted that he ‘passed one Indian Camp, a specimen of old times’.34 Some tents still stood on Grape Island. Their presence was likely due to practical reasons rather than resistance to missionary efforts. Life at the mission, as at Alderville in the first ten years, involved ‘largely voluntary cultural change’ by residents.35 However, ‘wigwams’ represented the nomadic habits which missionaries believed worked against the Indians’ successful assimilation and conversion, and criticism of the ‘wigwam’ was a common part of missionary rhetoric. Members of the British Anti-Slavery Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, ‘To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760–1823’, in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 282. 30 Mrs. A.L. Riggs, ‘The Indian Woman’, The American Missionary 38, no. 1 (1884): 10. 31 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 17; Celia Haig-Brown, Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Tillacum, 1998). 32 ‘Letter of William Case’, Toronto Christian Guardian, October 2, 1833, 186; Nancy A. Goyne, ‘Britannia in America: The Introduction of a New Alloy and a New Industry’, Winterthur Portfolio 2 (1965), 195. 33 Jones, Life and Journals, 279. 34 Ibid., 285. 35 Ripmeester, ‘Intentional Resistance or Just “Bad Behaviour”’, 109. 29

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Association and the British Wesleyan Missionary Society drew on the same idea in their letter to the Mississauga in support of the band’s land claim in 1837: ‘Brothers, – Send your little ones to school. Come out of the wigwam and out of darkness, and dwell in the light.’36 Mission Schools The last of the ‘Measures for Improving the Civil Condition of the Indians’ was the provision of school, which Indian parents and missionaries took very seriously. This commitment was evident in the generally good rate of school attendance and Case’s concern for adopting the latest educational methods in the schools including the infant school system, which is the focus of this section. The Methodists had earlier established a school led by Peter Jones at Grand River, where students of all ages learned to read the Bible. Schools of this kind were more readily accepted than was the Christian message itself. Historian Hope MacLean notes that the Methodists hoped for conversion both to be ‘the by-product of schooling’ and for schooling to reinforce conversion where it had already occurred.37 For this reason opening a school quickly followed a band’s conversion in most cases but first, because at this point the missionaries had no desire to separate children from families, the Indian converts needed to be gathered into a settlement. This was the plan for the converts at Belleville, as expressed in the Methodists’ 1826 report: It would be greatly to their advantage, if a school should be established in this vicinity for the benefit of their children. A house for this purpose would also serve them as a place for their devotions and could the tribe be settled where they might cultivate the soil during the summer, when they are not engaged in their hunting excursions, an opportunity would be afforded them of attending the means of further instruction, thereby furthering the Christian virtues.38

However, the Methodists had higher ambitions for the day schools as a base for a ‘native’ ministry, with the view that schools such as the one at Grape Island were seminaries.39 The schools were planned as the foundation of an overall system of mission work and not only to provide basic literacy. Augustus d’Este, Thomas Hodgkin, and Robert Alder, August 22, 1837, in Peter Jones, A History of the Ojebway Indians, Appendix I (London: A.W. Bennett, 1861), 260. The letter was given to John Sunday while he was in Britain seeking support for land claims. Hodgkin and d’Este were members of the British Anti-Slavery Association: Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). Alder was a secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society: Semple, The Lord’s Dominion. 37 MacLean, ‘A Positive Experiment’, 30. 38 Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (York: Printed for the Society, and the Office of the Colonial Advocate by William Lyon MacKenzie, 1826), 15, UCCA. 39 MacLean, ‘A Positive Experiment’, 39. 36

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A house for a teacher and a school were built on the island in spring 1827, and the day school opened in June with ‘25 scholars’.40 There is scant information about this school in the two years prior to its reorganization according to the ‘infant plan’.41 Eventually further schools were added: a boarding school for girls called the Female School providing domestic education; Sunday and evening schools for adults; and a vocational school for instruction in farming and trades. At the day school, male and female teachers led separate classes for the boys and girls using what Benham called the ‘common school system’.42 This system was concerned with the movement to regulate schools in Upper Canada in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly for poor children, rather than being a specific way to organize instruction. In his use of the term, therefore, it is conceivable that Benham meant that the school was similar to those found elsewhere in Upper Canada, which used methods of rote learning and had some influence from the Lancasterian monitorial system. The Female School was led by various mission teachers over the years, including Eliza Barnes and later Hester Ann Hubbard. Case had recruited both women during one of his regular speaking and fundraising tours in the United States. Case would marry each in turn: Hubbard in 1828 and, after Hubbard’s death, Eliza Barnes. While the records are unclear, it appears that Hubbard may have been teacher for a time in both the Female and day schools. Nancy Brink was teaching in the Female School when Peter Jones completed his inspections in 1830, with Thomas Hale leading the day school. There seemed to be no shortage of teachers for the schools, though most stayed only a short time before going to other missions, and none is known to have trained as a teacher. The movement of the mission teachers from station to station resulted in the rapid spread of methods of teaching and a degree of consistency amongst the Methodist-run schools for Indians. A number of teachers and missionaries came to the mission from the Methodist Cazenovia Seminary in New York State. This source of recruitment was encouraged by a friendship between William Case and the principal of the seminary.43 John Benham was a student there when he was recruited by Case.44 An earlier teacher, William Smith, had also been a student at Cazenovia. The seminary, which had opened in 1825, was co-educational and non-sectarian. The curriculum included Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (1827), 7. J.B. Benham, ‘Grape Island Mission’, Toronto Christian Guardian, February 13,

40 41

1830, 98. 42 Ibid. 43 Zachariah Paddock, Memoir of Rev. Benjamin G. Paddock (New York: Nelson & Phillips, 1875). 44 Joseph Edward Sanderson, The First Century of Methodism in Canada (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1908), 210. Later in his career Benham served as superintendent of Methodist missions in Liberia, and with a mission to the Indians at Onondaga, New York. First Fifty Years of Cazenovia Seminary, 1825–1875 (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1877), 226–7.

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studies in philosophy, astronomy, mathematics and chemistry as well as theology. Starting with eight students in the first year, by the time Smith and Benham attended a few years later, the seminary had 150 enrolled.45 Senior Indian students from the network of Methodist’s mission schools also attended Cazenovia: Benjamin J. Elliott (Nahkahnoshsheh), John Summerfield (Sahgahgewagahbaweh) and Henry Steinhauer (Shahwahnekzhih). Other students attended schools in Upper Canada or the United States, including William Wilson, George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh), Peter Marksman, John Johnson (Enmegahbowh), and Henry Chase (Pahtahquahong).46 As Hope MacLean explains in her history, training boys for the ministry was an important aim of the mission day schools and a motivation for efforts given to improving education on the island.47 Infant Schools for Indian Children It was Betsey Stockton who introduced the infant system at Grape Island which was later developed by teachers at the nearby Credit River and Rice Lake schools. Stockton was an African American free woman from Princeton, New Jersey and a Presbyterian missionary.48 She had established her credentials as a teacher in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where she had formed and led a small school for missionary children and adult Hawaiians on Maui at Lahaina from 1824 to 1825, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).49 The school was organized by the ABCFM to aid in its objectives of “Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ Hawaiians and preparing the elites among them to

First Fifty Years, 475. MacLean, ‘A Positive Experiment’, 45; Donald B. Smith, Henry Pahtahquahong

45 46

Chase, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online (2000). http://www.biographi.ca/index-e. html?PHPSESSID=ychzfqkvzape (accessed October 18, 2012). 47 MacLean, ‘A Positive Experiment’. 48 Information on Stockton is found in Gerald H. Anderson, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions (New York: Macmillan Reference, 1998), 643; A. Scott Moreau, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 909; Constance K. Escher, ‘She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton’, Princeton History 10 (1991): 87; Eileen F. Moffett, ‘Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19, no. 2 (1995): 71–6; and John A. Andrew, ‘Betsey Stockton: Stranger in a Strange Land’, Journal of Presbyterian History 52 (1974): 157–66. Stockton’s involvement at Grape Island is mentioned but not sourced in John Webster Grant, ‘Two-thirds of the Revenue: Presbyterian Women and the Native Indian Missions’, in Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 103. 49 Charles Samuel Stewart, A Visit to the South Seas in the U.S. Ship Vincennes during the Years 1829 and 1830 (New York: John P. Haven, 1831), 159. A general contemporary description of the mission is recorded in ‘Mission to the Sandwich Islands’, The American Baptist Magazine and Missionary Intelligencer 4, no. 1 (1823): 23–6.

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operate the [Hawaiian] kingdom”.50 Stockton’s own education was through homebased tutoring by other household members, and her teaching methods at Lahaina with her small group of students were likely informal at the start. However, the ABCFM schools on the islands used the Lancasterian monitorial system which had been trialled with American Indian students at Brainerd, its seminary in Tennessee.51 As described by historian Ronald Rayman, at Brainerd: under the tutelage of the monitors, who had received preliminary instruction from the white missionaries, students first learned the alphabet, and printed letters in the sand with sticks ... From these rudimentary beginnings, students advanced to writing on slates, and finally to reading.52

Teaching methods were likely similar on Maui, and schools expanded rapidly. By 1828 there were over 10,000 adult pupils of various ages in 173 schools in the vicinity of Lahaina.53 The curriculum was entirely based on literacy education, starting with reading lessons before moving on to writing and spelling. Instruction and reading materials were in Hawaiian.54 After Stockton returned from Maui to the United States, she led an infant school for African American children in Philadelphia. William Case or Peter Jones presumably met Stockton in Philadelphia while they were on a fundraising tour. Jones independently spoke at several Presbyterian churches in the city, which may have led to a meeting with Stockton.55 The visit by the missionaries to the city was timed to coincide with the 1829 meeting of the Philadelphia Conference Missionary Society. They were accompanied by eight children from the mission, including 13-year-old Shahwahnekzhih, who later took the name Henry Steinhauer.56 Case and his fellow missionaries made a number of similar trips to the United States to solicit volunteers and raise funds. On the tours, model students such as Shahwahnekzhih sang hymns in Ojibwa and displayed craftwork before an 50 C. Kalani Beyer, ‘The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai’, History of Education Quarterly 47 no. 1 (2007): 27–8. 51 Ronald Rayman, ‘Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education, 1815–1838’, History of Education Quarterly 21 no. 4 (1981): 395–409. 52 Ibid., 399. 53 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Twentieth Annual Report (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1829), 65. 54 Linda K. Menton, ‘A Christian and “Civilized” Education: the Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s School, 1839–50’, History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1992): 213–42. 55 Stockton was a member of First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. See Constance Killian Escher, ‘Betsey Stockton, 1798–1865’, in Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 87–9. 56 John Carroll, Case and His Contemporaries, vol. 3 (Toronto: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1871), 225.

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audience.57 The events were popular and well attended: there was a crowd of 3,000 in Baltimore.58 In Philadelphia, the portrait artist John Neagle was commissioned to paint a portrait of Shahwahnekzhih in a romanticized version of ‘native’ dress (see Figure 4.3). The blanket is a contradictory element in the portrait. They were not permitted to be worn in the Methodist schools.59 Missionaries commonly used ‘the blanket’ to symbolize the traditional way of life that was meant to be abandoned. Later in the century, boarding school administrators referred to students who retained their Indian identities and returned to home communities as going ‘back to the blanket’.60 There is no evidence that Case or Jones had set out to hire a trainer for an infant school during their Philadelphia visit, though it was the usual practice to combine fundraising with recruiting young men and women to work at the mission. There was, however, an interest in the system amongst mission leaders, and other missions to the Indians in the United States opened infant schools over the next few years. One was at the Presbyterian Mackinaw Mission on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron. Its teacher was Eliza Chappell Porter, who first taught at an infant school for European children in Rochester, New York.61 In 1831 she travelled to New York City to observe in the schools operated by the New York Infant School Society. From 1832 to 1833, she led an infant school for Métis children at the Mackinaw Mission. On the basis of her experience she wrote in her journal, ‘I look upon the Infant school system as designed by God to open the way for the missionary of the cross, and “perfect His praise from the mouth of babes.”’62 Infant school teachers with training and experience were in demand: Hester Crooks Boutwell, a Métis woman who had been student of Chappell Porter at the Mackinaw Mission School, later worked as interpreter and led infant schools at other missions, as did her classmate, Catherine Bissell.63

Schmalz, The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario, 153. Smith, Sacred Feathers, 116. 59 William Lyon Mackenzie, Sketches of Canada and the United States (London: E. 57 58

Wilson, 1833), 131–2. 60 Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr., Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance during the Early Reservation Years, 1850–1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 152. See also Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992). 61 ‘Infant Schools at the West’, The Mother’s Magazine, July (1834), 104. 62 Mary Porter, Eliza Chappell Porter, a Memoir (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1892), 62. 63 Porter, Eliza Chappell Porter; Rebecca Kugel, ‘Reworking Ethnicity: Gender, Work Roles, and Contending Redefinitions of the Great Lakes Métis, 1820–42’, in Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 60–181; Grace Lee Nute, ‘Wilderness Marthas’, Minnesota History 8, no. 3 (1927): 247–59; Keith R. Widder, Battle for the Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823–1837 (East Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 124.

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‘An Indian Boy: Shahwahnekzhih (Henry Steinhauer)’, 1829, oil on canvas by John Neagle. Collection of Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada. 79.1.1.

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A further example was the work of the Baptist missionary Eliza Merrill Wilcox, who arrived with her husband Rev. Moses Merrill at Sault Ste. Marie (Michigan) near Mackinac Island in 1832. They found the region overly concentrated with missionaries and believed that few Aboriginal people were unconverted.64 They were, however, able to work for a time at the Baptist Indian Mission where ‘the infant school system’ had just been introduced ‘with high approbation and promise of success’.65 Eliza Merrill Wilcox had been a teacher at an infant school in Albany, and she assisted at the mission school to the degree that her health and ‘personal acquisition of the Ojibeway [sic] language would allow’.66 In the spring, the Merrills left for their new assignment along the Missouri River, where Eliza Merrill Wilcox established an infant school at their mission for the Otoe people in Nebraska in 1833.67 It is important to appreciate that infant schools were only one aspect of education in the various missions, existing alongside vocational and domestic education for older students, for example. At the Mohawk Village school at Grand River, the Methodist Missionary Society reported that ‘Brother Johnson, the Teacher, is diligent in the performance of the duties of his station, and would not only have the children learn in the school, but in the fields’.68 The nature of education work of this type is clear: boys cleared land under the supervision of their teacher. What is unclear, however, is precisely what aspects of the infant system were used with Indian children. The overarching focus of schooling for Indian children was on literacy as a means of evangelism, so we do know considerable attention was paid to reading and reciting scriptures. Infant school teacher Chappell Porter claimed that most of her 54 students at the Mackinaw mission ‘learned to read and recite passages of Scripture’ in nine months, indicating that her students were highly motivated and that her infant school teaching methods were effective.69 Betsey Stockton travelled from Philadelphia to Grape Island some time in May, 1829, and the infant school at the mission opened on June 2, 1829.70 It presumably remained under her direction for the next two months, after which she returned to Solomon Peck, ‘History of the Missions of the Baptist General Convention’, in A History of American Missions to the Heathen from their Commencement to the Present Time (Worcester: Spooner and Howland, 1840), 490. 65 The American Baptist Magazine 13 (Boston: Putnam and Damrell, 1833), 224. The infant school at the Indian Mission (Baptist) at Sault Ste. Marie operated to at least 1834: The American Baptist Magazine 14 (Boston: John Putnam, 1834), 41. 66 The American Baptist Magazine 13, 224. 67 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1851). 68 Ninth Annual Report of the Missionary Society (1834), 12, quoted in Terence T. Whyte, ‘Grape Island: Methodist Missionary Station, 1827–1837’, paper submitted as partial requirement for the course ‘Canadian Church History’ in the Bachelor of Divinity Programme of Emmanuel College, Toronto, February 1965, 92. 69 Porter, Eliza Chappell Porter, 44. 70 Fifth Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (1830), 3. 64

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the United States. While accounts of Stockton’s life generally mention her work with Indians in Upper Canada, her name is mentioned only once in the mission’s annual reports: ‘Paid travelling expenses etc. to Miss Stockton, who was employed to introduce the Pestalozzian system of instruction in the school at Grape Island 17 £, 10 s’ on July 30, 1829.71 A letter to the editor of an American missionary magazine in the same year contained a little more detail: ‘We saw Betsey Stockton for a little while. She came for the purpose of setting up an Infant School, which has succeeded admirably’.72 She left Grape Island in July with a gift of a ‘birchbark canoe about three or four feet long’ for the son of a missionary friend, which was likely made on the island for sale to visitors.73 She returned to her work at the Infant School for Coloured Children in Philadelphia. American Influence on the Methodist Infant Schools Regardless of the context, there was little variation in the way the infant system was applied. A school for children from wealthy families located in the basement of the Presbyterian church in Cazenovia, New York had much in common with the one on Grape Island. As recalled by a woman who had been a student at the Cazenovia school in 1830: At the north side of the main room was a tier of box seats for children, rising from the lowest seat to nearly or quite half of the height of the room. We children sat in these seats at the opening of the school in the morning, when the older girls went to their desks, and we little ones to the seats arranged for us on the benches. I could not have been more than four or five years old when I first began going to school. Once each day we paraded around the big room, boy and girl together, hand in hand.74

The schools followed a basic template for infants’ instruction – as set out, for example, in Mary Howland’s manual, first published in 1830.75 Like many others, it was patterned on texts by Wilderspin. The illustration from Howland’s manual depicted the essential materials and organization of the infant school, replicated at the Methodist Credit River school described by William Lyon Mackenzie: an arithmeticon (a counting frame with coloured balls on wires), map, clock, pictures Ibid., 17. Quoted in ‘Extract of a Letter from Kingston, Upper Canada’, Religious Intelligencer

71 72

14, no. 19 (1829), 278. 73 Moffett, ‘Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary’. 74 Miss Louise S. Dwinelle’s ‘Paper on Old Cazenovia’, Cazenovia Republican, October 27, 1908. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nyccazen/Reminisce/Dwinelle1908. html (accessed October 14, 2012). 75 Mrs. (Mary W.) Howland, The Infant School Manual (Boston: Richardson, Lord and Holbrook, 1831).

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‘View of Infant school’. In Mrs Howland, The Infant School Manual (4th ed., Boston, MA: 1831). Author’s collection.

and gallery can all be seen. The illustration in Howland appears to have been patterned on Archibald Robertson’s rendering of the New York Infant School (Figure 4.4), though in a smaller and more intimate setting. Betsey Stockton’s teaching methods blended what she had learned in Hawaii and Philadelphia. Stockton observed Lancasterian teaching methods in Hawaii, and may have used them at the school at Lahaina. In Philadelphia, she taught according to the infant system. The Philadelphia schools were opened at the very start of the brief but enthusiastic infant school movement in the United States. As in Britain, educators, social reformers, and philanthropists in the United States united to promote infant schools as a support for poor parents and a means of socializing their youngsters. The first infant school societies were formed in New York and Philadelphia in 1827, with the first schools opening in New York in July, and Philadelphia in October. By 1831 the New York Society operated nine schools including two for ‘coloured children’.76 The first New York school is depicted in the illustration by painter Archibald Robertson (Figure 4.5), showing the children marching to their places in the gallery. As part of her preparation, Stockton visited the New York school for several days in 1828, prior to her arrival in Philadelphia.77 Edwin Williams, New York Annual Register (New York: Jonathan Leavitt and Collins & Hannay, 1831), 178. 77 Philadelphia Infant School Society (Philadelphia ISS), ‘Minutes of the Managers’, May 5, 1828, Philadelphia ISS Records, Box 2, (PHi) 1665, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (HSSP). 76

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‘First Infant School in Green Street, New York’, by Anthony Imbert, lithograph after Archibald Robertson, 1827. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US. Art 41170. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

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A key organizer of the Philadelphia Society was the American Swedenborgian, Rev. Maskil Carll. Carll had toured England in 1824, spending time in London where he preached at the New Church for Rev. Thomas Goyder, brother of infant school teacher David Goyder.78 Carll also visited the Spitalfields Infant School, then under the direction of evangelical teacher James Brown. Carll returned to Philadelphia intent on starting an infant school. However, several years passed before he was able to generate sufficient interest amongst local benefactors. The first school was located on Chester Street and placed under the direction of teacher Ephraim Bacon. He was assisted by Caroline Hyde, whose motivation was similar to that of Eliza Merrill and Eliza Chappell Porter mentioned earlier.79 Hyde had devoted herself to teaching the poor following her conversion, first teaching at a village near Philadelphia and then briefly in the Chester Street infant school where she worked with the youngest children. Ephraim Bacon likewise possessed a missionary spirit. In various reports he was described as a catechist and a teacher.80 Bacon claimed to be the ‘founder of the infant school system in the United States’. 81 However, nothing is known about his training or earlier teaching experience. In the years prior to opening the Philadelphia school he was occupied in colonization work in West Africa and in fundraising for a school in Sierra Leone. His brother Samuel Bacon led a United States mission to Africa in 1820, along with agents of the American Colonization Society, to acquire land for a permanent settlement for freed slaves. The venture failed and Samuel Bacon died from yellow fever. The next year, Ephraim Bacon travelled to Sierra Leone as assistant agent of the United States to Africa charged with the same task.82 It too failed, and Bacon, who had been accompanied by his wife Charlotte (Ellis), returned to the United States. A third attempt with the aid of United States naval forces under the direction of Captain Robert Field Stockton resulted in the creation of Liberia. Captain Stockton and Betsey Stockton were ‘The Rev. M. Carll’s Visit to England’, The New Jerusalem Magazine and Theological Inspector (London: Thomas Goyder, 1827), 26–8. 79 Mathew Carey, ‘The Infant School’, Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1830), 316. Hyde died March 8, 1832: William Watts Hart Davis, History of Doylestown, Old and New (Doylestown, PA: Intelligencer, 1904), 81. Rev. Charles Hyde gives an account of Hyde’s life in Memoir of Caroline Hyde, Who Died in Philadelphia, March 7, 1832 (New York: American Tract Society, 1836). 80 Maryland Gazette and Political Intelligencer (Annapolis, MD), Thursday, June 27, 1822. 81 Bacon, Ephraim, Infants School Teacher’s Guide, as conducted by E. Bacon founder of the Infants School System in the United States; to which is added, a course of instruction suited to infants Sunday Schools (Philadelphia: Published by the author, Clark & Raser, printers, 1829). 82 E. Bacon, Abstract of a Journal of E. Bacon (Philadelphia: Clark and Rater, 1821); E.F. Hening, History of the African Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1850); ‘Mission to Africa’, The Gospel Advocate 19, no. 7 (1822): 232. 78

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coincidentally part of the same extended Princeton family. Although Ephraim and Charlotte Bacon intended to return to Sierra Leone with the American Episcopal Missionary Society to organize a mission school and they spent several years raising funds for the project, their plans never materialized.83 Bacon was enthusiastic about the potential of infant school methods for teaching children in the African missions. Using a question and answer format in his Teacher’s Guide, he wrote: Q. Can the same mode of natural intuitive development be introduced into Liberia for the children of the Africans? A. Certainly; as I should conceive that these children are as capable of intellectual development as Americans.84

Bacon taught at the Chester Street infant school in Philadelphia for about two years, leaving in 1829 to ‘establish similar institutions throughout the Union’.85 He went on to open private infant schools in Washington and Cincinnati.86 Infant schools had a high profile with the political elite in this period. In Washington, the schools had the attention of the United States president. Bacon’s students performed a demonstration at the White House for President Andrew Jackson in June 1829. Also present were the secretary of war and the attorney general. President Jackson addressed the assembly, observing that ‘schools established on a plan by which instruction should be made interesting, would have an excellent effect in removing ignorance and vice’.87 The children’s performance, which lasted an hour, included a mix of ‘recitations, marching, singing, marking time, and manual gesturing’, resembling the scene captured in the illustration of the New York school (Figure 4.5). Further details on Bacon’s approach to teaching are found in his own writings. Bacon wrote a short manual describing the system used at the Chester Street school in Philadelphia, which was included within the American edition of Essay on Infant Cultivation by James Brown and published in Philadelphia in 1828.88 In ‘Survey of Missionary Stations, American Episcopal Missionary Society’, Missionary Register 12, January, (1824): 14. 84 Bacon, Infants School Teacher’s Guide, 12. 85 Ephraim Bacon to Managers, Philadelphia ISS, ‘Minutes of the Managers’, January 5, 1829, Philadelphia ISS Records, 1827–1885, Box 2, (PHi) 1665, HSPP. 86 ‘Infant School’, Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), Saturday, June 27, 1829; ‘Infant Schools’, Western Intelligencer, Religious, Literary and Political (Hudson, OH), Tuesday, December 8, 1829. 87 Quoted in ‘An Interesting Spectacle’, United States Telegraph (Washington, DC), Friday, June 26, 1829. 88 James Brown, An Essay on Infant Cultivation (Philadelphia: Clark and Raser, 1828). Bacon independently published three manuals the next year under his own name: Infant School Tuition (Philadelphia: E. Bacon, 1829); Hints to Mothers, and Infant School 83

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the book, Brown promoted his view of evangelical infant schools. He had little use for the frills associated with infant education which he believed detracted from Bible teachings. It is assumed that Bacon agreed with this view. Brown’s approach to instruction was strongly influenced by Pestalozzi, and Bacon’s approach closely followed Brown’s: a newspaper account of Bacon’s methods at the Chester Street school consisted entirely of sections from Brown’s description of a grammar lesson.89 Bacon’s manual was organized into three chapters: (1) the Opening of the School with hymns and prayers; (2) Arithmetic utilizing a Numeral Frame, and Geography, taught with children in the gallery and the teacher using pasteboard shapes and figures; and (3) Natural History using pictures and an analytical system (‘What is this? A cow’; ‘Is the cow a useful animal?’; ‘Yes, every part of the cow is useful’). The book ended with a list of ‘Rules and Regulations’ from Samuel Wilderspin and an extract from David Goyder’s Treatise on the Management of Infant Schools on discipline (see Chapter 2 for an introduction to both these educators), along with a selection of Mrs. Gilbert’s Hymns for Infant Schools.90 The publication was, in sum, a compendium of the current thinking on the task of teaching young children in large groups according to the evangelical point of view. There was not, however, a large section given over to Wilderspin, who had published three editions of his manual by this time. During his visit to Philadelphia in 1838, phrenologist George Combe claimed he ‘had not been able to discover a single copy of Wilderspin’s work on infant schools’, causing him to believe that teachers in the city were ‘imperfectly informed and trained’.91 This was likely an objection to what he perceived to be the overly rigid approach to instruction in the schools he observed, and the dominance of religious teachings. This was the view of Amos Bronson Alcott who visited Bacon’s Chester Street school shortly after it had opened, calling it ‘an engine of orthodoxy, by which the children of the poor may be trained up for the Presbyterian Church, by imbibing the doctrines of Calvin’.92 He likewise viewed the New York infant schools as ‘too mechanical and sectarian’.93 The alternative proposed by Alcott was to look to a child’s nature Teachers (Philadelphia: E. Bacon, 1829); and Infants School Teacher’s Guide (Philadelphia: E. Bacon, printed by Clark & Raser, 1829). All of Bacon’s writings are to large part compilations of the work of other, as acknowledged by Bacon in his introduction to Hints to Mothers. 89 ‘Method of Teaching English Grammar in Bacon’s Infant School, Philadelphia’, The Macon Telegraph (Macon, GA), August 8, 1829, 126; Brown, An Essay on Infant Cultivation, 14. 90 David Goyder, Treatise on the Management of Infant Schools (London, 1826); Mrs. Gilbert (Ann Taylor), Hymns for Infant Schools (London: B.J. Holdsworth, 1827). 91 George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit in 1838–40 (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1841), 11. 92 Quoted in Dorothy McCuskey, Bronson Alcott, Teacher (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 45. 93 Quoted in ibid., 44.

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to ‘find the principles of infant cultivation’.94 He went on to found the School for Human Culture in Boston in 1834, based on his ideas. While the Philadelphia schools did not meet with the approval of reformminded educationists, they proved to be extremely popular with parents. The Chester Street school was housed in a room in the Model School that had opened in 1818 and was intended to demonstrate Lancasterian education. The infant school had a playground attached ‘in which the children are allowed to relax themselves by various amusements, for which purpose the managers have provided blocks and other articles’.95 The room used by the infant school was a vast space. In his description of an exhibition given by the children in 1827, shortly after the school opened, publisher Mathew Carey noted there were 500 to 600 spectators and 126 children.96 A separate school for African American children was planned almost from the start. The Infant School for Coloured Children was opened by the Philadelphia Infant School Society on May 1, 1828, seven months after the lead school on Chester Street.97 The first annual report of the society noted that it was ‘under the instruction of a competent teacher’, Betsey Stockton.98 The enrolment grew to 150 by 1830, with a waiting list of 50 and about 115 regularly attending.99 Not all children were from the class of poor families originally targeted by the Infant School Society, and middle-class African American parents paid fees for their children. This contrasted with the approach at the original school on Chester Street. Though all parents paid a nominal fee, nineteen students were ‘dismissed’ in the first year, for ‘being above that class for whom this charity was intended’.100 Grape Island Infant School Under the guidance of Stockton, the existing Grape Island school was reorganized to accommodate the methods of the American infant schools. The original school building was enlarged, though it was still small scale. In its final form it measured Amos Bronson Alcott, Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830), 4. 95 Carey, ‘The Infant School’, 317. 96 Ibid., 313. 97 ‘Infant School for Coloured Children’, The Friend 5, no. 33 (1832): 260; also see John B. Russwurm, ‘Coloured Infant School’, Freedom’s Journal, May 9, 1828, in Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom’s Journal: The First African American Newspaper (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2007), 75; and ‘Report of the Infant School Society’, The Register of Pennsylvania 6, no. 3 (1830): 40. 98 ‘Infant Schools in Philadelphia’, American Journal of Education 3, no. 8 (1828): 240. 99 ‘Report of the Infant School Society’, Register of Pennsylvania 3, no. 23 (1829): 365. 100 Quoted in ‘Infant Schools in Philadelphia’, American Journal of Education 3, no. 8 (1828): 490. 94

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30 feet by 25 and had separate ‘apartments’ for male and female students. A gallery was built into one end. There is no record of a playground. The overall enrolment was about sixty children and youth: about two-thirds of all school-aged children at the mission in 1830.101 Of this number, 34 were reading, 25 writing, and 15 doing arithmetic, while ‘smaller ones’ were learning their ‘ABC’s and spelling’.102 The school thus admitted pupils across a wide age range. Teacher John Benham explained this practice, reporting that they had ‘adopted [the infant system] in connection with the common school system, for all at school’.103 Perhaps there were too few children or too few teachers to warrant separate facilities for younger and older pupils, for there were earlier references to plans for more than one children’s school. However, it was also believed that, with its use of picture cards as a starting point for lessons and recitation, the infant system was well suited in a ‘native school’ for teaching non-English speakers. On the basis of the pupils’ six-month experience, Benham wrote, ‘We are of opinion that the knowledge they gain, will leave a more lasting impression on the mind, from the plan on which they are taught; being by representation or familiar comparisons’.104 Other mission schools adopted components of the infant system, following the experience at Grape Island. The teacher at the Credit River infant school agreed that the simplicity of the system was ‘particularly suited to the tastes and dispositions of Indian children’.105 Benham outlined some details of the school day at Grape Island. Male and female students began the morning in their separate classes for about 90 minutes of lessons, which he described as being structured according to the Lancasterian system. We can assume that the older students worked as monitors and teachers in training: there was only one teacher identified at the school. It is unlikely, however, that the school followed Lancaster’s plan in other ways. The small numbers of students in the school would not have warranted Lancaster’s methods for mass instruction. After a recess, all students assembled in the gallery, ‘where they are taught on the infant plan, the elements of arithmetic, geography, astronomy, geometry, English grammar, and natural and sacred history’.106 The school was equipped with number frames, a world map, a globe, a blackboard, and forms to teach geometry. Some of the material, such as the number frames, was built in the workshop on the island; other items were purchased or donated.107 The decision to introduce the infant system into the mission schools therefore resulted in additional costs for furnishings and equipment, and in the case of the Grape Island and Credit MacLean, ‘A Positive Experiment’, 50. ‘Letter to the Editors’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 22, 1830, 98. 103 Benham, ‘Grape Island Mission’, 98. 104 Ibid. 105 Quoted in ‘Credit River Mission’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 29, 1831, 46. 106 Benham, ‘Grape Island Mission’, 98. 107 ‘Letter to the Editors of the Christian Guardian’, Toronto Christian Guardian, 101

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January 30, 1830, 83.

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River schools, the ‘expense of enlarging [the] School Room for the Infant School System’ to include a gallery.108 The expense was considered worthwhile. William Case, describing the school at Credit River, referred to the efficiency of what he called the Pestalozzian system and to the maps and ‘lessons on cards’ donated by ladies in Philadelphia and New York.109 The Credit River school was equipped in the same manner as at Grape Island. Journalist and politician William Lyon Mackenzie visited the school in late 1830. The teacher of the boys, Edway Ryerson, was away on the day of the visit and the school was closed.110 His comments were therefore focused on the school furnishings: The school-room is a large and commodious apartment, with tiers of raised benches in the rear; on one division of which sit the girls, and the boys on the other. There are also desks and slates for ciphering, and copy-books and copperplate lines for those who write. The Bibles and Testaments are chiefly those of the London Society for promoting Christian Knowledge; some of the other books are English printed, and some American … Among the schoolfurniture, are a handsome map of the world; the Arithmeticon; attractive alphabets on pasteboard; regular figures illustrative of geometry, some of them cut out of wood, and some of them made of pasteboard; the picture of Elijah fed by ravens; figures of birds, fishes, and quadrupeds, on pasteboard, coloured, accompanied by the history of each animal; the figure of a clock, in pasteboard, by which to explain the principles of the time-piece.

He added, ‘the walls of the school are adorned with good moral maxims; and I perceived that one of the rules was rather novel, though doubtless in place here. – It was, “No blankets to be worn in school.”’111 The predominant missionary belief was that Indian children needed to be remade, which involved more than adopting European styles of dress. Otherwise, as Benham believed, ‘it would have been putting new wine into old bottles’.112 Initially, the schools taught basic literacy skills, mainly in English until the mission teachers became more adept at speaking the Aboriginal language. At the Rice Lake mission, the teacher reported, ‘In the infant school the children repeat the answer both in English and in Indian. This plan I have adopted, lest they should 108 Report of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Upper Canada; from 1st Sept. 1829 to 1st Sept. 1831 (York: Printed for the Society, at the Guardian Office, W.J. Coates, Printer, 1832), 30, UCCA. 109 Quoted in William Case, Letter to the Editor, ‘Credit School’, Toronto Christian Guardian, March 13, 1830, 131. 110 Edway was brother of the Methodist minister Rev. Egerton Ryerson, who worked at the Credit River Mission in the 1820s and was appointed Superintendent of Education for Canada West in 1844. 111 William Lyon Mackenzie, Sketches of Canada and the United States (London: E. Wilson, 1833), 131–2. 112 Benham, ‘Grape Island Mission’, 98.

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be found not to understand the meaning’.113 The local language was only useful, however, insofar as it promoted literacy in English. William Case, writing about the infant school at Grape Island, noted, ‘We hope the plan of the Infant School system will do well for teaching the Indian children English, and that we shall be able to extend the influence of religion and education more generally’.114 It was expected that English literacy would lead to conversion, both to Christianity and to the English lifestyle, values, and culture. The shift in attitude was evident in changes in the Methodist mission schools referred to above: bilingual instruction was dropped in favour of English immersion. In 1830 instruction at the Methodists’ Rice Lake school was in ‘Indian’ and English. Two decades later, missionary David Wright at the New Credit school wanted to ‘burn or destroy all Indian books, and put an end to talking Indian in school’.115 Instruction in English was a better fit with the colonial aims of education for assimilation promoted by government in this later period. Another teacher at the New Credit school observed, ‘The English language is used almost exclusively in the play as well as the studies of the children, which is in itself a great advantage to the Indian children, and is becoming more and more appreciated by the Indian parents’.116 Children were in turn ‘employed in the pleasing task of instructing their parents, for they are often heard reading in the testament the words of our Saviour’.117 Passing on their learning in this way was considered to be the ideal: that the children’s training would have an impact on their parents and community. The Grape Island and neighbouring Methodist missions existed for only a few years. However, missions were rarely planned to stay in one location for long. They were not, in the main, envisioned as permanent communities, but rather as staging grounds for preparing converts to go further into the frontier saving souls along the way, as described in a report on the first year’s operation of the Credit River school in 1827: Mr. Jones’s school during the year has averaged 32; of these 24 could read in the testament, and English reader, and 10 are writing. A number of these children possess minds of more than ordinary capacity for improvement, and being pious, the society may hope that, at no very distant period, the Saviour will employ them as messengers of mercy to other tribes of their pagan brethren.118

In line with this plan, boys educated at the Grape Island school went on to establish missions in their work as ‘messengers of mercy’ elsewhere in Upper Quoted in ‘Rice Lake Mission’, Toronto Christian Guardian, January 30, 1830, 83. William Case to Peter Jones, March 30, 1831, quoted in Carroll, Case and His

113 114

Contemporaries, 281. 115 Quoted in Toronto Christian Guardian, May 12, 1858, 127. 116 Wesleyan Methodist Church, Missionary Society Reports, quoted in Semple, The Lord’s Dominion, 172. 117 Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (1827), 6. 118 Ibid.

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Fig. 4.6

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‘Henry Steinhauer preaching at Whitefish Lake, 1855’. Reproduced in Missionary Outlook (Trenton NJ: MacCrellish and Quigley, July 1881). Author’s collection.

Canada and in the west. Henry Steinhauer is a notable example. In Figure 4.6 below, he is shown preaching at the Whitefish Lake Mission to the Cree, 3,500 kilometres from the Bay of Quinte, in what is now Alberta, in 1855. The Grape Island mission fulfilled its role as the ‘chief nursery of our Indian exhorters’ as described by Superintendent of Missions, Rev. Joseph Stinson in his 1834 report.119 The reference to a nursery was apt: the Methodists’ aims were accomplished in a large part by focusing on children and youth. As expressed by historian Michael Coleman, Protestant missionaries strategically ‘utilized the child to penetrate Indian society’.120 The infant system was selected by church leaders as a useful tool for this purpose. It was believed to be more efficient as a means of literacy education and aid to Christianization than other available methods. Even child converts needed to be literate in order to read the Bible themselves. However, the mission schools were not limited to young children, though some may have attended: all ages were welcome, and the schools appear to have been particularly effective in preparing older boys as missionaries and teachers. The Methodists nevertheless showed a real interest in trialling the infant system in their schools. There were several reasons for their enthusiasm. First, the system targeted young children, who were seen as more likely candidates for 119 Rev. Joseph Stinson, Report of the Missionary Department of the Canada Conference (1834), quoted in Carroll, Case and His Contemporaries, 450. 120 Coleman, ‘The Symbiotic Embrace’, 7.

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resocialization than their parents. Second, teachers viewed the system as additive rather than as a reform to the existing approach to education. As described by mission teachers like Benham, it complemented the common school approach and familiar monitorial methods. Third, the system promised quick results, offsetting the start-up investment in materials. Children were expected to be in school for only a short time. Fourth, the infant system was believed to match the preferred learning styles of the children with its focus on acquiring knowledge via objects and pictures. Using visual aids also helped overcome language barriers between teachers and children. Indeed, Pestalozzian-styled ‘object teaching’ via picture lessons appears to have been the strongest appeal of the system for the mission teachers. In many instances, the terms infant system and Pestalozzian system were used interchangeably: teacher Betsey Stockton was hired ‘to introduce the Pestalozzian system of instruction’ at the Grape Island school.121 The close relationship was noted by William Russell, editor of the American Journal of Education. In his 1829 account of infant school pedagogy, Russell called the approach ‘a transcript of the method of Pestalozzi, applied to the earliest stages of education’.122 A rigid type of object teaching following scripted lessons continued to hold sway in Indian schools for decades. In the early twentieth century United States Superintendent of Indian Schools Estelle Reel promoted the ‘objective method’ which matched objects or pictures with English words as a means of language instruction. She claimed that it was ‘only by constant repetition and ceaseless grinding away that the child acquires a working knowledge of English’.123 Betsey Stockton’s role in setting up the infant school is an intriguing element in this story. African American missionaries were mainly involved in work in West Africa, in Sierra Leone, for example, where they also traveled as colonists. As an African American and a single woman, her participation in the ABCFM mission to Hawaiians was unique. However, the Methodist Grape Island mission had recruited other single women: Eliza Barnes and Hester Ann Hubbard came from Massachusetts in 1827 and 1828 respectively, to work as teachers on the island. Stockton was dedicated to a life as a missionary. She had expected to stay permanently at Lahaina, and her brief time at Grape Island may have been part of her plan to continue a missionary career.124 A visitor who met her on Grape Island

Fifth Annual Report of the Canada Conference Missionary Society (1830), 17. William Russell, Address on Infant Schools Delivered at the Request of the

121 122

Managers of the Infant School Society (Boston: Hiram Tupper, 1829), 6. 123 Quoted in Coleman, ‘The Symbiotic Embrace’, 11. See also Jon Reyhner, ‘Teaching English to American Indians’, in Learn in Beauty: Indigenous Education for a New Century (Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, 2000), 114–31. 124 Upon her arrival at Hawaii, Stockton wrote, ‘are these … the beings with whom I must spend the remainder of my life!’: Betsey Stockton, ‘Sandwich Islands. Betsy [sic] Stockton’s Journal’, The Christian Advocate 3 (1825): 39.

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noted that she ‘cherishes a hope of ending her days in the Sandwich Islands’.125 She never did return to Hawaii. In the late 1830s she taught in a segregated public school for African American children in Princeton, and later at the Witherspoon School for Colored Children. Her teaching methods in these schools were likely similar to those used by exemplary teachers elsewhere in New Jersey described by John Anderson in his history of segregated schools, which involved ‘object teaching’.126 The Shift to Boarding Schools Pressure for additional land for European settlement strained relations between the Canadian government and ‘native’ peoples in Upper Canada in the 1830s, and stimulated new attention to schooling as a tool of empire. LieutenantGovernor Francis Bond Head, with the support of the Colonial Secretary Lord Glenig, undertook forced land surrenders in Upper Canada and advocated for a segregationist policy of the removal of all Indians in the region to Manitoulin Island. After Bond Head left his post, government policy concerning Aboriginal people shifted back to assimilation, termed ‘civilization’, as described in the 1847 Report on the Affairs of the Indians in Canada (Bagot Report) requested by Governor General Sir Charles Bagot. The report included a key role for schooling in the process:127 Education [of the youth] must consist not merely of the training of the mind, but of a weaning from the habits and feelings of their ancestors, and the acquirements of the language, arts and customs of civilized life. Besides the ordinary routine of a primary School, the young men should be instructed in husbandry, gardening, the management of stock, and simple mechanical trades; the girls in domestic economy, the charge of a household and dairy, the use of a needle, etc; and both sexes should be familiarised with the mode of transacting business among the whites. It is by means of Industrial or Manual Labour Schools, in which the above branches of instruction are taught, that a material and extensive change among the Indians of the rising generation may be hoped for.128

The preference for manual labour boarding schools instead of day schools was clearly more than an educational matter: it signalled a preference in government policy to manage relationships with Aboriginal peoples via their children. In his speech before the assembly of Ojibwa leaders in Orillia in 1845, gathered to discuss Quoted in ‘Extract of a Letter from Kingston, Upper Canada’, Religious Intelligencer 14, no. 19 (1829): 278. 126 John R. Anderson, ‘Negro Education in the Public Schools of Newark, New Jersey During the Nineteenth Century’ (PhD dissertation, Rutgers, 1972). 127 Canada, Legislative Assembly, Journals 6 (1847), Appendix T, ‘Report on the Affairs of the Indians of Canada’, Section III. 128 Ibid., T3. 125

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the matter of boarding schools, Thomas G. Anderson, the Visiting Superintendent of Indian Affairs stated: It has ... been determined, that your children shall be sent to Schools, where they will forget their Indian habits, and be instructed in all the necessary arts of civilized life, and become one with your white brethren. In these Schools they will be well taken care of, be comfortably dressed, kept clean, and get plenty to eat. The adults will not be forced from their present locations. They may remove, or remain, as they please; but their children must go.129

As Hope MacLean explains, the government used the schools as a means to claim new land. It was expected that Indian parents would be drawn to larger settlements in order to be near their children.130 Church leaders and educators joined with government in advocating for the start-up of manual labour boarding schools. Rev. Peter Jones’s views on the schools were extensively quoted in the Bagot Report, and the schools were strongly endorsed by Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendant of Education for Upper Canada, in a separate report he prepared for the Assistant Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, George Vardon in 1847.131 Like many others did before him, including Robert Owen and Henry Brougham described in Chapter 2, Ryerson was impressed by what he had observed at de Fellenberg’s school in Switzerland during his European tour in 1845, calling it the “beau ideal of what I would wish our Indian industrial schools to be”.132 He echoed the view of the Bagot Report, recommending that schools for Indians in Upper Canada imitate those of de Fellenberg’s, with a ‘plain English education adapted to the working farmer and mechanic’.133 In Ryerson’s scheme, students would work on the farm during the summer for eight to twelve hours, and study in the evening from two to four hours, a ratio of work to lessons of three or four to one. In winter more time would be given for lessons and less for work. His plan was mainly concerned with agricultural labour, with little attention to trades or industries. Ryerson preferred to call the institutions industrial schools, not manual labour schools. In the former, children’s work trained them for future employment; in the latter, their work was used to sustain the school. An industrial school was part of the Alderville mission, formed after the closing of Grape Island mission in 1837. Plans to leave Grape Island had begun in the early 1830s when the island was found to be too small to sustain the population. Quoted in Minutes of the General Council of Indian Chiefs and Principal Men ... on the Proposed Removal of the Smaller Communities and the Establishment of Manual Labour Schools, 7. 130 MacLean, ‘Ojibwa Participation’. 131 Egerton Ryerson, Report of Dr. Ryerson on Industrial Schools, Appendix A (Toronto: Education Office, 1847). 132 Ibid., 75. 133 Ibid., 72. 129

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Under Case’s direction, the residents resettled near Rice Lake at Alderville. As at Grape Island, Case designed Alderville as an industrial farm colony. The first school was a boarding school for girls, opened by Case in 1838.134 A day school opened shortly after. In 1849, two years after the publication of the Bagot Report, the two schools combined to become the Alnwick (Alderville) Industrial School, regarded as one of the first of its type in Canada.135 A second school, called the Mount Elgin Institute, opened at Munceytown in 1850. In a report of the first year’s work of the Alnwick school quoted in the Journal of Education, we learn that students represented three categories: … 14 Indian scholars are supported by the funds of the Indians, and that 12 more are sent from the village as day scholars, making the number 26 in all. There are, however, 40 children at the School,—the remaining 14 being white children from the Township of Alnwick.136

However, the day school was of lesser importance for mission leaders. As described in a report of the British Wesleyan Missionary Society, which administered the Alnwick school, in a boarding facility, children could thus be separated from their families ‘until they are made emphatically new creatures’.137 Case remained as director of the school until 1851. Although the infant system continued to be used for a time at other Methodist missions, such as the New Credit River Mission, there is no record of it being employed at a school at Alderville. Work was construed as a learning activity in industrial schools, leaving little time for play or recreation. At the Methodists’ Mount Elgin school students worked for seven and a half hours per day. In the original experiment with the ‘system of Manual Labour Education’ at Alderville under William Case’s management, boys ‘spent 6 hours in the school, and six hours in the field and in other useful employment; the girls have spent in the school 6 hours, and six hours in knitting, sewing, plaiting bonnets, and in the duties of the dairy’.138 While this improved the ratio of work to lessons suggested by Ryerson, the 18 children – 13 girls and 6 boys – were effectively operating a farm under the superintendence of Case. At Mount Elgin, children similarly assumed the work of sustaining the community, labour that previously had been undertaken by or shared with the adults at Grape Island.

James Rodger Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 134. 135 Brian E. Titley, ‘Indian Industrial Schools in Western Canada’, in Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Education History (Calgary: Detselig, 1986), 133–53. 136 ‘Examination of Indian Scholars’, Journal of Education 2, no. 2 (1849): 30. 137 Quoted in G.S. French, ‘Rev. William Case’, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, ed. Francess Halpenny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 134. 138 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Missionary Society, (1839), quoted in Whyte, ‘Grape Island’, 97. 134

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The Alnwick school continued to operate on a small scale over the next decade, with twenty-three boys and sixteen girls enrolled in 1858. In that same year the government of Canada declared it and other industrial boarding schools to be failed experiments: the children, it was believed, were too old upon their admission to be resocialized, as by this time the influence of parents and home community was too great.139 As described by MacLean, parents, too, judged the school a failure and most refused to send their children to the Alnwick school after an outbreak of typhus in 1855.140 Aftermath Missionary plans for educating young Aboriginal children were fixed on the goal of ‘civilization’ coupled with conversion. The Canadian government had the same objectives when it renewed its attention to Indian education in the 1870s as part of treaties. Starting in 1871, a series of numbered land cessation treaties were negotiated with Aboriginal people to facilitate European settlement in western Canada. Indian leaders wanted schools as part of treaty negotiations as a means to prepare their people to participate in the new agriculturally based settler society; government offered schools as a draw for Indians to settle on the new reserves. Treaties included provisions for education, as in Treaty no. 1: ‘Her Majesty agrees to maintain a school on each reserve hereby made whenever the Indians of the reserve should desire it’.141 However, as with other aspects of the treaties, government took control of land and delayed delivering on its promises. In cases where schools were established, they were placed under church management with government funding and oversight. In some instances, day schools were established on reserves. However, from the 1880s to the early 1900s government policy in western Canada favoured large-scale industrial schools located at a distance from communities. As described by historian Sarah Carter, the revival of the industrial school model for Indian education stemmed directly from the government’s failure to support reserve farming which, like schools, was a treaty obligation.142 The promised equipment, seed, livestock, and training were not forthcoming, and reserve farming was mostly unsuccessful. However, the government blamed Indians for the lack of success, judging them unfit for farming, and thereby of 139 Report of the Special Commissioners to Investigate Indian Affairs in Canada, Appendix (no. 21), Part II, ‘Present Condition of the Indians in Canada’ (Toronto: Stewart Derbishire & George Desbarats, 1858). 140 MacLean, ‘Ojibwa Participation’. 141 ‘Treaty 1 Between Her Majesty the Queen and the Chippewa and Cree Indians of Manitoba and Country Adjacent with Adhesions’, 1871. http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/ eng/1100100028664/1100100028665 (accessed October 14, 2012). 142 Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).

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participating in the new settler economy. Attention turned from agricultural training for Indian adults to isolating children in institutions for ‘hands on’ learning via manual labour, reflecting a policy shift from assimilation of Indians into Canadian society to segregation. There was a similar trend towards segregation in the United States, as shown in Indian removal policy and the growth in numbers of boarding schools. In some instances, existing manual labour boarding schools were reorganized as industrial schools or simply renamed as such, others were opened to Indian students, and some were newly built. In 1878 the first Indian students were enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, along with its African American students. In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania was established as the first off-reservation boarding school in the United States. American developments were watched by the Canadian government, and in early 1879 the minister of the interior enlisted journalist and aspiring conservative politician Nicolas Flood Davin to visit Washington and prepare a report on Indian education.143 His investigation primarily involved meeting with US government officials and Indian leaders in Washington. However, he also visited the White Earth Boarding School in Minnesota. The school was one of several on the White Earth Reserve, which was created in 1867 as part of the US Indian Department’s experiment in ‘agrarian assimilation’.144 He was impressed by what he learned, returning to Ottawa with the message that ‘the Indian Department at Washington have not much hope in regard to the adult Indians, but sanguine anticipations are cherished respecting the children’ regarding their training in industrial boarding schools.145 Davin’s report drew upon recommendations for the schools made by C.A. Ruffee, the Indian agent at the White Earth Agency: ... an Indian Reservation should have manual labour schools, or, in other words, boarding industrial schools; mills, both saw and grist; blacksmith and carpenter’s shops; ... [and] all the young men of a tribe or tribes, who desired it, should be taught some trade.

Ruffee, however, did not believe the White Earth school was anywhere near this ‘ideal’, as he described in his report to the US commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1879. He protested the lack of government support for industrial education at the school, including financial support, writing: ‘I respectfully suggest that greater importance should be attached to the industrial department, wherein the rudiments

143 Nicolas Flood Davin, Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Ottawa? s.n., 1879). 144 Melissa L. Meyer, ‘Signatures and Thumbprints: Ethnicity among the White Earth Anishinaabeg, 1889–1920’, Social Science History 14, no. 3 (1990): 305–45. 145 Ibid., 7.

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of farm and home labor should be taught; it will be of great practical utility’.146 The White Earth Reserve was coincidently the home of Methodist mission school alumnus John Johnson (Enmegahbowh), whom Davin described as ‘a full-blood Ottawa, and … an able preacher’.147 As an Episcopalian, Johnson established a mission to Ojibwa who were forcibly resettled on the White Earth Reserve by the US government as part of its Indian removal policy.148 Davin‘s report did not reveal that he was aware of any limitations of industrial schools. He stressed their economy and efficiency, believing they would eventually be ‘self-supporting’ through their farms.149 The only caution he noted was that the US commissioner of Indian Affairs ‘is not in favour of the contract system’ – a system in which schools were operated by missions and funded by government on a per capita basis – ‘because the children at schools under contract do not, as a rule, get a sufficient quantity of food’.150 Nevertheless, Davin’s report to the Minister recommended that ‘wherever the missionaries have schools, those schools should be utilized by the Government, if possible; that is to say, a contract should be made with the religious body controlling the school to board and educate and train industrially a certain number of pupils’.151 This proved to be one cause of the schools’ eventual breakdown. The first two Indian industrial schools in western Canada opened in the early 1880s: the Church of England’s Battleford Industrial School in 1883 and the Roman Catholic Qu’Appelle Industrial School in 1884. Within a decade there were more than 20 industrial schools in the west. The schools quickly showed their weakness: they were expensive to operate, yet they were severely underfunded under the per capita system instituted in 1893. In many instances they were badly managed, staffed by poorly trained teachers, and provided minimal attention to children’s basic needs. Aboriginal parents protested by keeping their children at home, leading to increasingly coercive school attendance policies. Moreover, the schools failed to meet their aim to prepare Indian youth to be farmers: graduates returned to reservations with skills they were unable to put to use. Although the schools were intended for students from age 14, children as young as five or six commonly attended. Special attention to the learning of young children was nevertheless extremely limited, with the exception of a brief period in the 1890s when kindergarten methods were trialled after similar developments in

C.A. Ruffee, United States Indian Agent, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1879), 88. 147 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 7. 148 The history of the White Earth Reservation is detailed by Melissa L. Meyer in The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 149 Davin, Report on Industrial Schools, 3. 150 Ibid., 2 151 Ibid., 13. 146

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the United States.152 However, the kindergartens were short lived: the Kindergarten Department which opened at the Battleford school in 1897, closed the next year, likely due to the lack of a trained teacher. Industrial schools had mostly shut by the 1920s, replaced by boarding schools – officially known as ‘residential schools’ from 1923 – and ‘improved day schools’.153 Government interest in day schools followed its recognition that they were far less expensive to operate than residential schools. However, they were underfunded and mostly of poor quality. Residential schools under contract with churches continued as the core of the government-run Indian education ‘system’. A new period in Aboriginal education began in the 1950s, defined by increasing Aboriginal control. A Canadian Aboriginal rights movement was influenced by the global independence movement in former colonial areas in Africa, India, and elsewhere, together with the civil rights movement in the United States. For its part, the Canadian government responded to reports of high drop-out rates of Aboriginal students and abuses in residential schools by moving to a system of day schools on reserve and a policy of integration. At the same time, expert opinion came down strongly against institutional care for children, asserting that it caused lasting psychological damage. As the popularity of the residential school as an educational model waned, the schools were poised to take on a new role within the developing field of Aboriginal child welfare, in which increasing numbers of children were determined to be in need of treatment. While some children were placed in the residential programs, white families adopted many others in what is remembered as the ‘Sixties Scoop’. In the early 1950s the adoption of Aboriginal children was a key interest of the Child Welfare League of America, which had many Canadian members. Canadian government policy favouring integration began with amendments to the Indian Act in 1951.154 In 1969 the Federal government assumed control of Indian education, finally ending its ‘contract system’ with churches. Government favoured schools on reserves at the elementary level, and provincial public schools at the secondary level. Agreements were struck with provinces for education of Aboriginal children in public schools. However, education funding and curriculum remained in the hands of government, prompting the landmark 1972 policy paper by the National Indian Brotherhood, which called for ‘Indian Control of Indian Education’. The policy paper stimulated the transfer of education from government to administration by Aboriginal peoples, inaugurating the start of a new period

Larry Prochner, A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009). 153 E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 87. 154 Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995). 152

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of education characterized by pluralism.155 It included special consideration for preschool education, which were designated ‘priority programs’. The importance of local control over the programs was clear: Many communities will view this pre-school experience as an opportunity for the children to learn the second language in which school subjects will be taught. Other communities will emphasize cultural content, for the purpose of reinforcing the child’s image of himself as an Indian. This is the decision of the local parents and they alone are responsible for decisions on location, operation, curriculum and teacher hiring.156

Educational provisions for young Aboriginal children had increased in a limited way in the 1960s, stimulated by the Project Head Start initiative in the United States in 1965, which included a separate American Indian Head Start program for children on reserve. Head Start inspired a scattering of provincial initiatives in Canada. In Ontario, ‘reserve nursery schools’ were planned to prepare children for formal learning in school. This aim was supported in a survey of Indian education for the Government of Canada Indian Affairs Branch, in which preschool was described as essential for school success: ‘the Indian child is not ready to use the tools of the school until he familiarizes himself with them, and while he is engaged in this task, his White peers are learning skills such as reading and writing’.157 Nevertheless, 30 years passed before a federal program was started in Canada, in 1995, called Aboriginal Head Start, which included as one of its six components school readiness, the others being culture and language, health, nutrition, social support, and parent and family involvement.

155 Ibid.; Brian Bullivant, Pluralism, Cultural Maintenance and Evolution (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1982). 156 National Indian Brotherhood, ‘Indian Control of Indian Education, Policy Paper Presented to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development’ (Ottawa: National Indian Brotherhood, 1972), 11. 157 Harry B. Hawthorn, ed., A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: Economic, Political, Education Needs and Policies (Part 2) (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1967), 148.

Fig. 5.1

Church Missionary Society poster of a New Zealand Missionary School c. 1840s. Church Missionary Society, London. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. A-105-009.

Chapter 5

‘An alphabet on her coffin’: Infant Schools for Māori Children in New Zealand The Infant School was commenced in January last [1832], and contains 22 pupils, English [missionary children] and Native. The general system of instruction used in England has been introduced together with Watts catechism in the Native language and has been found to succeed equally with Native and European children.1

In John Barrington and Tim Beaglehole’s foundation text on Māori schooling, there is an abbreviated report from the Rev. William Williams to The Missionary Register in London concerning the Church Missionary Society (CMS) mission at Paihia in the Bay of Islands. There has been no other reference to this infant school, or others, from scholars on Māori or missionary education. The story of a network of missionary infant schools was lost; passing notes such as the one above, written mainly by missionary husbands, make only for fragmented records scattered through missionary archives and the papers of descendants. That the attendees at these infant schools were very young and the teachers mainly missionary wives and daughters is a reason for the lack of presence of the infant schools in missionary education histories. The pattern has much in common with the elusiveness of the histories of the institutions of early childhood such as the later kindergartens and nursery schools, their existence only partially ‘seen’, or ‘reported’ in relation to the rationales for schooling older children.2 Williams’ brief mention of an infant school nevertheless has clues of interest. First, the missionaries’ children and ‘native’ children were attending together, as were boys and girls, both of which conditions were unusual at missionary schools. From 1827 the missionaries had schooled their older children separately from Māori children. Missionaries were usually anxious to limit the contacts between The Barrington and Beaglehole report is more abbreviated than the Williams report in the Missionary Register. John M. Barrington and Tim H. Beaglehole, Maori Schools in a Changing Society (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1974), 23; Missionary Register: Containing the Principal Transactions of the Various Institutions for Propagating the Gospel: With the Proceedings, at Large, of the Church Missionary Society (hereafter MR) (London: L.B. Seeley, 1833), 469. The reference to ‘Watts catechism’ is to Dr Isaac Watts, The Second Sett of Catechisms and Prayers, or some Helps to the Religion of Children from Seven to Twelve Years of Age (Exeter: McKenzie and Son, 1797). 2 Helen May, Discovery of Early Childhood (Wellington, NZCER Press, 1997, 2013, 2nd ed.). 1

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their own children and ‘native’ children, due to what Samuel Marsden called the possibility of ‘improprieties’.3 Second, it can be surmised that the missionaries were following Samuel Wilderspin’s manual of instruction detailed in Infant Education (1829), combined with Dr. Isaac Watts’ Second Set of Catechisms and Prayers (1797) for Sunday schools that had been translated into Māori, possibly by Thomas Kendall for the first school at Rangihoua or by William Williams for the Paihia mission (see Chapter 1). Both were scholars of Māori language, and teaching in the vernacular language was a cornerstone of evangelical missionary work. Third, Williams’ report notes that Māori and missionary children were succeeding ‘equally’. The 1838 report to the House of Lords in Britain on ‘the state of the Islands of New Zealand’ cited in Chapter 1 similarly included comment from a missionary observer that ‘the children are intelligent … To as great an extent as any children I ever saw anywhere.’4 This was a repeated perception of New Zealand missionary infant school ventures although, as the chapter title implies, there were some sad consequences for the health of Māori children as European missionary teachers ventured into the hinterland. The story that is told in this chapter is compiled from fleeting references in the diaries, letters, and reports from missionaries and occasional travellers. The life of these early visitors to New Zealand has, in recent years, been more fully revealed in published compilations of diaries and letters as well as been the focus of studies for theses.5 The infant school story was not a focus in any of the original sources, or considered to be of any interest to later compilers of these records. However, by combining all mention of infant school ventures there is a story albeit still incomplete. Absent from the narrative, in the main, are the missionary wives and their Māori helpers who actually ran the infant schools. Absent too are Māori perspectives on the missionary schooling of their youngest mokopuna (children), but there are sufficient clues that the mokopuna and their whānau (family) were not passively grateful. There was enthusiasm and bemusement as well as indifference, fear, anger, and disillusionment regarding the strange ways missionaries reared young children. The Paihia Mission By 1830 the Paihia mission, established in 1823 by Henry Williams and his wife Marianne, was the showpiece of CMS missionary work (see Figure 5.2). 3 Samuel Marsden, quoted in Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Fences, Boundaries and Imagined Communities: Rethinking the Construction of Early Mission Schools and Communities in New Zealand 1823–1830’, History of Education Review 30, no. 2 (2001): 14–25. 4 ‘Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to enquire into the present state of the Islands of New Zealand’, British Parliamentary Papers, August 8, 1838, London. 5 Where a more accessible source is available this has been referenced rather than the original letter, report, or diary.

‘An alphabet on her coffin’

Fig. 5.2

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The Paihia Mission: ‘Etablissement des Missionnaires’, by Louis Auguste de Sainson, 1830. Author’s collection.

The arrival in 1826 of William Williams and his wife Jane created a nucleus of familial support and infrastructure to broaden the scope of mission work. Both Jane and Marianne were educated and had experience teaching in England. Prior to her departure Marianne had been directed by the CMS to focus on ‘the education of female children, and in the general improvement of the condition of women in New Zealand … [and] exhibit to the Natives, the instructive example of a happy Christian family’.6 Marianne boarded Māori girls in her home. They helped with domestic tasks. The logistics of releasing these girls for classes was the spark for the beginning of a separate girls’ school.7

6 ‘Instructions to Henry Williams 1822’, quoted in Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘In a Different Voice: A Case Study of Marianne and Jane Williams, Missionary Educators in Northern New Zealand 1823–1835’ (PhD dissertation, University of Auckland, 1995), 11. 7 Valerie Carson, ‘Submitting to Great Inconveniences: Early Missionary Education for Maori Women and Girls’, in Mission and Moko: Aspects of the Work of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand 1814–1882, ed. Robert Glen (Christchurch: Latimer Fellowship of New Zealand, 1992), 56–72.

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Marianne’s journal and letters, and surviving letters from Jane, detail the daily life in their adjoining households.8 Tanya Fitzgerald’s study of these two women educators describes how, alongside the rearing of their own families and organizing their households, Marianne and Jane each complemented their husband’s priorities of preaching, translating, mediating disputes, and visiting ‘far and near’.9 Marianne and Jane extended the instruction of the girls’ school to include hygiene, household management, and child care. Jane wrote to a friend: Our plan is to dine together, and Marianne and I cook alternatively. The one who does not cook keeps school … I quite enjoy my day for keeping school. It appears in New Zealand such lady-like work … We have our Native [girls’] school in the morning, and I am glad to say that it is in a promising state. We have now eleven pupils, but they are so uncertain that next week they might all be gone.10

Fitzgerald’s study examines the attempt of Marianne and Jane to ‘re-make’ Ngā Puhi women as useful Christian wives and mothers. The broader intent was to discipline Māori society through a ‘transformation’ in family life, deemed a necessity if Māori Christianity were to flourish.11 Women were seen as the problem but also the conduit for a conversion strategy. It was Henry Williams’ view that Māori women were ‘far more degraded than males’ and much ‘in need of reclamation’.12 That indigenous women needed ‘rescuing’ was a commonly held perception across the missionary worlds of Canada, Africa, India, and the Pacific. This view particularly applied to the Polynesian island cultures, fuelled by tales of sexual immorality from James Cook’s journals – something Williams was aware of, as a past sailor and a keen reader of Cook’s explorations in his younger years.13 In the Pacific Islands region, including New Zealand, missionary attempts to contain the sexuality of women started with the re-clothing of girls and women while at school or in missionary homes in fashions similar to those worn by girls at English charity schools (Figure 5.3).14 On a visit to Kawakawa in 1836 Marianne reports approvingly of ‘a hundred and fifty, possible more, who were assembled for divine worship, at least half decently dressed in English clothing’.15 Caroline Fitzgerald, ed., Letters from the Bay of Islands: The Story of Marianne Williams (Auckland: Penguin, 2004). 9 Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘In a Different Voice’. 10 Jane Williams to Lydia March, May 23, 1827, quoted in Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘In a Different Voice’. 11 Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Creating a Disciplined Society: CMS Women and the Re-making of Ngā Puhi Women 1823–35’, History of Education Review 32, no. 1 (2003): 84–98. 12 Quoted in Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Creating a Disciplined Society’, 85. 13 Caroline Fitzgerald, Letters from the Bay of Islands. 14 Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15 Caroline Fitzgerald, Letters from the Bay of Islands, 232. 8

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Māori girls and women were often resistant to the tutelage and regulation of Jane and Marianne.16 Training Māori girls in ‘civilized living’ but, in effect, to be domestic servants, was not easy. Kuni Jenkins suggests that Ngā Puhi women came to the mission to gain knowledge about the Pākehā (New Zealand European) world, and to acquire its domestic technology and artefacts. They would leave when they realized how restricted the knowledge and expected behavioural codes were.17 Marianne described how the women ‘rangatiras’ (chiefs) would run away ‘in a pet’, and the girls who had been slaves would laugh and say she had ‘too much of a mouth’. Moreover: … the best of the Native girls, if not well watched, would strain the milk with the duster, wash the tea-things with the knife-cloth, or wipe the tables with the flannel for scouring the flour. The very best of them, also, will, on a very hot day, take herself off (just when you may be wishing for someone to relieve you) and swim; afterwards she will go to sleep for two to three hours.18

Nevertheless, Jane reported that the girls were: … useful in washing, ironing, sewing and nursing and being able to write and read with tolerable ease; these requirements afford us much pleasure, but we are more gratified at perceiving that they become more orderly and obedient, and that their habits are more decorous and less dirty.19

This domestic education was a forerunner for the first infant school venture involving both Māori women and missionary wives and daughters. The infant school combined the arts of teaching and childrearing along with aspects of household management. Jane and Marianne tried to keep boys and girls separate, and girls within the picket fences of the mission away from visiting ships, where for sexual favours they could earn muskets for their men and trinkets for themselves. Fitzgerald provides a perceptive analysis of the distinctive fenced ‘boundaries’ created by the early missionaries.20 In part, the missionaries did not feel safe unless there was a physical barrier between themselves and the Māori they had come to convert, although a picket fence could only be symbolic in the face of the threatening 16 Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Jumping the Fences: Maori Women’s Resistance to Missionary Schooling in Northern New Zealand 1823–35’, Paedagogica Historica 37, no. 1 (2001): 175–92. 17 Kuni Jenkins, ‘Te Ihi, te Mana, te Wehi o te Ao Tuhi: Maori Print Literacy from 1814–1855: Literacy, Power and Colonisation’ (MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1991). 18 Quoted in Carson, ‘Submitting to Great Inconveniences’, 69. 19 Jane Williams to Lydia March, March 27, 1828, quoted 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), 28. 20 Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Jumping the Fences’.

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stances they did witness. Mainly the picket fences were signifiers of English values and beliefs of civilized Christian living, including dress, time, demeanour, literacy, and the domestic arts: The assumption was that beyond these palings was a world, variously described as ‘heathen’ and ‘uncivilised’, that was in need of missionary intervention … The essential task of CMS missionaries was to rescue indigenous peoples from their ‘ignorance and superstition’ and relocate Ngā Puhi both ideologically and physically within the boundaries of the Christian world.21

The school that Marianne and Jane ran, inside the boundaries, was part of an expanding education infrastructure at the Paihia and Kerikeri missions. Marianne described the second annual examination held in Kerikeri in 1829 to which the Paihia mission travelled in seven canoes, ‘paddling in unison, the boys all dressed in uniform with white shirts and trousers and Scotch caps’: Carpentry work for examination included a panelled door and a table, and the girls’ sewing included ‘gowns, shirts, frocks, trousers, flannels and even a boy’s jacket’. Marianne was pleased to note, too, that during the feast, ‘all seated themselves in good order and waited until Grace was said at each table’.22

The darker side of this ‘success’ story was the impact of European penetration on the health of the Māori population. Missionary George Clarke describes the missionary perspective of this tragedy: We continue to visit the villages about us but it is painful to witness the unconcern of many of the Heathen, and often leave them with wounded feelings. They charge us as the author of their evils; as having introduced many diseases. Till we came amongst them they say young people did not die, but all lived to so old as to be obliged to creep on their hands and knees.23

The missionaries argued that the absence of Christianity contributed to the rate of sickness and death in Māori, who were exhorted to ‘save’ themselves.24 The first baptism occurred in 1825 and the rate of conversion dramatically gathered pace during the 1830s. This decade was the heyday of New Zealand missionary endeavour, measured also by the rapid spread of literacy. Missionary William Brown observed, ‘if one native in the tribe can read and write, he will not be long

Tanya Fitzgerald, ‘Jumping the Fences’, 17. Cited in Hugh Carleton, The Life of Henry Williams, Archdeacon of Auckland,

21 22

vol. 1 (Auckland: Upton, 1874–77). 23 MR (1827), 627. 24 Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall (Auckland: University of Auckland & Oxford University Press, 1968).

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‘Native Girl Writing on a Slate’ dressed in her mission clothing, attrib. Joseph Jenner Merrett, c. 1840s, Waimate Mission. Governor George Grey Collection. © The British Library Board. C4000.05 V51.

in teaching the others. The desire to obtain this information engrosses their whole thoughts and they will continue for days with their slates in their hands.’25 An unenthusiastic observation of the missionaries comes from the artist Augustus Earle who spent nine months in New Zealand during 1827–28. Earle received an inhospitable reception from the missionaries at Paihia. They probably objected to his non-judgemental appraisals of Māori society and his friendly relationships with Māori women.26 Earle, likewise, was critical of uneducated ‘mechanical’ missionaries whom he accused of withholding their technical skills from Māori in place of preaching, for which they: William Brown, New Zealand and Its Aborigines (London: Smith Elder and Co.,

25

1845).

26 Anthony Murray-Oliver, Augustus Earle in New Zealand (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1968).

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… collect a few ragged urchins of natives, whom they teach to read and write in their own language – the English tongue being forbidden: and when these children return to their families, they are despised by them, as being effeminate and useless.27

Earle was particularly scathing of the reaction of the missionaries at Rangihoua. The foundation missionary teacher, Thomas Kendall, was no longer resident, having been dismissed for misconduct, which included adultery with a Māori woman and musket trading. Kendall was regarded by other missionaries as having become too enamoured with Māori knowledge. Samuel Marsden sternly reported that Kendall’s ‘mind has become greatly poluted [sic] by studying the abominations of the Heathens, and his Ideas are very heathenish’.28 This perceived contamination was a further justification for separate missionary enclaves of civilization. Earle and his party arrived at Rangihoua on Christmas Day 1827 intending to visit the resident missionaries. According to Earle: Our landing gave no pleasure to these secluded gentlemen: they gave us no welcome; but as our boats approached the shore, they walked away to their own dwellings, closed their gates and doors after them, and gazed at us through the windows; and during the three days we passed in a hut quite near them, they never exchanged one word with any of our party.29

Instead, Earle socialized in the nearby pā (fortified village). Earle, like Kendall, was also considered ‘polluted’. Earle’s paintings of Māori life and landscape provide a rare record of the period through a non-missionary lens.30 Paihia Infant School The infant school reported at Paihia in 1832 was the first. Marianne Williams makes a passing mention of the idea in her journal (October 31, 1831): ‘Last night I heard nothing but the infant school. This morning, nothing but the French man-owar working into the bay.’31 The occasion was most likely a planning meeting for an infant school, but the more momentous political interest of the French presence halted further comment on the infant school. The ‘larger drama’ against which infant schools are mentioned is a recurring pattern, but useful too in providing context for the broader colonial story. French traders had long plied the Pacific and both the French and the British were intent on extending their economic empires. It was the French ‘purchase’ of land in 1838 from South Island chiefs for a future 29 30

Quoted in Murray-Oliver, Augustus Earle in New Zealand, 143. Quoted in Binney, The Legacy of Guilt, 104. Ibid., 147. Augustus Earle, Narrative of a Nine-month Residence in New Zealand in 1827 (London: Longman etc., 1832). 31 Caroline Fitzgerald, Letters from the Bay of Islands, 201. 27 28

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French settlement at Akaroa, that hastened the British Parliament to formalize a Treaty with Māori in 1840 at Waitangi in the North. The treaty established New Zealand as a British colony. Although, prior to the signing the first settler ships from France and Britain had already set forth. This also made a treaty necessary, particularly as the settlers had expectations of land. We learn from Henry Williams that after five months the school had ‘twelve Māori and seven English children’.32 He was ‘particularly pleased’ and anticipated its growth. From a later letter in The Missionary Register we discover that the school was run by ‘Mrs H. and W. [Marianne and Jane] Williams, Mrs [Charlotte] Brown, Mrs [Sarah] Fairburn and Mrs [Mathilda] Puckey’.33 A rare sketch of a Māori woman and her child gives some clues concerning the likely attendees at the first infant school. The lithograph ‘Maori woman reading’ (Figure 5.4) portrays a cloaked Māori mother reading a book in front of her whare (house). There are mixed messages of creeping Europeanization. The infant, clothed in white European garments, is in her mother’s arms akin to a ‘Madonna and child’, rather than on her mother’s back, as was the practice of Māori mothers. The Māori mother, like the allegorical Virgin Mary, is teaching her infant (Jesus) to read. The image portrays too the interest of Māori women in literacy. Captain W. Jacobs of the East India Company was a visitor to Paihia in 1833. He observed a lot of women at the girls’ school with babies on their back. These were the children who were the initial recruits for the infant school: The Infant School contains 26 little children. I found 18 of them assembled some of whom were European, who from the smallness of their numbers are associated with the native infants in this interesting little school. The assiduous superintendence of the female members of the Mission appears evident, in the manner in which these little creatures go through their exercises; and there cannot be any doubt that the moral culture which the system engenders, no less than the mental improvement of the scholars, will make it a blessing to the Mission.34

Alfred Brown reported, ‘Our Infant School re-commences today [July 9, 1832]. The delight which it affords the children, and the marked improvement in the conduct of the little native scholars, are encouraging’.35 William Yate commented on the school around 1833–34: … the children from the infant school are brought up in habits of industry. They are taught to prepare flax, to be used for weaving themselves garments, and for other purposes; by which they are not only occupied in some beneficial

32 Henry Williams to Dandeson Coates, July 6, 1832, quoted in Lawrence M. Rogers, Te Wiremu: A Biography of Henry Williams (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1973), 97. 33 MR (1833), 469. 34 MR (1834), 61. 35 MR (1833), 243.

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Fig. 5.4

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‘Maori Woman Reading’, by Joseph Jenner Merrett, 1842. In Mrs [Eliza] Hobson’s Album. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. A-275-002.

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employment, but they learn to what good account the resources of their own country may be turned.36

From his standpoint in England, Yate was telling his audience about the great change ‘effected by the Gospel on the domestic character and conduct of those who have embraced it’: Formerly a parent would never correct a child for anything it might do; it was allowed to run riot in all that was vile, and to have its own way in everything. The evil of this was palpable. In New Zealand, as in every other country, a spoiled child is a great plague; but if the pest was in any one place more severely felt than in another, it was here. Brought up in evil, and without restraint of law in their youth, it could be no great wonder if, as men, they indulged in every vice …37

The missionaries, nevertheless, noted that Māori childrearing was indulgent. Indeed, Māori children, from most reports, were not physically chastised.38 Travelling amongst Māori in the 1830s, missionary Richard Taylor reported how Māori children ‘are never checked or corrected and are permitted to run wild until about sixteen …’.39 This parenting style appeared as indulgence compared with European evangelical dictates of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. An extraordinary variation on the theme of childrearing featured in an account penned in 1834 by Charles Marshall, surgeon on HMS Alligator. He was recounting the return of four-year-old John Guard held captive by Ngāti Ruanui iwi (tribe) for six months.40 It was not uncommon for Māori to take Pākehā captives during these years; some who were less useful, or where vengeance was a reason, were killed. John Guard had been well cared for personally by the tribal chief. When he was returned, he was wearing the miniature cloak of a chief and his head was adorned with feathers. It was John Guard’s behaviour that shocked Marshall, and it is Marshall’s proposed solution that is of interest to this story, although Marshall’s report primarily concerned the vengeful British retaliation that was later investigated: The little boy who had been rescued from the savages at Waimate, exhibited a good deal of that headstrong vehemence of temper which is encouraged among their boys, being looked upon as the germ of a martial spirit, and the

William Yate, An Account of New Zealand and the Church Missionary Society’s Mission in the Northern Island (London: R.B. Seeley and Burnside, 1835), 95–6. 37 Ibid., 241. 38 Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773–1815 (Auckland: Viking, 1997). 39 Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui. Or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants (London: Wertheim and McIntosh, 1855), 162. 40 Trevor Bentley, Captured by Maori: White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Frontier (Auckland: Penguin, 2004). 36

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source of military prowess. Everything he saw, he coveted; everything he coveted he put his claim to; and if aught were withheld from him, he stamped, screamed, thrust out his tongue, clenched his fists, and persevered in such like noisy demonstrations of his impotent wrath, until he had either tired others into compliance with his wishes, or he was exhausted by the violence of his own anger. When it is considered that this youngster was not five years old; that he was the complete pet of the tribe in which he had been reared for six months before, on account of this very impetuosity of temper; – and that similar passion to his is universally esteemed an accomplishment, it will be evident at once how greatly a Christian mission in this country like New Zealand needs to be strengthened by the addition of schools in every direction for the instruction of the very young.41 [emphasis added]

British readers were eager for tales of savagery in distant lands and could applaud the promise that missionary schooling would produce ‘civilized’ Christian Māori. With the advent of infant schools, this transformation could start in the cradle where the habits of childhood were formed. John Guard’s dramatic behavioural change to become ‘Māori’ in such a short time was evidence that the reverse was also possible. Infant School Specialist In 1830 a new mission was established at Waimate, inland from Paihia. The arrival of the Rev. Joseph Matthews at the Waimate mission, in 1832, was a boost to the fledgling infant schools in New Zealand. Various reports mention his knowledge of the infant school system. He began courting Mary Ann Davis, who had worked with Marianne and Jane Williams at the Paihia girls’ school. Davis gave Matthews tuition in Māori, while he instructed her in the latest teaching methods.42 Matthews wanted to develop the experiment at Waimate and include children up to ten years. The ages of children attending infant schools, both in Britain and amongst Māori, were wide ranging. There is mention of Māori children at school as young as 18 months. Several insights into the Waimate infant school are available. Teacher George Clarke, and founder of the Waimate mission, made mention of ‘Mr Matthews, who has lately joined us, [and] commenced the infant school on Monday’. He also noted that Mary Ann had ‘taken charge of the younger ones preparing them for Mr Brown’s School’ for the missionaries’ children at Paihia.43 In 1834 the Charles Marshall quoted in William Barrett Marshall, Personal narratives of two visits to New Zealand in His Majesty’s Ship Alligator, A.D. 1834 (London: James Nesbett and Co., 1836), 257. 42 Sophia Clarissa Matthews and Ludolph Joseph Matthews, Matthews of Kaitaia: The Story of Joseph Matthews and the Kaitaia Mission (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1940). 43 Joseph Matthews’ journal, June 10, 1832, quoted in MR (1833), 243. 41

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average attendance at the infant school was 25 and included ‘the infant children of the missionaries, whose age does not permit them to go to the general European school at Paihia’.44 Another report noted that the ‘younger branches of the Mission families have been under the daily instruction of Miss Davis. The Natives at their residences are eager to read and write: they have been supplied with slates for the purpose, and have purchased books’.45 Matthews and Davis were at Waimate for 18 months. A retrospective memoir of Matthews described how: It was decided to let him show what he could do… It was a success from the start, which was partly due to Miss Davis, who devoted much of her spare time to it. She knew the children personally, and, from experience, how to handle them; and Matthews, with only a working knowledge of their language, was wise enough to follow her advice. On the other hand he had the gift of teaching, and applied the up-to-date methods to his undertaking. Grasping the point that learning could be made pleasant to scholars, he invented learning games … with short stories to impress the main features of the lessons on their minds, thus gaining their whole-hearted interest, and he experienced no difficulty in keeping up attendance. His colleagues, noting the results, urged him to give up other mission work, and devote his whole time to teaching.46

In his journal (June 28, 1832) Matthews refers to the infants at the Waimate mission as ‘the best soil for cultivation’, adopting the Lockean metaphor of the malleable child. There seemed to be more hope of their transformation than for older children, where boys had deserted the schools to participate in tribal wars. Matthews still assumes the evangelical view of child waywardness. The Missionary Register published extracts from Matthews’ journal with the editorial that ‘they exhibit in a forceful manner the value of that “Infant-School System”, and its tendency to supplant the ferocious tempers early instilled into native children’.47 Matthews wrote: Many discouragements present themselves: the children are under no control at home; the villages are so situated, and the manners of the Natives … render it necessary to take no child in who is not allowed to be in the house of a Missionary; they must have a single garment on at School. There is a sufficient number of infants in the settlement to begin with. In surprise on the first day, including European and Native, they amounted to 24. Many will be induced to bring their children, when they know they have a place for them. The vestry at the chapel has a fire-place and I have made my forms, and put them in order after the English plan; and intend, with God’s assistance, to go on in the same way. The school-room will hold 35 children.48

46 47 48 44

45

MR (1836), 213. MR (1832), 470. Matthews and Matthews, Matthews of Kaitaia, 11–12. MR (1834), 11. MR (1833), 243–4.

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There are several points from the above extract to note. Significantly boys and girls, Māori and Pākehā, were again schooled together. Furthermore, Matthews had arranged the room using Wilderspin’s plans and enforced the rule of appropriately clothed children as the measure for entry. He felt that some of the nearby village children were too ‘uncivilized’ for his experiment. In 1834 when Matthews was relocating north to Kaitaia to start a new mission, he wrote a letter updating the CMS on the Waimate venture. Matthews made the following perceptive observation of a Māori father and his young son: I was very happy in teaching the Infant School which I had organised; and from what I have observed, I should conclude that were the Infant System to obtain a good footing in the villages of the Natives, it would soon change the moral face of nature in New Zealand. No English children ever enjoyed the system more than those Native children to whom I taught it. It is an undeniable fact that the savage learns to be savage in his infancy; he only waits for power and opportunity to display his ferocious nature. The custom of the Chiefs is, to make known every thing of importance to the child. I have noticed the principal Chief of Kaitaia talking to his little boy as though the child was able to give him advice. The father would steadfastly look his son in the face, while describing the scene which took place. And his son would as earnestly behold his the father, and show, by strict attention, that every word was digested.49

The seemingly equal adult–child relationship would appear strange to Europeans who practised the maxim that children should be ‘seen and not heard’. The trader Joel Polack, writing of his experiences in New Zealand, confirmed that ‘it is not uncommon to see young children of tender years sitting next to their parents in war councils’.50 Matthews, like Samuel Marsden, was caught between an admiration for the intellectual potential of young Māori children and the belief that Māori life was uncivilized: While sitting in the tent door, I observed a number of children flock to a small rush house, evidently very anxious to peep in. They peeped in, as fast as they could, and as they peeped they smiled. At what did they smile? They smiled and evinced their joy at the sight of heads of victims who have lately fallen in battle. Thus the infant race of New Zealanders are taught the delight in the savage, and worse than brutal habits of their parents. Now it is just as easy to teach them the orderly habits of the infant School, as to teach them the habit of delighting in war. The little incident taught me a great lesson. There are many obstacles in the way of setting these Schools a-going; but there is reason to hope that the day is not far distant when Infant Schools will become general.51

Joseph Matthews to the CMS, January 10, 1834, quoted in MR (1834), 511–12. Quoted in Bentley, Captured by Maori, 75. 51 Joseph Matthews to the CMS, January 10, 1834, quoted in MR (1834), 511–12. 49 50

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Missionary squeamishness over such practices is understandable but problematic. To Māori, trophy heads were an honourable adjunct of battle, but there was a new dimension. Tattooed heads had become a sought-after trophy for European travellers, which had increased the practice. Heads were bartered for guns, as well as for the European apparel and artefacts missionaries encouraged Māori to use.52 Matthews continued: While at Kaitaia nine weeks I opened a Sunday School, which was well attended. On the Monday I opened a morning school, commencing with reading the Word of God, singing, and prayer; and this also was well attended; and beyond my expectations I had an Infant class. It would have delighted any of the patrons of Infant Schools, to have seen the interest which this class excited among the grown-up people. They would sometimes stop their lessons to hear the infants say theirs. I began to teach them Watt’s Child’s Catechism, and other lessons. One of the Chiefs would frequently act as Sexton, to keep good order, and go out and about to call all into the school.53

Accompanying Mary Ann and Joseph Matthews (now married) to Kaitaia were William and Mathilda Puckey. Mary Ann and Mathilda managed the girls’ and infant schools. Matthews wrote, ‘I should gladly spend my whole time in teaching both adults and infants if circumstances would allow; but having to attend to all the requisite building, doing the greater part myself … There is no way of getting rid of these secular affairs …’.54 There is no further mention of infant schools until a report by Matthews and Puckey probably at the end of 1844, implying that the infant school is new: An infant school has been established in our settlement for all whose parents will provide food. The Committee is finding them clothes. The children appear to be very happy and make considerable progress in what they are taught. A Christian Native, of the name John Bunyan, takes the general superintendence of the children; but it is also regularly attended by Mrs Matthews and Mrs Puckey. We are thankful to state that [the local chief] Rawawa has not joined in the alarming disturbance and open war between Ngā Puhi and the British Government.55

This report was written subsequent to the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between Māori chiefs and the British Crown. There was already disquiet and disturbances over land, and a number of mission stations had closed.

52 Māori people and the New Zealand government are currently trying to recover these heads from various museums of Europe. A number have been returned. 53 MR (1834), 511–12. 54 January 26, 1836, quoted in Matthews and Matthews, Matthews of Kaitaia, 81. 55 MR (1946), 332.

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Māori Teachers Adapting some of the traditions of the monitorial schools, Māori women acted as monitors in the infant schools, and some of them became the significant adult teacher. They receive only a passing mention in any comments on infant schools but are sometimes named. Meri Taua (Mary Tawa)56 and her husband Hoani were among the first baptisms at Kerikeri mission in 1830. Meri is named as ‘teaching the infants’,57 probably ‘assisting’ Charlotte Kemp. In 1839 Mary Tawa’s presence and ‘assistance’ in the infant school on ‘weekdays only’ are again reported.58 Her long years of service yield no further comment. In 1834 William Fairburn and his wife Sarah, who had worked in the Paihia infant school, established a mission at Puriri (near Thames). Fairburn reported: Our schools are going on in a manner which affords us much encouragement. We have regularly the Adult, Boys and Girls School every day of the week. The Infant School is very well attended. The mothers and sometimes even the grandmothers attend to be taught with the infants. Many of the adult boys and girls are assembled from the village in the neighbourhood, as are the infants. They manifest a teachable and attentive disposition. The Boys School commences at half past seven during the winter, the Infants at ten in the morning and the girls at three in the afternoon.59

In February 1835 Henry Williams visited Puriri. He described a Sunday afternoon visit to the infant school: Twenty-eight were present. It was exceedingly interesting, as being early in this quarter. Most of the children were boys from seven years downwards. Each put on a blue frock upon entering the house, which gave a clean, uniform, and pleasing appearance. The children manifested much pleasure, and desire to learn, and went through their various evolutions with considerable precision. At the conclusion, some of the old ladies among the visitors, made a special request that the children might be marched around the flag-staff, in order that they might see them. Their wishes were complied with, to their great admiration. But one of the most important characters of the school was Tini, a lady of considerable note, and the wife of one of the principal Chiefs here. She came in a clean blue gown, and took the lead under Mrs Fairburn, in pointing to the letters, and keeping order. She appeared quick and intelligent, and is, I understand, a very well behaved person. This is a highly important feature in this early Mission. Surely this moral wilderness shall soon rejoice and blossom as the rose, and this

‘Mary’ is the baptized name with the Māori spelling and pronunciation of ‘Meri’.

56

Many Māori in New Zealand have reverted to Māori spelling and pronunciation of Pākehā baptism names. 57 Judith Binney, Te Kerikeri: The Meeting Pool (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books in association with Craig Cotton Publishing, 2006). 58 MR (1839), 226. 59 MR (1835), 422.

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desert break forth into singing. To hear these children repeat their Catechism, and answer questions put to them, was very animating, and we could not but feel the assurance, that our labour was not in vain.60 [original emphasis]

Henry Williams also recorded this event in his diary (February 21, 1835), describing the ‘visitors being thrilled by a demonstration by the children of Fairburn’s school, led by Tine [Tini] the wife of one of the local chiefs’.61 There is an earlier story of Tini describing her friendship with ‘A-o-tu-i-ata’, a chief’s daughter who reportedly, after hearing Marsden talk, had persuaded her reluctant parents to allow her to accompany the newly married Fairburns to the Puriri mission in 1833.62 Tini, also described as a ‘chieftain’s daughter’, later saved Mr. Fairburn from being stabbed by a disaffected suitor of ‘A-o-tu-i-ata’, whose parents had stipulated that she only marry someone of equal status. ‘A-o-tu-i-ata’ and Tini had lived, prior to marriage, ‘as daughters’ in the Fairburn household. The story, primarily about ‘A-o-tu-i-ata’, provides a few more clues about Tini and her work in the infant school at Puriri: Tini was herself a woman of great ability, and she looked quite a personage in the school. She took a deep interest in the education of the native children. When dressed in a spotless blue gown of calico she looked quite a princess as she moved quietly about the schoolhouse, helping the wives of the missionaries to teach the younger generation of her race … It was a pretty sight to see the dusky Maori children in their blue frocks, marching into the school – for these loose clothes were considered necessary during the hours of study, but were invariably shed directly the order to dismiss was given and they would run back to their whares [houses].63

In 1836 there is a further reference to the Puriri infant school. Fairburn reported that the school was making good progress, with an average attendance of 30 children. He related a moral anecdote from ‘a very little girl who attends Mrs Fairburn’s school’: A few days ago a female belonging to the native village disgraced herself by sinful conduct. Mrs Fairburn reproved her. The little girl stood by, and heard the reproof; and turning to the delinquent she said, ‘You have broken the seventh commandment’ [Thou shalt not commit adultery].64

Several points of interest emerge from these reports. There is the acknowledgement of the expert work Tini as a teacher and a convert. Moreover, her MR (1836), 341. Rogers, Te Wiremu, 113. 62 Marnie Spicer, ‘A-o-tu-i-ata – A Maori maid’, in Silhouettes of the Past a Century 60 61

Ago, Auckland Lyceum Club (Auckland: Unity Press Ltd, circa 1939), 21–5. 63 Ibid., 223–4. 64 MR (1858), 288.

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chiefly status is a bonus to missionaries, which she combines with an appropriate Christian demeanour. ‘Saving the very young’ is deemed to be a good investment of missionary time, particularly if the young can identify the wrongs of their older sisters. The observation that learning should be pleasurable for young children is noteworthy, although comments concerning ‘precision’ and ‘order’ suggest a regimented rather than playful program. Missionaries were clearly transporting the ethos of pleasure promoted by the infant school founders Robert Owen and Samuel Wilderspin. This was a pragmatic transformation of the idea, otherwise Māori children would not have stayed. There is also the interesting participation and/or entertainment of Māori mothers and grandmothers, certainly not a practice in British infant schools. Although observing patrons and visitors, who were no doubt entertained, was a feature of the British schools. Finally, there is the emphasis on European dress. Naked Māori children and even adults offended the sensibilities of missionaries, who sometimes were ‘obliged to resort to physical force to compel obedience to the rule that no naked person should come near a mission house’.65 The shapeless missionary ‘nightgown’ dresses did not always find favour. Missionary teacher James West Stack wrote that Māori: … complained that such garments interfered with the freedom of their bodily movements, and prevented them from doing their work comfortably. As soon as their work about our house was finished, and they got back to their quarters, they threw aside the foreign garment and put on their favourite mats.66

For church on Sunday and at the annual examination, Māori women and girls were encouraged to embellish their dark blue gowns with white aprons and buff handkerchiefs.67 In 1835 the CMS summed up almost twenty years of missionary activity: Out of an estimated native population of 180,000, 45,000 have had intercourse with missionaries: 300 baptised into the Christian faith; 800 taught to read in mission schools; 4000 now under instruction besides 250 infants of eight years and under. The Natives have also established schools of their own. The average attendance at worship at [the] settlements, 1000.68

The CMS was extending its work southwards into areas with little European contact.69 At Paihia from 1836 to 1837 Marianne Williams was again running A.H. Reed, ed., Early Maoriland Adventures of J.W. Stack (Dunedin: Coulls Somerville Wilkie Limited, 1935). 66 Ibid., 174. 67 Carson, ‘Submitting to Great Inconveniences’. 68 MR (1836), 157. 69 Hilda Constance Fancourt, The Advance of the Missionaries. Being the Expansion of the CMS Mission South of the Bay of Islands, 1833–40 (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1939). 65

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the infant school assisted at times by Hera, a young Māori woman in her care.70 That Hera managed her role to Marianne’s satisfaction is evident in an entry in Marianne’s diary concerning the day she decided to leave the infant school in Hera’s charge while she set off on a boat with Henry up river to Kawakawa to see a new chapel that had been built. Alongside the evidence of missionary gains there were also difficulties. In 1837 an entry in Henry’s journal describes the turmoil surrounding mission life. There had been skirmishing between tribal groups in the area. Henry Williams was involved in negotiating a truce. Samuel Marsden and his daughter were visiting Waimate from New South Wales: 15 April 1837. A fearful day of excitement. Just as I went to the infant school, with Mr Marsden and Miss Marsden, Henry saw a movement among the canoes; was off, and up the river in his dressing-gown before we knew he was gone. Mrs Clendon [wife of the American consul] and her children were brought over [from Kororareka] for refuge. She came weeping, and made me shudder with the account she gave of their skirmishing and fighting, and dropping down as fast, and my dear husband among them in the very thick of it. My husband returned safe. The poor natives made a sad affair of it … The storms of war seem gathering.71

The fighting continued for several months with shifting fortunes amongst tribal groups. No missionaries were attacked. Marianne noted in her diary the involvement of the mission-educated Hone Heke, and later rebel: ‘We heard of John [Hone] Heke’s near escape, being chased in a canoe from Wahapu. How sad that this Christian native should have any mix in these civil wars.’72 Hone Heke features again in this story in a skirmish at the Waimate mission. ‘An Alphabet on her Coffin’ By the late 1830s there is mention of infant schools operating at other mission locations; they had become an integral, although often short-lived part of any mission venture. In 1835–6 Alfred and Charlotte Brown went to Matamata in the Waikato. Brown reported 38 boys, 63 girls, and 49 infants attending Sunday services, assembled in their school groups. This venture too was short-lived, as the station was attacked. In 1838 the Browns shifted to Te Papa (near Tauranga). Thirty-five boys were reportedly attending school; there was also a girls’ and infant school for between 30 and 35 children, but war checked the development of schools established nearby at Otumoetai Pa.73 Inter-tribal warfare across the 72 73 70

71

Caroline Fitzgerald, Letters from the Bay of Islands. Ibid., 237. Marianne’s diary, May 16, 1837, in ibid., 239. Ibid.

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central North Island during the 1830s, sometimes referred to as the ‘musket wars’ was disruptive not only to missionary ventures but, more significantly, to Māori families.74 The keenly sought after muskets had encouraged more lethal contexts for tribal conflict often centred around notions of utu (revenge) for past wrongs. The most graphic missionary tales concerned Māori cannibalism that had increased in the midst of musket-led warfare.75 After a raid at Maketū in 1836 Brown described the passage of baskets of human flesh as ‘harrowing’, but added: What more deeply affected me than any other object [was] one of the infant children of our school dandling on his knees and making faces at the head of some Rotorua chief who had been slain in battle.76

In the aftermath of Cook’s visits there was a mix of European horror and curiosity at the extent of cannibalism amongst Māori.77 While visiting New Zealand in 1835, Charles Darwin noted in his diary that he had not heard of any recent acts of cannibalism, but he had been informed of a find of human bones around a fireplace.78 The practice declined with the advent of Christianity and the cessation of inter-tribal battles in the wake of colonial settlement and conquest. Māori scholar Paul Moon’s study, This Horrid Practice (2008) attempts to break through the cultural prejudices and sensitivities concerning cannibalism and unpack the ‘myths and realities’ of the practice. The European presence in New Zealand curtailed the practice, yet their import of muskets for a while actually increased the practice. There is no further mention of the infant school at Te Papa until 1845, at which time Christopher and Marianne Davies were appointed to (probably re-establish) the school. In June 1845 Davies wrote: The children [at Otumoetai infant school] have mastered the great difficulty of pronunciation of the English alphabet, and have learned several sentences. The average attendance during the past six months has been 41. I am sorry to say that I receive very little encouragement from the parents of the children; for they frequently allow them to accompany them on fishing excursions or when they take a journey.79

Janine Graham, ‘Towards a History of New Zealand Childhoods’, Historical Review (Tauranga – Bay of Plenty) 48, no. 2 (2000): 94. 75 Paul Moon, This Horrid Practice: The Myth and Reality of Traditional Maori Cannibalism (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2008). 76 Quoted in W.H. Gifford and H. Bradney Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga (Dunedin: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1940), 50. 77 Michael Wordsworth Standish, The Waimate Mission Station (Wellington: A.W. and W.H. Reed, 1962). 78 Moon, This Horrid Practice. 79 MR (1846), 332. 74

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Going fishing for Europeans was often a leisure activity. For Māori, fishing was an economic endeavour in which they would want their children ‘schooled’. Different cultural priorities for the activities of childhood are evident. In 1846 Brown reports that Marianne Davies was running the infant school. The work seemed an uphill challenge. Parental support for mission schooling was not assured: The children at the school are progressing but they require to be removed from their parents before any necessary discipline can be introduced amongst them. On Tuesday last I was obliged to attend a stormy meeting in the pa, in consequence of some of the natives withholding their children from school because they had been mildly punished for disobedience.80

It is unclear whether the cause of the controversy involved physical punishment, but a letter from a French Catholic missionary implies that it might have been. JeanSimon Bernard ran the Catholic mission at Otumoetai. In a letter to his superior in France, Bernard expressed his despondency at the way Māori moved backwards and forwards between the Protestant and Catholic churches, and seemed to lack interest in either denomination unless the missionaries supplied rewards. Bernard was disillusioned with the missionary work and wondered where he should apply his effort. He was doubtful even about his efforts with younger children: Would it be with the children as in Europe? But it is impossible to keep them around you. They are playing all day long, running around completely naked, unable to pay two minutes attention. I tried to attract them to school and catechism, but to no avail. My predecessor found … they asked him money to come … The children here are completely free: the parents never do anything to them. They never beat them and do not allow anyone else to beat them.81 [translated]

Brown’s moods swing between despondency and hope. His description of the children’s newly found literacy is revealing of the determination by many Māori to be literate but poignantly masks the consequences of the engagement: I am sure you will be grateful to learn that our school at Otumoetai is going on steadily. I muster 91 children and on average 70 daily. The majority of them have got over the difficulties of the alphabet and have learned a great many Pakeha [Pākehā] words. Their eagerness to learn surpasses anything I witnessed amongst Europeans. Whenever you go on the beach the alphabet meets your eye, whether on the sands or on the sides of houses … one little girl died of consumption. When her body was brought to be buried here, some of the children had printed the alphabet on her coffin. Poor child never learnt it.82 [emphasis added]

Quoted in Graham, ‘Towards a History of New Zealand Childhoods’, 93. Jean-Simon Bernard to Jean-Claude Colin June and 11 August 1844, in Reverend

80 81

Dr. Charles Girard, Lettres reçues d’Océanie 1836–1854 (Atlanta, 2010). Translated letter printed in Hugh Laracy, ‘The French Connection’, New Zealand Listener, February 27 to March 5, 2010, 22–5. 82 MR (1846), 332.

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The child’s death was one of many amongst a Māori population without immunity to European diseases, although a report in The Missionary Register (1843) cites the Wellington physician for ‘Native people’ who attributed their: … mortality principally to the injudicious use of blankets which are worn day and night, wet and dry. It is most important to bring the rising generation to a complete adoption of English habits, for which boarding schools are essentially necessary.83

The population decline continued throughout the nineteenth century and cruelly affected the life chances of Māori children. While sick children at the few boarding schools might have received better medical attention, the schools were not a safeguard to the spread of diseases that came with the presence of Europeans. By March 1847, Brown was despondent about the Otumoetai infant school. It was ‘struggling on amidst much discouragement arising from the situation of a school house in the midst of a noisy pa, the ill-conduct of many of the children, rendering their dismissal necessary, and the want of interest and support on the part of the parents and children’.84 The 1840s were unsettling times for Māori, as the impact of European encroachment became evident. Judith Simon describes a waning enthusiasm for literacy in the 1840s, particularly insofar as the focus was biblical, and mission instruction remained significantly in Māori. With settlers arriving, Māori wanted English literacy skills.85 Jenkins, however, suggests that literacy interest should not be measured by school attendance or Bible sales; literary outputs from Māori at this time were often in the medium of flax and broad leaf materials86 (or even, as Brown recorded so poignantly, on a coffin). Stack records the scarcity of slates and writing materials at the mission schools and the use sometimes of ‘pieces of board, on which sand was sprinkled, and the letters traced upon the sand with a pointed stick’.87 Brown’s description of a journey through the hinterland of the Bay of Plenty, begun on November 11, 1845, provides some insights into the tools of Māori literacy, more extensive than envisaged by missionaries as necessary for receiving a Christian education: The knowledge of writing imparted to the New Zealanders is of great use to them. I have been much amused at the various notices which we have read at different places during our journey. They are for the most part written with charcoal on the side of trees, the bark having for the purpose been stripped off. At other places a flat post is inserted in the ground, doubled with red ochre the writing being in red letters. One of these notices was addressed to a Chief, informing him that if he persisted in planting potatoes in that wood, which did not belong to

MR (1843), 181. Quoted in Gifford and Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, 211. 85 Judith Simon, ‘European Style Schooling for Maori: The First Century’, Access 11, 83

84

no. 2 (1992): 31–43. 86 Jenkins, ‘Te Ihi, te Mana, te Wehi o te Ao Tuhi’. 87 James West Stack, in Early Maoriland Adventures of J.W. Stack, ed. A.H. Reed, 217.

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him, his head would be cut upon by the hatchet of the writer. Another requested us not to eat at a certain spot, it being sacred. Another conveyed the information that a party of natives travelling by a stream of water over which we passed, had been bad for food … [a long list of examples follows].88

Reverend Robert Maunsell undertook the oversight of missions and schools along and around the Waikato River. His most well-known venture is the boarding school established at Maraetai at the Waikato Heads in 1847.89 Maunsell’s Hints on Schools amongst the Aborigines in Five Letters to the Lord Bishop of New Zealand (1849) provides insight into the business of educating Māori children at the time.90 Like other missionaries, he believed that ‘there was nothing inherently inferior about the Māori, indeed they were eminently capable of being civilized, as long as they followed his model for development’.91 Maunsell expounded, ‘Catechism, catechism and nothing but catechism will give thought and sound knowledge to the New Zealand scholar.’92 At an earlier school, in 1843, Maunsell reported problems with his infant school children. The difficulties were not, he explained, the fault of (Kaitupeka) Mary Ngāturu, the ‘head Female Native Teacher [who] labours with considerable diligence at the infant school in our neighbourhood’. Kaitupeka’s ‘meekness’, ‘sound sense’, and ‘knowledge of the doctrines’ are contrasted with the ‘barefaced effrontery moral and spiritual deadness that surround her’.93 Kaitupeka was the widow of Edward Ngāturu, a chief of the nearby Ngāti-tipa tribe who, prior to his death by consumption, had been baptized with Kaitupeka and their two children, and shifted into the mission. Instead Maunsell blamed his problems on the Māori parents: With this branch of our labours we have heretofore felt considerably discouraged, and our day of small things would, I think often be despised by one accustomed to the order, cleanliness and progress of an English school … A plan has lately occurred to me which promises to be of considerable utility … The parents will not allow their children to receive the least correction and they are under so little constraint at home, that they attend school only as caprice may prompt them. They are also, during large portions of the year, away with their parents at their several cultivations and thus cannot be mustered to school at any place in any numbers.94

Quoted in Gifford and Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, 147–8. Russell Bishop, ‘The Waikato Mission Schools of Reverend Robert Maunsell’,

88 89

Access 11, no. 2 (1992): 18–29. 90 Robert Maunsell (Rev.), Hints on Schools Amongst the Aborigines in Five Letters to the Lord Bishop of New Zealand (Auckland: St. John’s College Press, 1849). 91 Bishop, ‘The Waikato Mission Schools of Reverend Robert Maunsell’, 29. 92 Maunsell, Hints on Schools, 8. 93 Henry E.R.L. Wily and Herbert Maunsell, Robert Maunsell: A New Zealand Pioneer: His Life and Times (Dunedin: A.H. Reed & A.W. Reed, 1938), 65. 94 Robert Maunsell, Letter, February 2, 1843, MR (1844), 111.

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He proceeded to admonish and remind the ‘Godfathers and Godmothers, of baptized children, of the vows and the duty of incumbent on them’. Maunsell later reported that the plan had in some cases succeeded and at the Sunday examinations, ‘I now receive answers [from the infant school children] which before the plan was adopted, I never could have expected’. He also recognized the contribution that those around him made to such progress: ‘In these labours I receive great assistance from Mary, and five or six pious women in her neighbourhood’.95 There is no further mention of this school run by Māori women. There is reference to one other infant school in the Waikato. John and Maria Morgan established a mission Otawhao (Te Awamutu). In 1845, at nearby Ngauhuruhuru, Morgan set up an infant school. He clothed the children, aged from four to ten years, in garments sent from Liverpool.96 A later report reads: In reference to the schools, I am sorry to say that very little can be accomplished in that department of my labours. The adult having learned to read and write, the day school no longer presents the same attraction to him … The infant schools are still more discouraging. The unrestrained habits of the children render this department of labour very irksome, and there are but a few Native teachers possessed of sufficient perseverance to collect and instruct children, over whom they have no authority. I might also add, as a second reason, the want of clothing for the children during school hours. This difficulty could be easily overcome by Christian friends in England sending presents of clothing which would act as an inducement to them to attend school.97

Among missionaries by this stage there was a tone of discouragement with the idea of infant schools. Māori, for their part, appeared to be increasingly disillusioned with missionary education. Waimate Mission Between 1839 and 1841 there are only a few references to the infant schools in the Bay of Islands and a preoccupation with the increasing presence of Europeans. A significant event in 1840 was the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, to which eventually 540 chiefs became signatories. Henry Williams was called upon to translate the document into Māori at the behest of the newly arrived British Governor, William Hobson. On February 6, 1840, Williams read the document in Māori to the chiefs before encouraging them to sign it.98 Hone Heke was the first chief to sign. Partly due to the different translations there were, from the start, Ibid. Desmond La Monte Bodley, ‘The Evolution of Infant Education in Auckland to

95 96

1890’ (MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1959). 97 MR (1846), 68. 98 Robin Fisher, ‘Henry William’s leadership of the CMS Mission to New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History 9, no. 2 (1975): 142–53.

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differing understandings by Māori and the British Crown of tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) as cited in Article Two of the Treaty. The meaning continues to be tested in the courts of Britain and New Zealand.99 The death of an infant school child at the Waimate mission, in 1840, is revealing of the tensions around the recently signed Treaty. The situation attracted the intervention of Hone Heke who, later in 1844–45, cut down the government’s flagpole at Waitangi four times:100 (June 11) The natives are in a disturbed state in consequence of an infant school girl who died on Lord’s Day morning at Mr [George] Clarke’s [house]. A few days previous some disagreement having taken place amongst themselves, she ran away. Mr Clarke sent a man to bring her back and the natives attributed her death to the violence used by the man in effecting his object; but the child doubtless died from a severe cold, which she took in consequence of it being a very wet day when she left the Clarke’s house. (June 19) A party from Kaikohi arrived led by John [Hone] Heke. They made some very hard speeches against us … [omitted in MR] much forbearance was necessary … [omitted in MR] They had begun to suspect that we were in league with the government to take their country. This idea they countless got from the Europeans … [omitted in MR] They ordered all our working people to leave us. Should they do so it will involve us in difficulties. After the matter was over, we sent them 100lb of flour from the mill and Mrs [Martha] Clarke sent them some sugar so that they appeared to be happy.101

George Clarke was absent and Martha sick in bed when Heke arrived, and Richard Davis handled the ‘uproar’ as best as he could. The incident was described as a ‘crowning blow’ for the schools at Waimate.102 We gain little insight into the reasons for which the child ran away, her subsequent mistreatment and/or illness, or whether her family were indeed ‘happy’. The wider Treaty politics of land ownership and sovereignty are more evident. By 1840 more than 14,000 acres of land around Waimate had been purchased, much of it by the missionaries themselves. Māori were increasingly suspicious over the issue of land. Heke, with his followers, was making his presence felt at any point of conflict he was able to get to.103 The death of an infant in the care of missionaries, while tragic, was also opportune.

99 Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou – Struggle Without End (Auckland, Penguin Books, 1990). 100 Paul Moon, Hone Heke Ngā Puhi Warrior (Auckland: David Ling Publishing Limited, 2001). 101 MR (1841), 516. 102 Standish, The Waimate Mission Station. 103 Moon, Hone Heke Ngā Puhi Warrior, 35.

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Fig. 5.5

‘The Waimate Mission’, by Hutton Biddulph, 1850. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. A-196-024.

By this time Waimate had replaced Paihia as the missionary showpiece. Charles Darwin, who visited in 1835, described it as an ‘oasis’ with ‘the appearance of an English farm house and its well dressed fields’, ‘placed there as if by an enchanter’s wand’, after miles of ‘uninhabited useless country’. The fenced settlement comprised thirty acres with a further forty-eight acres under cultivation. Henry Williams reported on this missionary success: A prospect more pleasing cannot meet the eye of the philanthropist than the sight of the British plough breaking up the deserts of New Zealand; and the youth of New Zealand, themselves the drivers that plough, and the conductors of the whole business after they have received their instructions from their teachers and friends.104

The first Anglican Bishop, George Augustus Selwyn, arrived in New Zealand in 1842. Selwyn also likened Waimate to ‘an English village with a white church and spire, comfortable houses and gardens’ and concluded, after touring the surrounding vicinity, that ‘the Maoris a race famous for their ferocity, were learning to live

MR (1836), 214.

104

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quietly and peacefully’.105 The separately located houses – European and Māori, the various schools, St. John’s Church and College, a hospital, printing office, carpentry workshop, blacksmith, shop, barn, mill, and pond can be imagined from various graphics and maps.106 The building on the left in Figure 5.5. was the infant school. Next door to the infant school, but not in the drawing, was a house lived in by William Bambridge, a teacher who had travelled to New Zealand in a party of 23 with Selwyn. Bambridge arrived at Waimate in 1842, aged 22 years, accompanied by his wife Sophie, who gave birth to their first child a month later. During his stay in New Zealand from 1842–7 Bambridge wrote a diary providing insights into the joys, doubts, and irritations of domestic and missionary life. His occasional pencil drawings in the diary are less censored windows onto life and learning with glimpses of the ‘arts of civilised’ life.107 Bambridge taught singing, drawing and writing in the schools and was present for the re-establishment of the infant school with boarding arrangements in a building newly fitted with a Wilderspin infant gallery. What follows are selected diary entries during 1843–4 that mention the infant school. Bambridge provides the most sustained information of any infant school venture in New Zealand: (September 18, 1843) Opening of the Infant School This has been a cheerful day indeed. I am not quite certain but I think [it was due to] the Bishop [Selwyn’s] circular of notice concerning the infant school to nearly all the natives who came to church. The consequence was that children were brought to the number of 57 whom the Bishop arranged in the church and then told to follow him in a single file to the building which he has latterly fitted up for the purpose. After I had registered the adult natives in the church I went to the infant school and entered the names. The Bishop had had a high day. If I may so think it seems to be filled with delight at the prospect of establishing his institution for the neglected but interesting children of New Zealand. The parents required very minute explanations as to the treatment which the child would receive and very closely inspected the dormitories [in the classroom] which his lordship had had nicely arranged including the gallery. The parents having been satisfied the children were left at one o’clock and were in a short time in full exercise upon the English alphabet, clapping hands and varied other amusements. The duties of the school will evolve upon Mrs [Elizabeth] Colenso and Mrs Christopher [Marianne] Davies, wives of two missionaries. They understand the native language thoroughly which is necessary to conduct an establishment of this kind. 105 Louise Creighton, G.A. Selwyn, D.D. Bishop of New Zealand and Lichfield (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923), 29–33. 106 Standish, The Waimate Mission Station. 107 William Bambridge Diaries 1819–1879, MS-0129-0132, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), Wellington.

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A calendar listing the names of the children and their teachers survives as a relic pasted into the journal of William Cotton, a missionary colleague who, like Bambridge, had also traveled to New Zealand with Selwyn.108 The calendar notes too that the ‘system of education is the same as that of an English Infant School’, but it is the calendar’s glimpse of the actual children, at least in terms of their presence and their names, which is unique. A number of children had been baptized with Māori versions of English names such as Katerina (Catherine), Ripeka (Rebecca), Hera (Sarah), Mere (Mary), Hemi (George), Hoani (John), Matiu (Matthew) and, appearing with particular frequency, Henare, after the missionary Henry Williams. Some traditional Māori names had been shortened or were recast into ‘surnames’ in the European fashion. The renaming of indigenous populations was a feature of the missionary and colonial enterprise. This infant school where children were boarded was linked to Selwyn’s quest to establish a network of Māori boarding schools. Less optimistically, Marianne Williams, now at Waimate, wrote to Charlotte Brown at Te Papa: I have been engaged all day in our new infant school – Mrs Colenso and I are to take it alternatively – we find it a rather difficult and fatiguing post just at first but as the children get better training we shall find it much easier, at present they are just wild out of the bush and require some management.109

Williams had been working in infant schools for eleven years. The involvement of Elizabeth Colenso, as she mentions, is of note. Elizabeth was newly married to William Colenso (of the front cover fame), who had earlier established the missionary printing press. The marriage ended after William fathered a child with a Māori woman. Elizabeth continued her work as an educator of girls and women. Bambridge continues his diary in which we see elaborated: the overall missionary view that children would be best removed from the families; the collusion of Māori converts in the process; the hope of parents that their children might learn English; and ongoing Missionary optimism and evidence that these young children, once tamed and suitably clothed, were apt and able scholars: (November 13) I have been much pleased with the infant school today. In their singing I tried two girls alone with ‘God Save the King’ and they did it beautifully. The rest joined in the chorus and clapped their companions who succeeded well. I think the children who are remaining at this school will continue. Today they seemed to be almost weaned from their kaingas [villages]. God bless all of them and may they grow up in the new faith and become useful in propagating that faith amongst them.

108 W.C. Cotton Journals, Dixson Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia, DL MS 39/127, DL MS 40/53, DL MS 39/83; vol. 8 p.iv. 109 Quoted in Cathy Ross, Women with a Mission: Rediscovering Missionary Wives in Early New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2006), 106.

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(February 16, 1944) Opening a new school This afternoon I fixed upon for commencing school in the new pa belonging to Noa and Pirika. I was much pleased with the very small beginning. At first the little children fled from me with evident terror, but Noa brought them to me by force and as soon as I began to [undecipherable] them they sat down after giving me their right hand in a token of reconciliation. We spent some time with the English alphabet and then sang some Native hymns which the little creatures highly approved of and made such a noise in attempting to follow me that it was with difficulty I could maintain the air of the tune. I had only four scholars from 18 months to 2 1/2 years. On Monday I expect a larger number washed nicely and with their hair combed. This is the promise. Who can tell but more good may come from this than I could expect. Pirika says he will buy the building which serves for a church from the place where it now stands and put it in his pa that I may use it for a school room. At present we shall occupy the entrance to Noa’s hut. (February 19) Was much encouraged and [undecipherable] with my little school in Pirika’s pa. The parents of the children seem to be very anxious for them to be improved and know our language. I think if I can continue in the place it will be of considerable benefit ultimately to the schools of Waimate. There are some children who cannot be induced to leave their homes and by watching over them perhaps in their habitations a relish will be formed for instruction and they maybe induced to attend public school. (March 11) Today I found one of my scholars unwell at Pirika’s pa. I thought I would attend to her myself as the poor little creature had not one comfort about her. I took some medicine to her and stayed to prepare it for I think Maori are generally very [undecipherable]. I think her illness is brought on by over exertion attending Maori prayers in the pa. Afterwards I was requested to stay and it was with difficulty that I could get away. (April 24) Went to prayers and was afterwards engaged in final counting the school lists. Rev W. Cotton was with a very amusing class. About 18 middle aged and young women were seated on the floor in the vestry learning to read Maori. When I went in to obtain the names of the scholars Mrs Cotton was teaching them from a large blackboard such as used in English school. The word ‘Tamaiti’ a boy, had just been written. They spelt it as follows T A M A I T I which they called TA AH MA AH E TA E.

It was in William Cotton’s journal that the cover image sketch by Bambridge was located, and noting again that it is the only known image portraying a missionary infant school.110 Bambridge’s own diary sketch (Figure 5.6) is similarly the only W.C. Cotton Journals.

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Fig. 5.6

‘Maori women learning to read, 24 April 1844’, by William Bambridge, Waimate Mission. In William Bambridge Diaries. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. qMS-0130-038.

known illustrations of Māori women at school during this period. A commentary from Jenkins is insightful: Perhaps the class did present an ‘amusing’ sight at the time to William Bambridge whose own English schooling would not have had the age range in a classroom, and nor would he have sat on the floor to be taught. I can forgive his air of superiority and cultural insensitivity because there is a real bonus contained in his picture and his other comments. From these it is possible to re-construct what it was like for Maori women to learn the new skills of print. His picture and comments show how determined and enthusiastic they were for learning – middle aged women were as keen for learning as were the young girls.111

Also pasted into Cotton’s journal is a ‘DIVISION OF TIME for the infant school’.112 The schedule describes a long day of carefully supervised timetabled activities: a key tool of Europeanization practiced in many contexts across the colonies. The summer day, recorded, starts at 6:00 a.m. with the first bell of the day for all mission residents and ends at 8:00 p.m. as a curfew lockdown. For the infants, the day is divided into half-hour blocks. Once school is underway there are similarities to infant school timetables in Britain, but these children are also living at the school. ‘Washing under Supervision’ is followed by ‘Cleaning Rooms’ and Jenkins, ‘Te Ihi, te Mana, te Wehi o te Ao Tuhi,’ 106. W.C. Cotton Journals, MS 39/83; vol. 8 p.iv.

111

112

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then 30 minutes of ‘prayer’ before one hour for breakfast and then ‘Making Beds’. At 9:00 a.m. the school gathered for ‘Assembly singing and prayer’, followed by a mix of ‘Spelling by Ear’, ‘Addition from 1–6 and 7–12’, ‘Reading in Classics’, then a regular session in the ‘Gallery for religious instruction’, followed by ‘Singing’ that would have been taken by Bambridge. Perhaps he drew the cover picture as he waited for Colenso to finish the previous lesson. There is then a halfhour ‘play under charge’ that would be the equivalent of outdoor play, although there is no evidence of an actual playground. ‘Washing for Dinner’ is followed by one hour for lunch between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. The afternoon includes a mix of sewing and spinning, writing and spelling, spelling from letters, and another regular singing session. There were two ‘playground’ times followed by prayers at 5:30, supper, ‘instructive amusements under charge’ and finally bed at 8:00 p.m. This rare schedule of a missionary infant school timetable is evidence of both the replication and the transformation of the British infant school model in such a distant setting. While the broad focus was on saving, taming, and eventually converting ‘heathen’ peoples, the infant school timetable and its implied curriculum was, in common with British infant schools and the earlier charity and monitorial schools, about shaping the behaviour and demeanour of young children alongside the necessary acquisition of the three Rs as a foundation for worthy employment in a few years time. The mismatch for Māori was that these children were, as a consequence, losing the necessary skills for economic survival in Māori settings, yet participating equally alongside European settlers in the new colony was less tenable with colonial sentiments. A journal excerpt (September 3, 1844) from William Williams recorded that ‘The infant school was visited by the Governor [FitzRoy] yesterday when he expressed much satisfaction with it.’ No longer independent agents, missionaries were carefully courting approval from the fledgling new powers of Church and state, both of which were wary of missionary influence with Māori. Remarkably, the attendance register of the Waimate mission’s ‘Native infant school’ (Figure 5.7) survives for April to September 1844.113 A few insights can be gleaned. Quite a few of the children listed in the calendar the year before were still present. The size of the school ranged from 27 to 39 children, predominantly girls. The attendance of the children was regular, presumably due to the boarding arrangements, but there were also withdrawals with the occasional note when a child was ‘sick’. In one of his diary entries Bambridge commented on attendance. Perhaps the extra children were not entered on the roll, because on May 27 there was no change in the register: (May 27) There was an encouraging increase in the number of children at the infant school [at Waimate] this morning. The more I see of New Zealand youths themselves I am convinced they are capable of being taught anything. The girls voices are improved from the practice they have had nearly everyday during the last 6 months. The boys vocal powers are much coarser. The difference seems

‘Native Infant School 1844’, qms-1408-1413, ATL.

113

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‘Native Infant School’ attendance register 1844, Waimate Mission. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. MS-1408-03.

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to be among European children. Time and observation will show us more about them in this respect. They work through their exercises tolerably. (June 3) Mr Bambridge’s day Copying revision

2½

Collegiate school

1½

Collegiate school singing 1 Infant school singing

½

Collegiate accounts

3¼

Infant school morning

2¼ = 11 hours

We do not, however, learn what Bambridge did in his 2 1/4 hours in the infant school! (June 24) Infant school exercises this morning. I think upon the whole the children are improving. We must keep on persevering but above all it is necessary that they see us as an example agreeing with our pretensions that we may by our actions recommend order, cleanliness and punctuality for they are very often watching and will readily charge us upon the least deviation from the path we preach to them with our lives.

September 18, 1844 is the final entry in the attendance register. A few weeks later Bambridge writes about the forthcoming relocation of the mission’s schools to the new capital of the colony: (October 29) Today the parents of our school boys assembled to give us their decision respecting the removal of their children to Auckland. As expected some are very averse to parting with them and have taken them away from their kainga. The boys seemed delighted with the idea. The natives are very changeable in their minds. I think the parents have seen enough to convince them of the good intentions of our Bishop towards the New Zealand youth as well as adults. If only they can be prevented from falling into native habits … When they are competent to adopt clean and orderly customs I think they will feel bound to love the school rather than be burdened with the weight and trouble of civilised life. (November 16) I am sketching the interior of the infant school room which was formerly the church then the dining hall and now fitted up for the instruction of native children.

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Fig. 5.8

‘Interior of Infant school November 16, 1844’, by William Bambridge, Waimate Mission. In William Bambridge Diaries. Alexander Turnbull Library: Wellington, NZ. MS-0130-208.

Figure 5.8 affords a rare image of a Wilderspin’s infant gallery in a colonial missionary setting; the same gallery was later sketched and given to Cotton (and is now the cover image of this book). Before Bambridge left for Auckland, Lady Mary Ann Martin, a writer and the wife of the newly appointed Chief Justice to the colony, visited Waimate: At the gate the Bishop met us with twelve of his clergy and the students in caps and gowns, and a goodly array of English and Maori boys, girls and infants assembled with their masters who greeted us with ‘God Save the Queen’ and many ‘Hurrahs’. The infants struck up ‘Try try try again’ … We visited the native girls school which was under the charge of a clergyman’s wife. She had taught them to spin flax, and they were very merry over their work and sang many of our school songs amid the whirl of their wheels. The infant school was delightful – plump jolly Maori children who clapped their hands and sang the multiplication tables with glee. New Zealand children are pleasant to teach. They are so wide awake and full of fun.114

After Bambridge relocated to Auckland, information about the infant school ceases. Upon his return to England in 1848 he took up the new art of photography and in 1854 became royal photographer to Queen Victoria. 114 Mary A. Martin (Lady), Our Maoris (England: London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1888), 30–31.

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Reports in The Missionary Register (1846), written soon after Bambridge left, indicate the rapid fragmentation of the old missionary order at Waimate. Intertribal warfare and ill feeling against European incursion caused Henry Williams to report: The loss of life and property has been very considerable and our missionary work has been well nigh suspended. For many months a very jealous and turbulent feeling was exhibited among many tribes, owing to the evil workings of the wicked and designing men upon the minds of several Chiefs, instilling into their minds that the British Government had taken full and entire possession of the country and that the Chiefs were slaves … the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 was stated to have caused all the evil. By a timely application, however, a full explanation of the Treaty, most of the tribes maintained their position and remained quiet.115

From the Reverend Burrows: On my arrival at Waimate John Heke had already commenced his career, which has since led to some disastrous consequences … the loss of the 4th flagstaff and the destruction of Korororika [Kororareka] – attended as it was with the loss of life – was the commencement of a storm which has been pending. On our arrival, my daughter, under the superintendence of Mrs Davis, commenced a promising school. This was continued until the danger became too apparent for my daughter to remain and was sent then to Kaitaia [with the Matthews] for safety.116

There is one later reference to an infant school in the Bay of Islands in 1851, at Waitangi. There it is reported, ‘Mrs Colenso has attended to the daily Infant and Girls School; but the general attendance in this and the adult male school save on Sunday and Monday is of a very irregular kind.’117 ‘Highest Step in Civilisation’ and its Aftermath The impact and extent of the infant schools in New Zealand are difficult to gauge. No reports provide extensive insight. The itinerant nature of these infant schools, however, should not be a measure of their success or failure. Of scholarly interest is an insight, through missionary eyes and minds, of a period when young Māori children at school, albeit ‘wild’ and ‘indulged’, were also seen as precocious and avid learners, quicker than their European counterparts. This attitude stands in contrast to the later education story for Māori, which still positions them as failing or less able than European children at school. Evident too are different cultural perspectives of childrearing and the place of young children in the adult world. MR (1846), 329. MR (1846), 330–31. 117 MR (1851), 402. 115

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Whereas Māori found missionary fences around their houses hard to understand, educated European families increasingly aspired to the physical and social separation of children from adults. Nineteenth-century childhood was becoming a domain and period to be filled with its own institutions. The young Māori child was rarely separated from adults, and direct participation in the adult world was, for most children, their education. Missionaries were not interested in and did not see the broader context of life and learning for the Māori child, applying instead evangelical codes of what was appropriate for children to witness. The European backdrop to Māori schooling was the quest to ‘civilize’ and ‘Christianize’ Māori children and adults. The missionary measure of their success is evident in reports in The Missionary Register during the 1840s. Dr. Sinclair, a surgeon in Her Majesty’s Navy, claimed that in his wide experience: No other people in the history of mankind has been so completely changed in their religious and moral condition as these natives have been in so short a time; and more particularly by so small a number of men, and by such peaceful means.118

In a letter to the British and Foreign School Society, the Reverend H.H. Turton buoyantly described how: Very few indeed of the missionaries have ever had to teach the Maori their letters and most New Zealanders between the ages of ten and forty or fifty are able to read the Testament with fluency, while most of the young men can write a legible, some of them superior hand, either on the slate or on paper; and you would be surprised at the degree of correspondence which is carried on among them form one end of the island to the other. The fact is they taught each other.119

William Colenso described finding a deserted house at Otamatea. He penned a long and detailed account, greatly summarized as: On a shelf were plates, cups and saucers … and beneath were a tea-kettle, frying-pan, buckets. A mattress, bolster, and pillow, were rolled neatly together … a coloured print representing the Crucifixion of Christ hung on the wall … In a corner on a shelf, were, a hair-brush, a hat-box, a New Zealand testament … On another shelf were paper and pens … Out of doors were raspberry bushes and peach trees … I was much pleased with the air of neatness that everywhere prevailed and had already formed a high opinion of the owner, whom we supposed to be some respectable European … [but] in reality belonged to a Native! – Without doubt, this was the highest step in civilisation which I had seen among the New Zealanders during the more than seven years residence among them.120 [emphasis added]

MR (1843), 192. MR (1847), 218. 120 Ibid., 193. 118 119

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The writer was clearly ‘reading’ into this dwelling understandings of racial hierarchy but also the possibilities that education and Christianity could place ‘heathen’ peoples on a pathway to ‘civilisation’. Remaking, renaming, and reclothing were symbolic expressions of this process. Less apparent was the issue of whether those Māori who did climb these steps successfully would then be viewed as equals in the hierarchy. The demise of the infant schools accompanying the decline in Māori interest in the mission day schools was caused in part by frustrations with the limitations of biblical instruction in Māori.121 European settlement gave Māori a wider horizon for contact. In some localities various land and tribal disputes caused the collapse of missionary work. The missions moved towards setting up larger boarding establishments but the numbers attending remained small. The new settler government adopted a premise of Europeanization for Māori. Government involvement began with the 1847 Native Trust Ordinance, which provided grants to the ailing mission boarding schools. The Ordinance had a political intent different to that of the earlier mission schools. The goal of Native policy was ‘assimilating as speedily as possible the habits and usages of the native to those of the European population’.122 This goal also became the cornerstone of Māori education policy.123 The government had expectations that, in exchange, Māori land would be released for settlement. In the event, the backdrop to various schooling ventures for Māori during these years was war over land; schooling was just one of the casualties.124 The 1867 Native Schools Act emerged in the bitter aftermath of the New Zealand Land Wars. The schools were operated by central government and outside of missionary control. The new schools were village based, secular, and in English. There had previously been schools in Māori settlements run by Māori but these had mainly collapsed due to war and the disaffection of Māori.125 The government’s view was to ‘make education part of the Runanga [Rūnanga, meeting place] of the marae [meeting house]’ and was likened to ‘scattering the seed [of European ideas] instead of confining it to a few hot-beds’.126 Māori interest in establishing schools paralleled their fate in the Wars. In the Waikato, where the Tainui tribes bore the brunt of land confiscation, the new Māori King, Tāwhiao, told the Government to

Simon, ‘European Style Schooling for Maori’. Barrington and Beaglehole, Maori Schools in a Changing Society. 123 Ibid.; Judith Simon and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds, Civilising Mission? Perceptions 121 122

and Representations of the Native School System (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001). 124 Barrington and Beaglehole, Maori Schools in a Changing Society. 125 David Grace, A Driven Man. Missionary Thomas Samuel Grace: Battling for Maori Causes amid Controversy, Hardship and Danger (Wellington: Ngaio Press, 2004). 126 Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1862, Education, E-4, 7.

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‘cease surveying, cease selling, cease erecting schools’.127 Only 13 Native schools were established across New Zealand between 1867 and 1870; thereafter this trend reversed, and by 1879, 57 were operating. By this time Europeans outnumbered the Māori population. The Land Wars altered the balance of Māori and Pākehā relationships. The early missionaries did not anticipate the trauma of this situation for Māori. In 1877, when a national system of schooling was established, the Native schools were administered by the Department of Education, but schooling for Māori children was not initially made compulsory. By 1890 the view was that the Māori were a dying race. Darwin’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ allowed Europeans to see the extinction of a race as part of the natural order. The task of education must be to Europeanize the new generation of Māori children as rapidly as possible. The condition of instruction in English was insisted upon more harshly. The idea of infant schools for very young Māori children was not reproduced, excepting the optional attendance, from five to seven years, in the infant class of a school. Māori children rarely attended burgeoning preschool institutions such as kindergartens until the 1960s, when Māori parents were told that attendance at preschool would offset the ‘disadvantages’ their children experienced at school.128 The Native schools operated until 1969, although from the early 1900s almost half of Māori children attended schools with Pākehā children.129 The population decline turned around, but Māori language went into steep decline. In the 1980s a swing in education policy, politically spearheaded by Māori, led to Māori immersion schooling institutions at all levels from preschool to tertiary.130 At the 1984 Māori Conference on Education Development – Ngā Tumunako – 300 Māori educators voted to opt out of Pākehā schools and seek their own solutions.131 Judith Simon reported on research indicating that teachers’ racist attitudes and cultural deficit beliefs ensured Māori interests would never be met within the

127 Quoted in John Adrian Williams, Politics of the New Zealand Maori 1891–1909 (Auckland: Oxford University Press for the University of Auckland, 1969), 41 128 May, Discovery of Early Childhood. 129 Judith Simon, ed., Ngā Kura Māori. The Native School System 1867–1969 (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1998); Simon and Tuhiwai Smith, Civilising Mission? 130 Kuni Jenkins (with Tania Kai’ai), ‘Maori Education: A Cultural Experience and Dilemma for the State – a New Direction in Maori Society’, in The Politics of Learning and Teaching in Aotearoa–New Zealand, ed. Eve Coxon et al. (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1994), 148–79; Graham Hingangeroa Smith and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, ‘Ki te Whai Ao, ki te Ao Marama: Crisis and Change in Maori Education’, in Myths and Realities, Schooling in New Zealand, ed. Alison Jones et al. (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 1990), 123–56. 131 ‘Maori Education Development Conference – Ngā Tūmanako: Report to the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Auckland’ (1984).

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mainstream.132 Donna Awatere’s treatise on Maori Sovereignty (1982) made a similar critique: The education system is the major gate which keeps Maori out [of participating in white society]. There is an invisible sign over every kindergarten, playcentre, school and university. That sign reads ‘Maoris Keep Out. For White Use Only’. White people can’t see this sign … Kindergartens are the first of the educational gate. A bastion of white power. Kindergartens have frightened Maori people off pre-school education … Maori parents won’t take their children there, not because they don’t want to, but because kindergartens, in particular, and play centres to a lesser extent, don’t meet their needs.133

In 1982 Māori established ngā kōhanga reo – literally translated as language nests, as a term for Māori immersion early childhood centres – an initiative Awatere saw as the first step towards ‘de-colonisation’. For Hilda Halkyard this approach was the only strategy left: Maori people have been the scapegoats of the Pakeha education system too long. Enough is enough. What can we do? We have several options: We can accept IT, Spit at IT. Join in and change IT or make our own alternatives … Te Kohanga Reo is an alternative …134

On the political front, in 1975 the government established the Waitangi Tribunal to consider alleged breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi by the Crown. In 1985 the tribunal’s powers were made retrospective to 1840, and calls were made for government institutions to ‘honour the Treaty’. This initiative was a catalyst for reappraisals by both Māori and Pākehā concerning what honouring the Treaty might mean in the late twentieth century. The general Māori view was that Māori had not, as supposed by Pākehā, surrendered tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) and their right to self-determination under the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.135 These issues continue to shape debates on education for young Māori children, with a recent claim to the Waitangi Tribunal from Te Kohanga Reo National Trust Board that sought to remove its centres from Ministry of Education accountability measures and to become self-managing as originally intended. The Tribunal concluded that ‘significant prejudice to the claimants had occurred as a result of the Crown’s breaches of Treaty principles. … as a result the claimants had Judith Simon, ‘The Ideological Rationale for the Denial of Maoritanga’, Maori Educational Development Conference – Ngā Tūmanako (March 23–25, 1984, Tūrangawaewae Marae, Ngāruawāhia, New Zealand); ‘Policy, Ideology and Practice: Implications of the Views of Primary School Teachers of Maori Children’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1984). 133 Donna Awatere, Maori Sovereignty (Auckland: Broadsheet Books, 1984), 21–3. 134 Hilda Halkyard, ‘Te Kohanga Reo’, Broadsheet 113, October (1983): 16. 135 Manuka Henare and Edward Douglas, ‘Te Reo o Te Tiriti Mai Rano’, in Report of the Royal Commission on Social Policy, III, Part One (Wellington: Government Printer, 1988), 79–220. 132

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suffered, and were likely to continue to suffer, significant prejudice. The Tribunal accordingly adjudged the claim to be well founded…. [and] called on the Crown to make a formal acknowledgement and apology for the Treaty breaches that had occurred’.136 There has been no apology but an Independent Advisor has been appointed to work with the Crown and Te Kohanga Reo National Trust Board as a ‘first step in re-engagement’.137

136 http://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/waitangi-tribunal/news/wai-2336-matuarautia-report-on-the-kohanga-reo-claim (accessed October 18, 2012). 137 http://www.minedu.govt.nz/NZEducation/EducationPolicies/EarlyChildhood/ ToRIndependentAdvisor.aspx (accessed February 13, 2013).

Chapter 6

Conclusion Rather than assuming that the politics and agendas of these [imperial] projects and the attitudes of Britons towards them are self-evident, it is necessary instead to examine the specificities of the national and colonial communities in which imperial power and its refusal was negotiated and lived through, … Within imperial and colonial settings, colonial intentions, both formal and informal, were incompletely and ambiguously realized; historical actors were defined in multiple ways; and different genders, classes, ethnicities and races all participated, albeit in varied and unequal measure, in the creation of their history. The movement of peoples and goods, the clash of cultures and experience and the imperial contexts of everyday life forged the many links that connected men and women living on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Indian and Pacific oceans.1 A focus on national histories as constructed, rather than given, on the imagined community of the nation as created, rather than simply there, on national identities as brought into being through particular discursive work, requires transnational thinking.2

In line with scholars such as Kathleen Wilson and Catherine Hall, we contend that transnational studies such as the one presented in this book can help illuminate the evolving and constructed nature of the usually taken-for-granted ideas and identities.3 We examine how the changing imperial and missionary ideas about ‘natives’ and young children and attempts at the re-making of both through infant schools were enacted, resisted, or adapted in three specific colonial contexts in the nineteenth century. The introduction offers a broad brush sketch of ‘the contradictory mix of ideas concerning exploration, empire, education, ‘Englishness’, and evangelism; legacies of the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that spilled into Great Britain and across education and missionary ventures’ during the early nineteenth century. The first chapter takes as its focus the transformative dream of the missionary endeavours and its reality across time for the Indigenous peoples and for the missionaries in the specific colonial contexts of the nineteenth century. The missionaries were on a mission aimed at the re-making of the ‘Other’, Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 15. 2 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. 3 Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660–1840, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also see Barbara Beatty, ‘Resistance as a Lens for Understanding the International Preschool Movement’, History of Education Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2009): 156–8. 1

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but could not escape being shaped by the experience themselves. As Kathleen Wilson argued above with reference to the imperial history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we submit that the missionary dreams could only be realized ‘ambiguously and incompletely’. The second chapter turns to trace the origin of European ideas about young children and experiments for their education in infant schools in Britain, that were seen as unproblematically applicable alike to the children of the poor at home and those of the Indigenous peoples in the colonies. The opening chapters collectively are meant to serve as a means to bring into sharp relief the local contextualized realities in three colonies of the British Empire detailed in the subsequent chapters. The case studies (Chapters 3–5) illustrate the ideals and practices regarding early education brought by missionaries to very different settings of British influence. The missionaries’ task was civilizing and Christianizing the ‘native’ inhabitants. In the early years of the nineteenth century British evangelicals, and Americans in the case of the Canadian story, idealistically believed that this task was righteous and achievable. Infant schools offered them the possibility of a quicker solution than waiting for the conversion of adult populations. The case studies illuminate the significant, albeit unequal, participation of historical actors from various situated positions in ‘the clash of cultures and experience’ inherent in these encounters. Evident too in each case was the ‘larger drama’ of an expanding British empire and the development of a colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, who in both Canada and New Zealand became virtually landless minorities. The education of Indigenous children is entangled in empire and missionary endeavour. The case studies reveal some of the minutiae of this engagement and reflect the new European understandings concerning the malleability of young children and the possibilities for educating them. Missionary infant schools were the most daring of the many education experiments of these times. In the words of de Leeuw and Greenwood in this book’s Foreword: Infant schools were the places where education, through various cultural products upon which pedagogic ideals rested, was put to work in the instruction and disciplining of those Othered children into what colonial subjects believed to be righteous social imperatives.

The aftermath stories of education, briefly sketched, are an important bridge towards understanding the wider legacies of colonization that the Foreword considers. As historians often argue, understanding our past is necessary for confronting our present and therefore planning our future. Tools for educating very young children, once used by missionaries in their global quest for Christianity, are similarly applied by governments and development agencies in the twentyfirst century as conduits for the global economy. The minds and bodies of young children are still contestable. This chapter draws together the main threads running though the preceding chapters with comments on the comparative form infant schools took in the three colonial settings of Canada, New Zealand, and India in the nineteenth century and briefly considers their legacy for young children’s education in the globalized world today.

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Infant Schools, Children and Childhoods Infant school theory drew upon contradictory ideas of child development: children were both pre-wired and malleable. For historian Harry Hendrick, these ideas were components of distinct models of childhood.4 In the model of the ‘evangelical child’, human nature was rooted in the conception of Original Sin. In order to be saved, children needed to be made aware of this situation; early schooling and literacy were means to help them achieve their salvation. In the model of the ‘schooled child’ human nature was malleable and, within some limits, potential could be optimized with the help of expert direction. In this view, school knowledge took precedence over home knowledge; behaviours and attitudes fitting to the child’s perceived position in society were cultivated; learning was an investment in future productivity; school discipline was required for proper development; and learning required children’s separation from society. While the second model reflected Enlightenment thinking, the first was at the heart of most missionary endeavours. It was left to infant teachers to build on predispositions, or, more optimistically, to shape character in whatever way desired or feasible. While the curriculum supporting these aims differed, with more or less emphasis on religion, the teaching strategies for each were basically the same. Infant curriculum and pedagogy ignored the fact that indigenous cultures in the colonies to which the infant system was transported had their own formal or informal models of childhood and approaches to child socialization. For instance, in the case of India, a rich conceptualization of childhood existed among high-caste Hindus.5 The rituals associated with each age/stage, mostly for boys, were practiced in some sections and some parts of the country. In the case of New Zealand, missionaries often expressed frustration with what they perceived as permissive and capricious ways of childrearing among Māori. Furthermore, to be a Māori child was not to be separated from the Māori adult world, except to be protected in times of battle, but to have one’s presence and opinion in the appropriate contexts welcomed. In Canada Aboriginal children were viewed as a gift by their parents and communities, considered as competent from birth and ‘encouraged to develop as thinking, autonomous beings’.6 Although the underlying model of child development in indigenous cultures would have been Harry Hendrick, ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present’, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1997). 5 Sudhir Kakar, Indian Childhood: Cultural Ideals and Social Reality (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979). 6 Canada. Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, vol. 3 (Ottawa: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996), 417. See also Janine Akerman, ‘The Image of the Child from the Perspective of Plains Cree Elders and Plains Cree Early Childhood Teachers’ (Master’s thesis, University of Alberta, 2010). 4

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different from either mentioned by Hendrick, the missionaries saw their task as children’s resocialization according to the European models and their conversion to Christianity. The Infant System did have defects, which were identified early on in Britain and which travelled with it as it was taken abroad by mission teachers. For instance, David Salmon and Winifred Hindshaw comment on two defects in their 1904 history of the schools, ‘the misuse of the Bible’ and the ‘prodigy system’.7 As Salmon and Hindshaw observed, the ‘Scriptural Infant School’ – fitting the model of the ‘evangelical child’ – extended an inferior religious training across the curriculum with a focus on rote learning.8 In the ‘prodigy system’, fitting the ‘schooled child’ model, children were made to emulate their classmates’ behaviour as in Lancastrian schools. This led to teachers singling out gifted students as models for emulation and concerns by some educationists that children were academically pressured. In the view of historian Harold Silver, this problem was exacerbated by Wilderspin’s ‘emphasis on words, not things, on books, lessons and apparatus’.9 Nevertheless, as recounted in the case studies, mission teachers mainly provided glowing accounts of the progress and potential of infant schools. It is unlikely that they would have agreed with or admitted to the judgement of ‘inferior religious training’ when moral and religious education was at the forefront of their concerns and they were under pressure to show results for their audience in Britain, or in North American missionary societies in the case of Canada. The Infant System Used with Diverse Groups of Children Early on in his career as a teacher and promoter of infant schools Wilderspin saw the value of infant schools for foreign mission work. In the quote below from the 1824 edition of his infant school manual, he explained, in condensed form, his ‘system’: I consider it of public importance, in every point of view, to take children out of harm’s way, as soon as they can walk. No better plan could be devised in my opinion, for the improvement and comfort of slaves in the West Indies, and other of his Majesty’s colonies, than by establishing infant schools for the instruction of their children. They might be taught to speak as we do in this country, and instructed, I think, with as great care as our own children; this would produce a great change for the better, it would be gradual, and consequently not dangerous, for all sudden changes are pregnant with danger, but this would be free from that objection, and therefore the more desirable. Early impressions made in the infant minds of the sable sons of Africa, would be likely to prove of more benefit 7 David Salmon and Winifred Hindsaw, Infant Schools: Their History and Theory (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 85, 87. 8 Ibid., 87. 9 Harold Silver, The Concept of Popular Education (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 141.

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to them, to us, and to their sovereign, than at first view we might be inclined to believe.10

To recap, to effect their resocialization children were to be isolated from their parents, (‘out of harms’ way’) – separated from society in the model of the ‘schooled child’. The emerging discourses about racial hierarchy and the superiority of the White race are evident in the construction of the Other cultural/familial influences as harmful for the next generation. The moulding of children into new civilized casts was best done when they were very young (‘as soon as they can walk’)11 in light of the importance of ‘early impressions made in the infant minds’. Instruction should be in English (‘taught to speak as we do in this country’) and, by invoking a process of internal or self-colonization,12 results should be expected to be gradual but more effective (less dangerous) for the colonial project overall. And because all children were believed to learn in the same way via sense impressions, one educational system could be applied to all. By 1824 the infant system had been tested in different situations with poor children in Britain – in factory villages, urban slums, and many smaller communities – with apparent success. One of the first colonial ventures was a school in Ireland opened by a teacher trained by Wilderspin. A report on the school in 1825 described its curriculum in simple terms: ‘they learn their alphabet, and they learn to obey, and they sing a hymn … in short, they are trained to obedience until they are six years old, and then they are drafted into the other schools’.13 There were instances in which children brought to Britain from abroad attended infant schools, ‘proving’ the effect of this system on children from diverse backgrounds. A group of Patagonians ranging in age from nine to 26 attended William Wilson’s infant school at Walthamstow in 1830–31.14 Wilderspin’s reference to the West 10 Samuel Wilderspin, On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 2nd ed. (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1824), 19–20. 11 As described in Chapter 2, the age of entry was typically 18 months to twoyears-of-age. Children begin to walk at about 12 months, and walking was a measure of a child’s independence: they no longer needed to be carried, essential in consideration of the large numbers of similar-age children in the infant school. It was also generally after they had been weaned, at about seven to nine months in late eighteenth-century Britain. See Valerie Fildes, ‘The Culture and Biology of Breastfeeding: An Historical Review of Western Europe’, Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, ed. Patricia Stuart-Macadam and Katherine A. Dettwyler (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995), 115. 12 See Frantz Fanon, ‘The Negro and Language (1952)’, The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley, and Alan Girvin (New York: Routledge, 2000). 13 ‘First Report of the Commissioners on Education in Ireland’, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (1825), vol. 12, 804. This school is recorded by Wilderspin in Early Discipline Illustrated, 63. 14 Larry Prochner, Helen May, and Baljit Kaur, ‘“The Blessings of Civilisation”: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools for Young Native Children in Three

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Indies in the quote above was likely due to his experience teaching two slave children, older boys, at a school in Chilham.15 They had been brought to Britain by James Beckford Wildman from his plantation in Jamaica. As described in Chapter Two, Wildman subsequently established infant schools on his plantation, representing another trial for the system in a new context. Prior to its use in foreign missions the infant system had also been employed with children who were English-language learners – with Gaelic-speaking children at New Lanark and at an infant school in Wales established by Wilderspin himself.16 On the basis of his experience Wilderspin saw a great future for the infant system to make the English language ‘universally diffused, and in a very short period’.17 In his vision, the infant school could be a tool of empire: School-masters might be sent from this to other countries, and though they were acquainted only with their mother-tongue, they might teach it in part, in a few weeks to all the infants they could collect. This would give amazing facility to the labours of the missionary, since these might at once come under his care, and be the means of imparting the knowledge they acquired to their parents. I would rejoice to see a society arise … for the establishment of the Infant System wherever British influence and authority can be exerted.18

Wilderspin was aware of the work of the Buchanan brothers in Cape Town, sons of teacher James Buchanan, who organized infant schools on behalf of Dr. John Philip, London Missionary Society superintendent for the region. Dr. Philip was a defender of the rights of coloured persons and slaves, and the Cape Town infant schools were multiracial, grouping poor European children with the children of slaves in a single class, a view which was controversial amongst slaveholders. Wilderspin published a letter from Dr. Philip in Early Discipline Illustrated, which highlighted the promise of the schools. Philip wrote: The children of barbarous tribes start with the advantages of those of civilized man, and instead of being retarded in their progress by the ignorance and imbecility of a people only rising above the savage state, they raise up to cultivate and humanize their parents, and become the elements of a society that will soon be able to supply its own wants, advocate their own rights, and diffuse the blessings of civilization among the tribes in the interior of Africa.19

Colonial Settings—India, Canada and New Zealand 1820s–1840s’, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 1/2 (2009): 191–210. 15 McCann & Young, Samuel Wilderspin, 90. 16 Wilderspin, Early Discipline Illustrated, 217. 17 Ibid., 237. 18 Ibid. 19 John Philip to Samuel Wilderspin, July 29, 1831, quoted in Wilderspin, Early Discipline Illustrated, 16–17.

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In Philip’s description, African children were judged to be like children everywhere and, in particular, like poor children in Britain who were also believed through the program of the infant school to have a civilizing influence on their parents. Thus, the rhetoric which built up around infant schools created a convincing case for their use in mission settings, particularly given the ‘ignorance and imbecility’ of the Indigenous adults. Infant schooling was seen as a tool to re-cast the Indigenous child and eventually the Indigenous adult into a ‘civilized’ mould and in line with Christian beliefs. The Infant School in Foreign Missions In its fullest form as described by Wilderspin, the infant system needed (1) trained teachers, (2) specialized teaching materials, (3) a building with a gallery and one or two classrooms, and (4) a playground equipped with a swing, flower beds, etcetera. An initial step in organizing infant schools in the case studies was to recruit a teacher – W.H. and Ann Perkins in India, Betsey Stockton in Canada – or utilizing an available missionary with some experience with the system such as Joseph Matthews in New Zealand. While schools already existed in each setting, with the arrival of these teachers schools were reorganized according to the infant system or an infant school was added as a branch of the schools. However, it is important to note that such changes were limited to the territories under the British control, met variously with enthusiasm or resistance, and were not widespread or stable over time even in those areas, particularly in the case of India. The schools’ sponsors recognized the importance of specialized teacher training, though infant teachers with training and experience were perpetually in short supply. The experience of the Perkins’ is unknown, but it could be presumed that they had previously led a school in Britain. Stockton had a year’s teaching experience in an urban infant school and experience with adult English language learners at a school in Hawaii. Matthews had helped organize infant schools in Sydney while he awaited his posting to New Zealand. While mission teacher Mary Ann Wilson (India) suggested that infant schools could be undertaken with little ‘time and strength’, they did in fact require considerable effort and funds to establish in the first instance – a building and materials in addition to the teachers – and in the case of India, dilemmas about the language of instruction. The schools in Canada and at least one in New Zealand were known to have had Wilderspin’s galleries. There is reference to a list of materials in the Canadian case, while for India and New Zealand, the references to materials remain generic. Historian Jill Shefrin has described the school supplies market which supported and helped to propagate the infant system.20 In some cases materials were donated, as in Canada, or made on site, as in India, where 20 Jill Shefrin, ‘“Adapted for and Used in Infants’ Schools, Nurseries, &c.”: Booksellers and the Infant School Market’, in Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, ed. Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (London: Ashgate, 2009).

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they were adapted and translated into local languages. In New Zealand it is known that missionaries brought school materials from the British and Foreign School Society and the National Education Society; some of these would have been useful in the infant schools. However, as in India, most materials were probably made on site. The system’s focus on learning via visual sense impressions was useful for teachers in cross-cultural contexts. Picture lessons helped both teachers and students overcome language barriers to an extent, and classes could accommodate learners of different ages and abilities, making the expanded age range a natural adaptation. In Britain, too, some infant schools accommodated older children. Older students trained as monitors could further bridge the culture and language gap. Teachers could also show quick results, holding student demonstrations and performances for parents and other members of the community after a few days or weeks of instruction. Some teaching devices that were deemed essential in Britain – for example, playgrounds – were not recorded in the missionary settings. We can only speculate on the reasons; for instance, playgrounds may have not been perceived to be useful or practical when mission teachers were challenged with managing children’s behaviour in classrooms, as was the case in New Zealand. In addition, in industrial Britain, playgrounds with their mechanical equipment were developed to provide city children with an imitation of the natural world, a situation which was unnecessary in New Zealand, Canada, or India. In New Zealand, a swing was used prior to European settlement for recreation by Māori youth, as depicted in the illustration by George French Angas (Figure 6.1), who likened it to ‘the gymnastic pole of Europe’. Contemporary reports on infant schools in Canada and India indicate that they developed as variations of the ‘true’ infant system: in India as an ‘adapted system’ and in Canada ‘adopted in connection with the common school system’. In India the main adaptation was the use of bilingual (e.g., Bengali/English) instruction, an older age group, and an attempt to train infant teachers locally. In Canada the infant system was used for teaching students of all ages. The New Zealand infant schools also included a wide age range, with children up to ten years old as well as some adults. While the idea of age-based admission to infant schools was significant in the missionary thinking, age was not as significant a marker of what a child could do and where he or she could properly be, prior to the advent of infant school. In most societies in the early nineteenth century, whether in Britain or in the colonies, there was an abundance of age-integrated contexts. Further, childhood was never universal or homogenous category that could equally hold all children. Instead, it has been marked by other categories of difference deemed significant in a particular time and context, such as class, caste, gender, or race. Age often resided at the intersections of such markers, and still does. Howard Chudacoff has argued in the context of American society that the ‘first widespread age-limited

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Fig. 6.1

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Morere ‘Maori Swing,’ by Joseph Jenner Merrett, c. 1840. Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ. 12 760.a.

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educational institution was the infant school’.21 This is not to contend that there was no age grading prescribed in earlier writings about educating children, be it Comenius’ book The School of Infancy in the seventeenth century, or Isaac Watts’ catechisms written in the eighteenth century.22 Such prescriptions were more readily ignored in practice in Sunday schools than seems to be the case with infant schools, in view of the ensuing debates on age appropriateness of instruction as the nineteenth century progressed. Nevertheless, in all three settings, the infant school system in the early to mid-nineteenth century catered to a wider age range than the originally envisaged two to seven years. Further, infant schools in all three settings were attended by boys and girls from more diverse backgrounds than those initially targeted. Officially there was no gender segregation or preference, though boys outnumbered girls in accordance with local beliefs and practices, particularly in India. Infant schools in New Zealand were intended for Māori children but with no other schooling available for missionary children, it is known that they attended the infant schools alongside Māori children. In India, the student population, both intended and actual, varied significantly in terms of class, caste, and religion depending on, among other variables, whether the missionaries or the government was responsible for the establishment of the infant school. For instance, as noted in Chapter 3, Macaulay argued that the British government had no desire to educate the poor ‘masses’ of India since this did not fit with their overall objectives of educating the Indians who could be of service to the Empire. Missionaries, on the other hand, often had to contend with orphans or the children of Christian converts or sympathizers. However, where local communities took interest, children, particularly boys, of wealthy families attended the infant schools run by missionaries as well as the government. The infant school movement in Canada was influenced early on by American developments including by US-trained teachers with experience in urban schools in Philadelphia and New York. Historian Caroline Winterer described the differences between the British and American infant schools. In Britain, the schools were established as a means of child rescue ‘to combat the harmful effects of industrialization and factory production requirements’23 with teaching methods developed by Buchanan, Wilderspin, and others after the schools had started up. In the United States the infant schools’ appeal was their educational value 21 Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 33. 22 John Amos Comenius, The School of Infancy, ed. Ernest McNeill Eller (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1956). Isaac Watts’ catechisms (1788) were divided into three levels for specific age levels – 3–4, 7–8, and 12–14 years, Chudacoff, How Old Are You? 39. 23 Caroline Winterer, ‘Avoiding a “Hothouse System of Education”: NineteenthCentury Early Childhood Education from the Infant Schools to the Kindergartens’, History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1992): 291.

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and novel pedagogy. The first schools appeared in the United States more than a decade after Owen’s infant school at New Lanark. In the United States they were established as educational programs for children across a variety of contexts: for the urban middle class including African American middle-class, poor urban children, slave children on plantations, and as discussed in this book with regard to Canada, Aboriginal children. Even in situations that combined child rescue with an educational aim as in the many infant schools cum nurseries that sprouted up in Canada and the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, the educational program was the defining feature. As explained by Winterer with reference to Boston, ‘the Boston infant schools were, first and foremost, a forum for innovative pedagogy and, only second, an attempt to forestall urban decay’.24 The Methodistrun Aboriginal infant schools were solely concerned with children’s education, socialization, and Christianization, with the goal to prepare a cadre of Indigenous missionaries. In Canada, though there was an American influence on pedagogy, the influence of empire was nevertheless a major force in the mission infant schools, which provided the means for religious instruction, the teaching of English, the inculcation of Anglo-Canadian values and encouraged containment of Aboriginal people to free up land for settlement by Europeans. Further Work in the History of Infant Schools We believe that transnational history holds much promise for the study of infant schools as a key example of a travelling educational reform.25 We therefore call for further research to understand the longer reach of infant schools beyond the three cases in this book, for example, in the colonial and missionary projects in Africa, the South Pacific, and the West Indies.26 We know that in some situations one individual was involved in starting schools in widespread contexts: the evangelist Thomas Bilby, whom we met in Chapter 2, organized schools in Trinidad and Sierra Leone as well as London. This raises questions of the layered international and cross-cultural influences on the infant school idea, as it was transported by Bilby, for example, who returned from the West Indies to London to serve as inspector of infant schools for the Home and Colonial Infant School Ibid., 294. The term ‘travelling reform’ is drawn from Gita Steiner-Khamsi, ‘Building

24 25

Comparative Policy Studies’, Policy Making and Lending in Education, World Yearbook of Education 2012, ed. Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Florian Waldow (New York: Routledge, 2012). 26 Larry Prochner, A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009); Larry Prochner and Margaret Kabiru, ‘Early childhood development in Africa: A historical perspective’, Africa’s Future, Africa’s Challenge: Early Childhood Care and Development in SubSaharan Africa, ed. Marito Garcia, Alan Pence, and Judith L. Evans (Washington: World Bank, 2008).

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Society. Beyond individuals, however, further studies are needed that focus on the identification and analysis of reform and educational networks as has been explored in kindergarten history.27 We offer a number of other topics: a re-examination of infant schools in the United States, where the schools were also established for Indigenous children as noted in Chapter Four, as well as for slave children on plantations; a comparative study of infant schools for Indigenous children and settler children within and across national contexts; and a focused study of one dimension of the schools, for example, their material culture, or the perspectives of the indigenous populations that were the target of these initiatives. The Legacy of Infant Schools Young children have often been seen as beneficiaries of adult benevolence. Their agency and voices are hard to discern in historical accounts, even in those like the present book that are primarily concerned with young children. Yet, they have been objects of rescue and resocialization and, in turn, considered change agents for society through their influence on their parents.28 ‘Rescue’ was warranted particularly when children were deemed fit for rescue but vulnerable to ‘vice or peril’ as is evident in the foregoing discussions in this book.29 Poor and Indigenous children’s home life and culture along with the stray influences from the streets and their own dispositions were considered the main sources of danger and depravity. The solution dictated by such an approach logically led to ‘removal’ of young children from ‘pernicious’ influences, briefly everyday into an infant class or long term through residential school placements in order to effect their resocialization. The resulting marginalization of indigenous cultures and languages has had horrendous long-term effects on Indigenous peoples in erstwhile colonies around the world. Re-socializing of very young children continues to be a topic of concern in current programs targeting minority children. Hillel Goelman and his colleagues ask, ‘what happens if ECE programs of these children do not understand the values and child development goals behind cultural differences and seek to resocialize

27 Kerry Bethell, ‘To Bring into Play: Miss Mary Richmond’s Utilization of Kindred Networks in the Diffusion of Kindergarten Ideals in Practice’, History of Education 35, no. 2 (2005): 225–44. 28 Karen Sánchez Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 29 Bernadette Baker, ‘“Childhood” in the Emergence and Spread of US Public Schools’, Foucault’s Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge and Power in Education, ed. Thomas Popkewitz and Marie Brennan (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).

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the children to a new set of values?’30 They continue: ‘asking very young children to be rescocialized, just as formative socialization is taking place, unduly burdens them’. However, attempts at re-socialization of children of the ‘other’, historically as well as currently, have often shown little concern for the values and child development goals of the culture deemed unfit, thus having more insidious consequences than ‘unduly burdening’ the very young child. On the one hand, the economic and social mobility seems to hinge on the educational participation and attainment in today’s globalized world even more than it did in the nineteenth century. This makes re-socialization through education of the very young a desirable goal for those advocating it from positions of privilege as well as an aspiration of the minorities and the poor. On the other hand, the time-worn assumptions of racial and cultural hierarchies that have underpinned such attempts for more than two centuries, implicitly or explicitly, continue to undermine ‘other’ ways of living and being with destructive consequences for the subordinated and indigenous cultures and languages. The challenge for today’s projects of re-socialization is how to work interculturally without perpetuating the reductionism and assimilation that has largely characterized such attempts in the past and without losing sight of the indigenous agency.

30 Hillel Goelman et al., ‘Early Childhood Education’, Handbook of Psychology, vol. 7, Educational Psychology, ed. Irving B. Weiner and Gloria E. Miller (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

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Hall, Catherine. White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’. In Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hall, Catherine, and Sonya O. Rose. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and Imperial World. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Harry Hendrick. ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present’. In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 34–62. Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1997. Harsha, D.A. Life and Choice Works of Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D. New York: Derby and Jackson, 1857. Hilton, Mary. Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Hilton, Mary, and Jill Shefrin, eds. Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009. Hilton, Mary, and Pam Hirsch, eds. Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790–1830. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2000. Hulme, Peter, and Ludmilla Jordanova. The Enlightenment and Its Shadows. London: Routledge, 1990. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Huzel, James P. The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Martineau, Cobbett and the Pauper Press. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. James, Lawrence. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. London: Abacus, 1994. Jayawardena, Kumari. The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule. New York & London: Routledge, 1995. Jenkins, John W. ‘Infant Schools and the Development of Public Primary Schools in Selected American Cities Before the Civil War’. Unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1978. Johnston, Anna. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jones, M.G. The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Puritanism in Action. Great Britain: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1964. Kirby, Peter. Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Klingberg, Frank J. ‘The Lady Mico Charity Schools in the British West Indies, 1835–1842’, Journal of Negro History 24, no. 3 (1939): 291–344.

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Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich. Leonard and Gertrude, 1781. Translated by Eve Channing. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath, 1885. ———. How Gertrude Teaches her Children, 1801. Translated by L.E. Holland and F.C. Turner. London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1894. Porter, Andrew. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. ———. ‘Religion, Missionary Enthusiasm, and Empire’. In The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Alaine M. Low, Andrew Porter, and William Roger Louis. Oxford, UK: University Press: 2009, eBook Collection: 222–46. Porter, Roy. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000. Prochner, Larry. A History of Early Childhood Education in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009. Prochner, Larry, Helen May, and Baljit Kaur. ‘“The Blessings of Civilisation”: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools for Young Native Children in Three Colonial Settings: India, Canada and New Zealand’, Paedagogica Historica 5, no. 1 (2009): 83–102. Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780–1832. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Robert, Dana L., ed. Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008. Roberts, A.F.B. ‘A new view of the infant school movement’, British Journal of Educational Studies 20, no. 2 (1972): 154–64. Rooke, Patricia. ‘Slavery, Social Death and Imperialism: The Formation of a Christian Black Elite in the West Indies, 1800–1845’. In Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism, edited by J.A. Mangan, 23–45. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. ———. ‘Papists and Proselytizers: Non-denominational Education in the British Caribbean after Emancipation’, History of Education 23, no. 3 (1994): 257–73. Rose, Nikolas. Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Janis. ‘A Landscape of Enculturation: The Vernacular of Elementary School Buildings and Playgrounds, 1840–1930’. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1984. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Émile, 1762. Translated by Barbara Foxley. London: Dent Everyman Library, 1911. Russell, William. ‘Address’, American Journal of Education 1, January, 1826. ———. Address on Infant Schools. Boston: Tupper, 1829. ———. ‘Intelligence’, American Journal of Education 4, September and October, 1829.

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Truman, George, John Jackson, and Thomas B. Longstreth. Narrative of a Visit to the West Indies, in 1840 and 1841. Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1844. Tschurenev, Jana. ‘Incorporation and Differentiation: Popular Education and the Imperial Civilizing Mission in Early Nineteenth-Century India’. In Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development, edited by Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann, 79–124. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd and Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001. Twells, Alison. ‘“Happy English Children” Class, Ethnicity and the Making of Missionary Women in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Women’s Studies International Journal 21, no. 3 (1998): 235–45. Wade, Nicolas J. ‘Cox’s Chair: “A Moral and a Medical Means in the Treatment of Maniacs”’, History of Psychiatry 16, no. 1 (2005): 73–88. Ward, Kevin, and Brian Stanley, eds. The Church Missionary Society and World Christianity 1799–1999. Cambridge, England: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., and Surrey, England: Curzon Press Ltd., 2000. Welter, Barbara. ‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860’, American Quarterly 18, Summer (1966): 151–74. Wesley, John. ‘A thought on the manner of educating children’. In The Works of John Wesley, X111, Letters. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1783. Wilderspin, Samuel. On the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 2nd ed. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1824. ———. Infant Education: Or Remarks on the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor from the Age of Eighteen Months to Seven Years, 3rd ed. London: W. Simpkin & R. Marshall, 1825. ———. Infant Education; or, Practical Remarks on the Importance of Educating the Infant Poor, 4th ed. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1829. ———. Early Discipline Illustrated. London: Westley and Davis, 1832. ———. A System for the Education of the Young, Applied to all Faculties. London: James S. Hodson, 1840. Williams, C. Peter. The Ideal of the Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1990. Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2003. ———, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wilson, William. A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools, adapted for the Infants’ Schools in the United States by H.W. Edwards. New York: G. & G. & H. Carvill, 1830. Withers, Charles W.J. Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Wolfe, Larry, and Marco Cipolloni. The Anthropology of the Enlightenment. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Woodbridge, William. ‘Infant Schools in Africa and Their Effects’, American Annals of Education 2 (July 1832): 45. Woollacott, Angela. Gender and Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Canada Adelson, Naomi. ‘The Embodiment of Inequity: Health Disparities in Aboriginal Canada’, Canadian Journal of Public Health 96 (2005): S45–S61. Allard, Yvon E., Russell Wilkins, and Jean-Marie Berthelot. ‘Premature Mortality in Health Regions with High Aboriginal Populations’, Health Reports 15, no. 1 (2004): 51–60. Anderson, John R. ‘Negro Education in the Public Schools of Newark, New Jersey During the Nineteenth Century’. PhD dissertation, Rutgers, 1972. Armitage, Andrew. Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995. Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Bacon, Ephraim. Abstract of a Journal of E. Bacon. Philadelphia: Clark and Rater, 1821. Bacon, Jacqueline. Freedom’s Journal: The First African American Newspaper. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2007. Ball, Jessica, and Alan R. Pence. Supporting Indigenous Children’s Development: Community-University Partnerships. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. Barman, Jean, Yvonne M. Hébert, and Don McCaskill, eds. Indian Education in Canada, vols 1 and 2. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Bennett, Marlyn, Cindy Blackstock, and Richard de La Ronde. A Literature Review and Annotated Bibliography on Aspects of Aboriginal Child Welfare in Canada. Ottawa, 2005. Bennie, Donald. ‘In a World of Their Own: Isolation and the Jesuit Mission to the Huron, 1632–1650’. PhD dissertation, University of Guelph, 2005. Beyer, C. Kalani. ‘The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai’, History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2007): 23–48. Bonvillain, Nancy. ‘The Iroquois and the Jesuits: Strategies of Influence and Resistance’. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1986): 29–42. Bullivant, Brian. Pluralism, Cultural Maintenance and Evolution. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 1982. Bumstead, J.M. The Peoples of Canada: A Pre-Confederation History. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Carney, Robert. ‘Aboriginal Residential Schools Before Confederation: The Early Experience’, Historical Studies (Canada) 61 (1995): 13–40. Carroll, John. Case and His Contemporaries, vol. 3. Toronto: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1871. Carter, Sarah. Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Castellano, Marlene Brant, Linda Archibald, and Mike DeGagné. From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008. Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families 1900–1940. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Churchill, Ward. Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2004. Clarke, Ruth. Before the Silence: Fifty Years in the History of Alderville First Nation, 1825–1875. Alderville, ON: Alderville First Nation, 1999. Clayton, Daniel W. ‘Geographies of the Lower Skeena’, British Columbia Studies 94 (1992): 29–58. Combe, George. Notes on the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit in 1838–40. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1841. Copway, George. The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway). Philadelphia: J. Harmstead, 1847. Davin, Nicolas Flood. Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds. Ottawa, 14 March, 1879. de Leeuw, Sarah. ‘Intimate Colonialisms: The Material and Experienced Places of British Columbia’s Residential Schools’, The Canadian Geographer: Special Issue, Historical Geographies of Colonialism 51, no. 3 (2007): 339–59. ———. ‘“If Anything is to be Done with the Indian, We Must Catch Him Very Young”: Colonial Constructions of Aboriginal Children and the Geographies of Indian Residential Schooling in British Columbia, Canada’, Children’s Geographies 7, no. 2 (2009): 123–40. de Leeuw, Sarah, Margo Greenwood, and Emilie Cameron. ‘Deviant Constructions: How Governments Preserve Colonial Narratives of Addictions and Poor Mental Health to Intervene into the Lives of Indigenous Children and Families in Canada’, International Journal of Mental Health and Addictions 8, no. 2 (2010): 282–95. Dickason, Olive Patricia, with David T. McNab. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 4th ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2009. Dickason, Olive, and William Newbigging. A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Escher, Constance Killian. ‘Betsey Stockton, 1798–1865’. In Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women, edited by Joan N. Burstyn, 87–9. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997.

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Mackenzie, William Lyon. Sketches of Canada and the United States. London: E. Wilson, 1833. MacLean, Hope. ‘A Positive Experiment in Aboriginal Education: The Methodist Ojibwa Day Schools in Upper Canada, 1824–1833’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 22 (2002): 23–63. ———. ‘Ojibwa Participation in Methodist Residential Schools in Upper Canada, 1828–1860’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 25, no. 1 (2005): 93–137. McCuskey, Dorothy. Bronson Alcott, Teacher. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940. Menton, Linda K. ‘A Christian and “Civilized” Education: the Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s School, 1839–50’, History of Education Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1992): 213–42. Meyer, Melissa L. ‘Signatures and Thumbprints: Ethnicity Among the White Earth Anishinaabeg, 1889–1920’, Social Science History 14, no. 3 (1990): 305–45. ———. The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889–1920. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Miller, James. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. ———. Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Milloy, John. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879–1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999. Moogk, Peter N. ‘The “Others” Who Never Were: Eastern Woodlands Amerindians and Europeans in the Seventeenth Century’, French Colonial History, 1 (2002): 77–100. Murphy, Lucy Eldersveld. ‘To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760–1823’. In Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, edited by Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Tuete, 270–303. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. National Indian Brotherhood. Indian Control of Indian Education, Policy Paper Presented to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Ottawa: National Indian Brotherhood, 1972. Nute, Grace Lee. ‘Wilderness Marthas’. Minnesota History 8, no. 3 (1927): 247–59. Osborne, Brian, ‘Barter, Bible, Bush: Strategies of Survival and Resistance among the Kingston-Bay of Quinte Mississauga, 1783–1836’. In Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Actions of Peace and the Temagami Blockades of 1988–89, edited by Bruce Hodgins, Ute Lischke, and David McNab, 85–104. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. Osborne, Brian, Marijke Huitema, and Michael Ripmeester. ‘Imagined Spaces, Constructed Boundaries, Conflicting Claims: A Legacy of Colonial Conflict in Eastern Ontario’, International Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (2002): 87–112.

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Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Sue, S. ‘Science, Ethnicity, and Bias: Where Have We Gone Wrong?’, American Psychologist 54 (1999): 1072–3. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 2006. Titley, Brian E. ‘Indian Industrial Schools in Western Canada’. In Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Education History, edited by J. Donald Wilson and David C. Jones, 133–53. Calgary: Detselig, 1986. ———. A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986. Trafzer, Clifford, Jean Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Education. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Waterstone, Marvin and Sarah de Leeuw. ‘A Sorry State: Apology Excepted. Human Geography’, A New Radical Journal 3, no. 3 (2010): 1–28. Webster, Paul. ‘Canadian Aboriginal People’s Health and the Kelowna Deal’, The Lancet 368, no. 9523 (2006): 275–6. Weisner, Thomas and Ronald Gallimore. ‘My Brother’s Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking’, Current Anthropology 18, no. 2 (June 1977): 169–90. Whyte, Terence T. ‘Grape Island: Methodist Missionary Station, 1827–1837’. Paper submitted as partial requirement for the course ‘Canadian Church History’ in the Bachelor of Divinity Programme of Emmanuel College, Toronto, February 1965. Widder, Keith R. Battle for the Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823–1837. East Lansing, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Wilson, J. Donald ‘“No Blanket to be Worn in School”: The Education of Indians in Nineteenth Century Ontario’. In Indian Education in Canada, edited by Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert, and Don McCaskill, 65–87. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986. India Acharya, Srikumar. The Changing Pattern of Education in Early Nineteenth Century Bengal. Calcutta: Punthi-Pustak, 1992. Adams, Nancy L. and Dennis M. Adams. ‘An Examination of Some Forces Affecting English Educational Policies in India 1780–1850’, History of Education Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1971): 157–73. Basu, Sajal, ed. Rammohun Roy: A Prophet of Modern India. Kolkata, Sujan Publications, 2003. Bateman, Josiah. The Life of the Right Rev. Daniel Wilson, D.D., Late Lord Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of India, 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1861.

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Bellenoit, Hayden J. Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920, Empires in Perspective. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007. Brander, Isabel. Kindergarten Teaching in India: Stories, Object Lessons, Occupations, Songs and Games, vol. I: Infant Standard. London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1899. Chadwick, Henry and G.R. Evans, eds. Atlas of the Christian Church. Oxford: Equinox, 1987. Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. Collett, Sophie Dobson, ed. The Life and Letters of Rammohun Roy. Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1900. Cox, Jeffrey. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Crawford, S. Cromwell. Ram Mohan Roy: Social, Political, Religious Reform in Nineteenth Century India. New York: Paragon House, 1987. Dewan, Dick B. Education in the Darjeeling Hills: An Historical Survey: 1835–1985. New Delhi: Indus Publishing Co., 1991. Dharampal. The Beautiful Tree: The Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. Coimbatore, India: Keerthi and AVP Publishing House, 1983; Goa, India: Other India Press, 2000. Dharamraj, Jacob S. Colonialism and Christian Mission: Postcolonial Reflections. Delhi: Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1999. Duff, Alexander. India and India Missions: Including sketches of the gigantic system of Hinduism, both in theory and practice. Delhi: Swati Publications, 1839, Reprint 1988. Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765–1843. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Farquhar, J.N. The Crown of Hinduism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913; 2nd ed., New Delhi: Oriental Books, 1971. Firth, Cyril Bruce. An Introduction to Indian Church History, 5th ed. Edited by Franklyn J. Balasumdaram. Indian Theological Library. Bangalore: The Senate of Serampore College, ISPCK, 2001. Frykenberg, Robert Eric. Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present. Edited by Owen Chadwick and Henry Chadwick. Oxford History of the Christian Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Frykenberg, Robert Eric, and Brian Stanley, eds. Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, MI: Willaim B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003. Ghosh, Durba. ‘Making and Un-making Loyal Subjects: Pensioning Women and Educating Orphans in Early Colonial India’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 1 (2003): 1–28. Gillingham, Carol L. The Indian Kindergarten. Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908.

254

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods

Gordon, Corrie. Essays on the Child and His Education. Madras: Srinivasa Varadachari & Co., 1917. ———, ed. Teaching in Indian Elementary Schools. Madras: Oxford University Press, 1921. Gross, Andreas, Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, and Heike Liebau, eds. Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India: The Danish-Halle and the English-Halle Mission, vol. I. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen zu Halle, 2006. Haggis, Jane. ‘Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of “Women’s Work” in the “Mission of Sisterhood” to Indian Women’, Feminist Review 65 (2000): 108–26. Harper, Susan Billington. In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India. Edited by Brian Stanley and Robert Eric Frykenberg, Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000. Hunter, W.W. Report of the Education Commission 1882. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884. Jackson, Eleanor. ‘From Krishna Pal to Lal Behari Dey: Indian Builders of the Church in Bengal, 1800–1894’. In Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914, edited by Dana L. Robert, 166–205. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008. Jayawardena, Kumari. The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Jeyaraj, Daniel. ‘Mission Reports from South India and Their Impact on the Western Mind: The Tranquebar Mission of the Eighteenth Century’. In Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706–1914, edited by Dana L. Robert, 21–42. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008. Kakar, Sudhir. Indian Childhood: Cultural Ideals and Social Reality. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979. Kaur, Baljit. ‘“Keeping the Infants of Coolies out of Harm’s Way”: Raj, Church and Infant Education in India, 1830–51’, Contemporary Issues in Early Education 5, no. 2 (2004): 221–35. ———. ‘Early Childhood Education in India from 1830s to 1940s: Leapfrogging through a Century’. In Early Childhood Care and Education: Theory and Practice, edited by Prerana Mohite and Larry Prochner. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 2009. Kent, Eliza F. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kumar, Krishna. Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. New Delhi: Sage, 1991. Laird, M.A. Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Long, James. Handbook of Bengal Missions in Connexion with the Church of England in North India. London: John Farquhar Shaw, 1848.

Selected Bibliography

255

Mackenzie, Helen Douglas. Life in the Mission, the Camp, and the Zenáná; or, Six Years in India (vol. I & II). New York: Redfield, 1853. http://books.google. com/books?id=M9cMAAAAIAAJ&dq=editions:0ueCXclOjH1LjROM (accessed November 16, 2007). ———. ‘Six Years in India: Delhi, the City of the Great Mogul, with an Account of the Various Tribes in Hindostan; Hindoos, Sikhs, Affghans, Etc.’ In A New Edition of The Mission, The Camp, and The Zenana by Mrs. Colin Mackinzie. Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, London, 1857. http://books. google.com/books?id=gVwBAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks (accessed February 11, 2010). Markovits, Claude. A History of Modern India 1480–1950. London: Anthem Press, 2004. Meyer, William S., Richard Burn, James S. Cotton, and Herbert H. Risley. Imperial Gazetteer of India (vol. 2 and 4). New edition, published under the authority of His Majesty’s Secretary of State for India in Council. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–1931. Naik, J.P., and Syed Nurullah. A Students’ History of Education in India 1800–1973, 6th ed. Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 1974. Nair, Janaka. ‘Uncovering the zenana: visions of Indian womanhood in Englishwomen’s writings 1813–1940’. In Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries – A Reader, edited by Catherine Hall, 224–45. New York: Routledge, 2000. Neill, Stephen. A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Oddie, Geoffrey A. Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006. Panikkar, K.N. ‘Intellectual History of Colonial India: Some Historical and Conceptual Questions’. In Situating Indian History: For Sarvepalli Gopal, edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar, 303–33. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pankajam, G. Pre-school Education: Philosophy and Practice. Ambala Cantt: The Indian Publications, 1994. Pearson, John Dorking. The British System of Education as Adapted to Native Schools in India. Calcutta: Mission Press, 1830. Potts, E.D. British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837: The History of Serampore and its Missions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Sen Gupta, Kanti Prasanna. The Christian Missionaries in Bengal 1793–1833. Calcutta: Firma L.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971. Singh, Maina Chawla. Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South Asia (1860s–1940s). Edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Vol. 4, Gender, Culture and Global Politics. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Spear, Percival. India: A Modern History, 2nd edition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972.

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Swaminathan, Mina, ed. The First Five Years: A Critical Perspective on Early Childhood Care and Education in India. New Delhi: Sage, 1998. Thapar, Romila. A History of India. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1965. Weitbrecht, M. The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana. London: James Nisbet & Co., 1875. Woodrow, H., ed. Education in India: Macaulay’s Minutes. Calcutta: C.B. Lewis, 1862. Yechury, Sitaram. ‘Educational Development in India’, Social Scientist 14, no. 2/3 (1986): 3–23. Zachariah, K. History of Hoogly College 1836–1935. Alipore: Bengal Government Press, 1936. New Zealand Awatere, Donna. Maori Sovereignty. Auckland: Broadsheet Books, 1984. Barrington, John M., and Tim. H. Beaglehole. Maori Schools in a Changing Society. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1974. Belich, James. Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Auckland: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1996. Bentley, Trevor. Captured by Maori: White Female Captives, Sex and Racism on the Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Frontier. Auckland: Penguin 2004. Binney, Judith. The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall. Auckland: University of Auckland & Oxford University Press, 1968. Bishop, Russell. ‘The Waikato Mission Schools of Reverend Robert Maunsell’, Access 11, no. 2 (1992): 18–29. Brown, William. New Zealand and its Aborigines. London, Smith Elder and Co., 1845. Carleton, Hugh. The Life of Henry Williams, Archdeacon of Auckland, vol. 1. Auckland: Upton, 1874–77. Carr, Margaret and Helen May. ‘Te Whariki: Curriculum voices’. In Early Childhood Services: Theory, Policy and Practice, edited by Helen Penn, 53–73. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999. Caughley, Vivien. ‘Her Civilizing Mission: Discovering Hannah King through her Textiles’, History of Education Review 38, no. 1 (2009): 16–28. Creighton, Louise. G.A. Selwyn, D.D. Bishop of New Zealand and Lichfield. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923. Elder, John Rawson, ed. The Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden, 1765–1838. Dunedin, NZ: Coulls Somerville Wilkie, Ltd and A.H. Reed, 1932. ———. Marsden’s Lieutenants. Dunedin, NZ: Coulls Somerville Wilkie, Ltd., and A.H. Reed for the Otago University Council, 1934. Fancourt, Hilda Constance. The Advance of the Missionaries. Being the Expansion of the CMS Mission South of the Bay of Islands, 1833–40. Wellington, NZ: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1939.

Selected Bibliography

257

Fisher, Robin. ‘Henry William’s leadership of the CMS Mission to New Zealand’, NZ Journal of History 9, no. 2 (1975): 142–53. Fitzgerald, Caroline, ed. Letters from the Bay of Islands: The Story of Marianne Williams. Auckland: Penguin, 2004. ———. Te Wiremu, Henry Williams: Early Years in the North. Wellington: Huia, 2011. Fitzgerald, Tanya. ‘In a Different Voice. A Case Study of Marianne and Jane Williams, Missionary Educators in Northern New Zealand 1823–1835’. PhD dissertation, University of Auckland, 1995. ———. ‘Fences, Boundaries and Imagined Communities: Rethinking the Construction of Early Mission Schools and Communities in New Zealand 1823–1830’, History of Education Review 30, no. 2 (2001): 14–25. ———. ‘Jumping the Fences: Maori Women’s Resistance to Missionary Schooling in Northern New Zealand 1823–35’. Paedagogica Historica 37, no. 1 (2001): 175–92. ———. ‘Creating a Disciplined Society: CMS Women and the Re-making of Ngã Puhi Women 1823–35’, History of Education Review 32, no. 1 (2003): 84–98. Glen, Robert, ed. Mission and Moko: Aspects of the Work of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand 1814–1882. Christchurch, NZ: Latimer Fellowship of New Zealand, 1992. Grace, David. A Driven Man: Missionary Thomas Samuel Grace: Battling for Maori Causes Amid Controversy, Hardship and Danger. Wellington, NZ: Ngaio Press, 2004. Graham, Janine. ‘Towards a History of New Zealand Childhoods’, Historical Review (Tauranga – Bay of Plenty) 48, no. 2 (2000): 89–102. Halkyard, Hilda. ‘Te Kohanga Reo’, Broadsheet, 113 (October 1982): 16. He Kōrero. Words Between Us: First Māori-Pākeha Conversations on Paper, Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2011. Henare, Manuka, and Edward Douglas. ‘Te Reo o Te Tiriti Mai Rano’. In Report of the Royal Commission on Social Policy, III, Part One, 79–220. Wellington, NZ: Government Printer, 1988. Jenkins, Kuni. ‘Te Ihi, te Mana, te Wehi o te ao Tuhi. Maori Print Literacy from 1814–1855. Literacy, Power and Colonization’. MA thesis, University of Auckland, NZ, 1991. Jenkins, Kuni (with Tania Kai’ai). ‘Maori Education: A Cultural Experience and Dilemma for the State—a New Direction in Maori Society’. In The Politics of Learning and Teaching in Aotearoa- New Zealand, edited by Eve Coxon, Kuni Jenkins, Jim Marshall, and Lauren Massey, 148–79. Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1994. Jones, Alison, and Kuni Jenkins. ‘Invitation and Refusal: A Reading of the Beginnings of Schooling in Aotearoa, New Zealand’, History of Education 37, no. 2 (2008): 187–206. Matthews, Sophia Clarissa, and Ludolph Joseph. Matthews of Kaitaia. New Zealand: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1940.

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May, Helen. The Discovery of Early Childhood: The Development of Services for the Care and Education of Very Young Children, 2nd ed., Wellington: NZCER Press, 1997. ———. School Beginnings: A Nineteenth Century Colonial Story. Wellington: NZCER Press, 2005. ———. Politics in the Playground: The World of Early Childhood in Postwar New Zealand, 2nd ed. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2009. Moon, Paul. Hone Heke Ngã Puhi Warrior. Auckland, NZ: David Ling Publishing Limited, 2001. ———. This Horrid Practice: The Myth and Reality of Traditional Maori Cannibalism. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books, 2008. Murray-Oliver, Anthony. Augustus Earle in New Zealand. Christchurch, NZ: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1968. Owens, John Morley R.. Prophets in the Wilderness: The Wesleyan Mission to New Zealand 1815–1827. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 1974. Porter, Frances, 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. Rogers, Lawrence M. Te Wiremu: A Biography of Henry Williams. Christchurch, NZ: Pegasus Press, 1973. Ross, Cathy. Women with a Mission: Rediscovering Missionary Wives in Early New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin Books, 2006. Salmond, Anne. Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773–1815. Auckland, NZ: Viking, 1997. Simon, Judith. ‘The Ideological Rationale for the Denial of Maoritanga’. Maori Educational Development Conference—Nga Tumanako, Turangawaewae Marae, Ngaruawahia, New Zealand, March 23–5, 1984. ———. ‘European Style Schooling for Maori: The First Century’, Access 11, no. 2 (1992): 31–43. ———. Nga Kura Maori. The Native School System 1867–1969. Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1998. Simon, Judith, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds. Civilising Mission? Perceptions and Representations of the Native School System. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2001. Smith, Graham Hingangeroa, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. ‘Ki te Whai ao, ki te ao Marama: Crisis and Change in Maori Education’. In Myths and Realities, Schooling in New Zealand, edited by Alison Jones, Gary McCulloch, Jim Marshall, Graham Hingangeroa Smith, and Linda Smith, 123–56. Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore, 1990. Standish, Michael Wordsworth. The Waimate Mission Station. Wellington, NZ: A.W. and W.H. Reed, 1962. Stock, Eugene. The History of the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand. Wellington, NZ: New Zealand Church Missionary Society, 1935.

Selected Bibliography

259

Taylor, Richard. Te Ika a Maui. Or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants. London, Wertheim and McIntosh, 1855. Urlich Cloher, Dorothy. Hongi HIka: Warrior Chief. Auckland: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2003. Walker, Ranginui. Ka Wha Whai Tonu Matou. Struggle Without End, 1990. Auckland, NZ: Penguin, 2000 ed. Wells, Peter. The Hungry Heart: Journeys with William Colenso. Auckland, NZ: Vintage, 2011. Wily, Henry E.R.L., and Herbert Maunsell. Robert Maunsell: A New Zealand Pioneer: His Life and Times. Dunedin, NZ: A.H. Reed & A.W. Reed, 1938. Yate, William. An Account of New Zealand and the Church Missionary Society’s Mission in the Northern Island, 1835. Wellington, NZ: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1970 ed. Published Journals Calcutta Christian Observer. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, from 1832–45. General Committee of Public Instruction (India). Calcutta, from 1837–51. Missionary Register. London: L.B. Seeley, from 1814–56.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aboriginal, as term, 17 Africa first Anglican African bishop, 34 infant schools, 8, 117, 168, 175, 230–31 land for freed slaves, 167 multiracial charity schools, 183–4, 230 racial hierarchies, 35, 230–31 research needed, 235–6 African American children infant schools, 160–61, 165, 170, 176, 235 residential schools, 180 Agra, India, 38 Airy Nothings; or; Scraps and Naughts, and Odd-Cum-Shorts (Egerton), 74 Akaroa, New Zealand, 193 Alberta, Canada, 174, 174 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 169 Alderville, Ontario, 150, 156, 177–8 Alnwick Industrial School, Ontario, 178–9 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 159–60, 175 Anderson, David, 60 Anderson, John, 176 Anderson, Thomas G., 177 anti-slavery movement, 21, 83 architecture of infant schools. See buildings and sites for infant schools arithmetic. See mathematics instruction Ashworth, Henry, 82 assimilation processes hair styles, 156 instruction in English, 163, 173 renaming, 13, 48, 212, 221 See also clothing Athabasca, Canada, 60

Auckland, New Zealand, 217 Australia, xx–xxi, 8, 62, 63, 64, 114n11 Awatere, Donna, 223 Bacon, Ephraim and Charlotte, 167–8, 169 Bacon, Samuel, 167 Badheka, Gijubhai, 146 Bagot Report, 176, 177 Baines, Edward, 87–8 Bal Mandir system, India, 146 Ballantyne, William, 96 Bambridge, William and Sophie, 3, 211–18, 214, 218, 240 Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), England, 25–6 Barnes, Eliza, 158, 175 Baroda, India, 141 Barrington, John, 185 Bateman, Josiah, 123 Battiste, Marie, 18 Battleford Industrial School, Saskatchewan, 181–2 Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, 206 Bay of Quinte, Canada, 56, 149–50, 151–2, 152 Beaglehole, Tim, 185 Beckford Wildman, James, 83, 230 behaviour of children. See discipline and behaviour management Belich, James, 15–16, 17, 23 Bell, Andrew, 29, 71, 138–9 Belleville, Ontario, 56, 149–50, 152, 157 Bengal, India first Baptist missionaries, 26 infant schools, 44, 121 kindergartens, 141 See also Burdwan; Hooghly College Benham, John, 155, 158–9, 171, 172 Bennie, Donald, 54 Bernard, Jean-Simon, 205 Bhabha, Homi, 34

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biblical instruction. See religious instruction Bilby, Thomas, 83–4, 91, 235–6 Bissell, Catherine, 161 boarding schools. See residential schools Bombay, India, 42, 141 Bombay Educational Society, India, 130 Bond Head, Francis, 176 Boston, Massachusetts, 170, 235 Boutwell, Hester Crooks, 161 Brander, Isabel, 141–3 Brewer’s Green, London, England, 84–8, 89 British and Canadian Infant School Society, 109 British and Foreign School Society (BFSS), 7, 28–30, 220, 232 British India, as term, 112n2 British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (Cox), 19 Brougham, Henry, 85–7, 88, 92 Brown, Alfred and Charlotte, 193, 195, 196, 203–6, 212 Brown, James, 97, 101, 167, 168–9 Brown, William, 190–91 Buchanan, Barbara, 80 Buchanan, Isabella (James’s wife), 87–8 Buchanan, James at New Lanark, 71, 77 South African infant schools, 230 supervision of children, 105 Swedenborgian ideas, 93 at Westminster, 87–8, 102 buildings and sites for infant schools in Canada, 154, 155, 158, 170–72 in Great Britain, 72–3, 74, 75, 77, 89, 90, 91 in India, 48–9, 49, 138–9, 139 in New Zealand, 3–4, 210, 210–11, 218, 218 overview, 89, 90, 91, 231 See also galleries; playgrounds Burdwan, Bengal, 48, 49, 121, 131, 135, 139 Byculla, India, 130 Calcutta, India, infant schools attraction and resistance to, 116–17, 120 British influences, 122

buildings and map, 39, 111 clothing, 120, 134 educational materials, 132–3 examinations, 120, 121, 137 first infant school, 112, 113–17 government role, 122–4, 129 historical background, 42 language of instruction, 119–20, 133–4 pedagogy, 122, 132–3 religious instruction, 134 separate schools for Indians and Christians, 117–21 social class, 119, 120 teacher training, 120–21, 130, 132, 134 teachers and monitors, 118–21, 131–5 Calcutta, India, schools for females Hindu girls, 138–9, 139 orphans and widows, 132, 135, 136, 137 residential schools, 132, 134–5, 137–8 society for female education, 49–50 teachers, 131–2, 134–5, 137 ‘Calcutta Central School,’ 39 Calcutta Infant School Society, 117–19, 121–3, 126 Canada Cook’s exploration, 10 health of indigenous people, xx–xxi historical background, 5, 8, 51–2, 150, 152–3, 176 historical background, maps, 52, 151–2 historical trends, recent, 182–3 Indian, as term, 17 Indian assimilation, 172, 176–7, 179 Indian land surrenders, 150, 176, 177 Indian reserves, 179–80 treaty obligations, 179–80 See also residential schools, Canada Canada, indigenous culture ‘blanket’ as symbol, 161, 172 child development model, 227 historical trends, recent, 182–3 language use, 172–3 spiritual quests, 153 traditional education, 52 ‘vanishing Indian’ myth, 56 ‘wigwam’ as symbol, 156–7 See also Huron people; Mississauga Ojibwa

Index Canada, infant schools American influences, 158–9, 163–70, 234–5 buildings and sites, 154, 155, 158, 170–72 de Fellenberg’s influence, 177 educational materials, 171–2, 231–2 historical trends, recent, 182–3 language use, 172–3 overview, 174–5, 231–5 pedagogy, 175, 235 playgrounds, 102–3 See also Grape Island mission Canada, missionaries and education adult instruction, 174 assimilation strategies, 172 camp meetings, 153 denominational competition, 153 fundraising tours in US, 160–61 historical background, 34, 55–6, 59–60 Jesuit missionaries, 51–6 language use, 172–3 literacy for conversion, 163, 173, 174 missionary societies, 26 seminaries for indigenous preachers, 157–8, 173–4, 174 separation from converts, 35 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5, 56, 153, 173–4, 174 in western regions, 174, 174 See also Grape Island mission; residential schools, Canada Cape Town, South Africa, 117, 230 Carey, Mathew, 170 Carey, William estimate of non-believers, 44 first Baptist missionary in India, 21, 25–7, 30–31 Caribbean factory schools for slaves, 83, 230 infant schools, 8 Caril, Maskil, 167 Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania, 180 Carter, Sarah, 179 Case, William, 152–8, 160–61, 172, 173, 178 caste system childhood category and difference, 227, 232

263

education and, 44, 50 segregation in churches, 35 Zenana work by female missionaries, 49–51 Catholic missionaries. See Roman Catholic missionaries Cazenovia Presbyterian church, New York, 164–5 Cazenovia Seminary, New York, 158–9 Chapman, William, 108 Chardin, Jean-Siméon, 22 charity school movement influence in Calcutta, 133n108 influence in New Zealand, 64, 188 overview, 27–8 See also ‘the poor’ and education Chase, Henry, 159 Chelsea Infant School, London, England, 83–4 Chester Street school, Philadelphia, 169–70 child development theory absence of unifying theory, 93 age appropriateness of instruction, 232, 234 change environment to change behaviour, 92 Child Study movement, 143 childhood category and difference, 227, 232 disregard for indigenous pedagogy, 227 evangelical child model, 227, 228 malleability of children, 76, 92, 227 phrenology’s influence, 93–7, 169 physical activity and mental development, 101–2, 103 Rousseau and need for play, 23–4 schooled child model, 227, 228 separation of children from adults, 59–60 socializing children vs. re-socializing adults, 58–9 spiritual salvation, 93 child labour, 80–82, 84 Child Study movement, 143 Chilham, England, 230 Chinsurah, India, 121, 137–8 ‘Christianizing and civilizing’ assumption of European superiority, 13

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in Canada, 173, 176, 179 civilization before conversion, 63 colonialism and, xvi–xvii ‘downward filtration theory,’ 35–6 education as tool, xvi–xvii, 1, 6–8, 15, 22, 228–31 in India, 117, 123, 145 in New Zealand, 3–4, 220 mission stations as models, 38–9, 41 overview, 1, 4–8, 13, 228 progress as theme, 13, 15 Rousseau’s ‘noble savages,’ 27 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5, 56, 153, 173–4, 174 ‘upward fulfilment theory,’ 35–6 view of other religions, 44 See also ‘Englishness’; Enlightenment; ‘the Other’ Chudacoff, Howard, 232 ‘Church Mission House at Burdwan,’ 49 Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Canada, 57–60, 59 history, 7, 26, 33 in India, 129 in New Zealand, 62–6, 184, 185, 187, 202 Church of Scotland, 33, 35 Cincinnati, Ohio, infant schools, 168 Cipolloni, Marco, 13 Clarke, George and Martha, 190, 196, 209 class. See social class clothing assimilation tool, 3, 13, 64, 172, 221 in Canada, 172 charity schools, 64, 188 in Great Britain, 74, 75, 76 in India, 120, 134, 136 in New Zealand, 3, 64, 66, 188, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197–8, 200–202, 208 requests to British societies, 208 ‘rescuing’ indigenous women by re-clothing, 188 school rules, 109 CMS. See Church Missionary Society Coleman, Michael, 174 Colenso, William and Elizabeth, 3, 211, 212, 219, 220 Collett, Miss L.R., 141

colonialism ambivalent discourse, 34 citizenship education, 74–5 education and, xvi–xxii, 4 Enlightenment, education, and missions, 5–9 moral missions, xvi–xvii perspective in historical sources, 19 See also ‘Christianizing and civilizing’; ‘the Other’ Combe, Abram and Andrew, 95 Combe, George, 94–6, 169 Cook, James, 10, 12, 26, 188, 204 Copway, George, 159 Cotton, William, 212–14, 218 Cox, Jeffrey, 19, 38 Credit River, Ontario government land sales, 150 mission school, 57, 159, 164–5, 171–3, 178 model of civilization program, 57, 58 Cree, missionaries to, 174, 174 dance. See music and dance instruction Darwin, Charles, 204, 210, 222 Davies, Christopher and Marianne, 204, 205, 211 Davin, Nicolas Flood, 180–81 Davis, Mary Ann, 196–7 Davis, Richard, 209 de Fellenberg, Phillip Emanuel, 77, 85, 102–3, 177 de Giustino, David, 96 de Leeuw, Sarah, 2–3, 226 developmentally delayed children, 103 discipline and behaviour management Foucauldian ideas, 91 in galleries, 104–8, 106–8 in Great Britain, 75, 76, 77, 91, 95 in India, 128, 130, 132 in New Zealand, 65 Jesuit strategies, 55 on playgrounds, 97–9 rows of children, 105 school rules, 109–10, 169 token rewards, 29, 65, 132 See also teacher-student relationships discovery. See exploration and discovery Donovan, Cornelius, 94

Index Dr. Bell’s Instructions for Modelling and Conducting Schools (Pearson), 138 Duff, Alexander, 35, 133 Earle, Augustus, 191–2 Early Discipline Illustrated (Wilderspin), 230 East India Co., 5, 12, 42, 46, 51, 193 Edgeworth, Richard and Maria, 24–6, 28, 92, 97–8 Edinburgh Model Infant School, 96 Edinburgh (Scottish) Glasgow Missionary Society, 26 education colonialism and, xvi–xxii ‘downward filtration theory,’ 35–6 Foucault and social power, xv–xvi independence movement in former colonies, 182 indigenous health and, xx–xxi indigenous mistrust of, xxi for prevention of social ills, 81 social justice and, xviii socializing children vs. re-socializing adults, 58–9, 81 See also Canada, missionaries and education; India, education; infant schools; New Zealand, education; ‘the poor’ and education educational materials creative materials, 24 missionary society materials, 29–30 object pictures, 24–5, 92–3, 175, 232 overview, 231–2 in Wilderspin’s system, 231 See also geography instruction; mathematics instruction; reading and writing materials; teachers’ resources Egerton, M., 73, 74 Elliott, Benjamin J., 159 Émile (Rousseau), 23 employment preparation factory schools, 82–4, 86 at New Lanark school, 72, 78, 80–82 playground activities, 100, 102 school rules, 109–10, 169 Encyclopédie des Voyages (Grasset de Saint-Sauveur), 13, 14

265

England, infant schools. See infant schools, Great Britain ‘Englishness’ evangelical ideals and, 38, 173 ‘fenced’ boundaries in New Zealand, 189–90, 220 health habits, 206 imperialism, missions, and education, 5–9 mission stations as models, 38–9, 41 non-English people as ‘the Other,’ 39 whiteness of, 41 See also assimilation processes; ‘the Other’ Enlightenment assumption of European superiority, 13 civilized as Enlightenment ideal, 13 dance education, 76 education and, 1, 15, 22–5, 227 evangelism and, 8, 227 exploration and, 9–13, 14, 15 overview, 4–9, 69, 227 progress as theme, 4, 13–14 schooled child model, 227, 228 scientific classification, 10–11, 13 social reform and, 8 See also Locke, John An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians (Carey), 21 Essay on Infant Cultivation (Brown), 168–9 Essays on Phrenology (Combe), 96 Etherington, Norman, 6–7 ethnicity. See race and ethnicity Europeans on child development. See de Fellenberg, Phillip; Montessori education; Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich evangelism. See missionaries; missionary societies examination days British influences, 67 in India, 120, 121, 128, 137, 144 in New Zealand, 66–7, 190 exploration and discovery Cook’s travels, 10, 12, 26, 188, 204 influence on Locke, 9–10 overview, 5, 9, 9–13, 14, 15 See also geography instruction; travel literature

266

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factory schools, 82–4, 86 See also employment preparation; New Lanark school, Scotland Fairburn, William and Sarah, 200–201 Faust, Bernhard Christoph, 76 Female Orphan School, Calcutta, 134–5 Fitzgerald, Tanya, 188 Foucault, Michel, xv–xvi, 91 France francization in Canada, 53–4 Jesuit travel literature, 54–5 missionaries in New Zealand, 62, 205 traders in Pacific, 192–3 Froebel, Friedrich, 95, 108, 139–40, 141 galleries arrangement by age, 3, 107 buildings, 89, 90, 91, 105–8, 106–8, 165–6 in Canada, 171 in Great Britain, 89, 90, 91, 105–8, 106–8 ‘low’ and ‘high’ galleries, 107–8, 108 in New Zealand, 3, 218, 218 overview, 89, 90, 91, 104–8, 231 supervision of children, 104–8 in United States, 165, 165–6 Gandhi, Mahatma, 147n160 gender British women and gender roles, xix childhood category and, 227, 232 female missionary teachers and gender roles, xix female roles in infant school societies, 118 male authors of missionary publications, 18 ‘rescuing’ of indigenous women, 188 roles of missionary wives, 18, 30–31 separation and preference in infant schools, 158, 234 geography instruction in Canada, 172 citizenship education, 74–5 educational materials, 9, 9, 73, 74, 107, 107, 231–2 gallery lessons, 107, 107 in Great Britain, 73–5, 80, 107, 107 influence of exploration on, 9–11

pedagogy, 73–5 in United States, 169 geometry instruction. See mathematics instruction Ghosh, Durba, 120–21 Gillingham, Carol, 142–3 Glasgow Missionary Society, 26 globes. See geography instruction Goelman, Hillel, 236–7 Gomez, T.M., 121, 126–9 Gorakhpur, India, 129–30 Gordon, Corrie, 142–4 Goyder, David, 75, 88, 93, 96, 167, 169 Goyder, Thomas, 167 Grand River, Canada, 57, 157, 163 Grant, Charles, 34, 56 Grant, John Webster, 53 Grape Island mission, Ontario American influences, 149, 158–9, 163–70 buildings and site, 150, 154, 155, 158, 170–72 domestic life, 154–6 educational materials, 171–2 history and maps, 149–50, 151–2 language use, 153, 155, 160, 172–3 overview, 149–50, 153–9 pedagogy, 164–5, 171 relocation to Alderville, 150, 177–8 schools, 157–9 schools as seminaries, 157–8, 173–4, 174 tourist attraction, 149–50 Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Jacques, 13, 14 Greaves, James Pierrepont, 92 Greenwood, Margo, 2–3, 226 Greer, Alan, 53 Grimshaw, Patricia, 15 Griscom, John, 77–8 Guard, John, 195–6 Hale, Thomas, 158 Halkyard, Hilda, 223 Hall, Catherine, 38–9, 41, 225 Hall, G. Stanley, 143n151 Hall, William, 63 Hawaii, 159–60, 165, 175–6 ‘heathen,’ as term, 17 Hendrick, Harry, 227, 228

Index Hilton, Mary, 28 Hindshaw, Winifred, 228 Hinduism caste system, 44, 50, 227 converts to Christianity, 47, 48–9 female education, 138–9, 139 funeral practices, 12, 12–13, 46 itinerant preachers at Hindu festivals, 47, 47 Krishna, 44–5, 45 missionary view of, 44–7 reform movements, 46 Zenana work by female missionaries, 49–51 historical sources on infant schools absence of child’s perspective, 236–7 absence of indigenous perspective, 18, 186 diaries and letters, 3, 17, 133, 186 dominance of colonial perspective, 19 government reports, 112–13 in India, 112–13, 114–15, 133 interpretation of, 3–4, 17–19, 112–13, 185 male authors, 18 in New Zealand, 185–6, 188, 202 overview, 2, 17 See also missionary texts; teachers’ resources; travel literature Hoare, William, 9 Hodges, William, 12, 12–13 Hohepa, Patu, 67 Home and Colonial Infant School Society, 29, 84, 93, 235–6 Hone Heke, John, 203, 208–9 Hooghly College, Bengal British influences, 124, 127, 129 buildings and site, 125–6 discipline, 128 educational materials, 124, 128, 129 examinations, 128 gender restrictions, 131 history, 121, 123–4 language instruction, 127 pedagogy, 124, 127–9 social class, 126 students, 126–7, 128, 131 teachers and assistants, 121, 123, 125–6, 128, 129

267

Howland, Mary, 164–5, 165 Hubbard, Hester Ann, 158, 175 Hunter, Ian, 97 Huron people, Quebec, 51, 53–6 Hyde, Caroline, 167 Hymns for Infant Schools (Gilbert), 169 imperialism and colonialism. See colonialism India explorations, 11, 11–13 historical background, 8, 16, 35, 41–4, 46–7, 51 historical background, map, 43 indigenous Christians, 42, 44 scientific classification by British, 10–11 terms, people of mixed race, 50n121 travel literature, 12, 12–13, 133–7, 136 See also caste system; Hinduism India, education attraction and resistance to, 116–17, 124–5 caste system and, 44, 50 ‘downward filtration theory,’ 35–6 educational materials, 119, 124, 128, 129, 130, 132–3, 231–2 gender restrictions, 131 government role, 122–4, 129, 140, 145, 146 history, recent trends, 51, 139–45 impact of Mutiny (1857), 51, 140n135 language of instruction, 133–4, 232 secular education, 51, 114, 145 Tagore’s views on, 143 teacher training, 232 India, infant schools British influences, 114–15, 138 buildings and sites, 138–9, 139 Catholic schools, 138 ‘Christianizing and civilizing,’ 117, 123, 145 clothing, 120, 134 CMS influence, 129 education of European children, 144n155 educational materials, 119, 130 first infant school, 112–17 gender restrictions, 131

268

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government reports on (1883, 1944), 140, 144, 146–7 historical sources, 112–13, 114–15, 133 historical trends, recent, 145–8 kindergartens, 140–45, 146 language of instruction, 119–20, 133–4 Macaulay’s views on, 124–5 monitors, 29, 133–4, 138–9 Montessori’s influence, 146 overview, 231–4 religious denominations, 130–31 social class, 141 See also Calcutta, India, infant schools; Carey, William India, infant schools and female education clothing, 136 Hindu girls, 138–9, 139 history, 129–30, 139 pedagogy, 132–3 student support for mission, 137, 139 teachers, 131, 135, 137 See also Calcutta, India, schools for females India, languages assistant teachers, 119–20 Bengali, 42, 119, 128–9, 133–4 English language instruction, 119–20, 132–4 Gujarati, 142, 146 itinerant preachers in Indian languages, 47, 47 Marathi, 42 Tamil, 42, 143 teachers’ resources in Indian languages, 138–9 India, missionaries attraction and resistance to, 145–6 female education, 131, 139 first Baptist missionary, 25–6 first Scottish missionary to India, 35, 133 historical background, 41–4, 43, 46–7 impact of Mutiny (1857), 34, 51 institutional presence, 38–9, 51 itinerant preachers, 47, 47 mission schools and stations, 38–9, 48–9, 49, 140 orphan schools, 131, 132, 134–5, 137 publications, 114–15

religious denominations, 130–31 remote areas, 145 separate churches, 34–5, 48–9 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5 Zenana work with elite women, 49–51 See also Carey, William Indian, as term, 10, 17 The Indian Kindergarten (Gillingham), 143 The Indian Normal School and Instruction Society, London, England, 50 ‘Indienne du Coromandel’ (Grasset de Saint-Sauveur), 14 indigenous people agency, xviii, xx, 3–4, 31, 32–6, 40 colonialism and, xvii–xxii health and education, xx–xxii indigenous, as term, 16–17 Rousseau’s ‘noble savages,’ 23–4, 27, 28 indigenous people as converts ‘downward filtration theory,’ 35–6 impact of political events, 34 roles in church hierarchy, 33 seminaries for indigenous preachers, 157–8, 173–4, 174 separation from original community, 48–9, 53–4, 59–60, 137 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5, 56, 153, 173–4, 174 ‘upward fulfilment’ doctrine, 35–6 industrial schools. See residential schools; New Lanark school, Scotland Infant Education (Wilderspin), 109, 186 The Infant School Manual (Howland), 164–5, 165 Infant School Society, England, 88, 108 infant schools age ranges, 232, 234 assumption of disorder at home, 109–10 ‘Christianizing and civilizing,’ 1, 7, 117, 123, 145, 173 colonialism and, xvii–xxii disorderly home assumption, 8 diversity of backgrounds, 234 educational materials, 231–2 Enlightenment and, 1, 4, 5–9

Index impact on parents, 7, 108, 173, 236 outside educational mainstream, 185 overview, 69, 231–5 phrenology’s influence, 93–7, 169 for prevention of social ills, 81, 85, 228–9 Wilderspin on value of, 228–9 See also buildings and sites for infant schools; Canada, infant schools; factory schools; India, infant schools; New Zealand, infant schools; pedagogy; ‘the poor’ and education; United States, infant schools infant schools, Great Britain buildings and sites, 89, 90, 91 Froebel’s influence, 139, 140 low cost instruction of large groups, 97 overview, 1, 231–5 statistics, 114 urban infant schools, 84–9, 124–5 See also Lancaster, Joseph; New Lanark school; Owen, Robert; ‘the poor’ and education; teachers’ resources; Wilderspin, Samuel Ireland, infant school, 229 Iroquois, 14 itinerant preachers in Canada, 58 in India, 47, 47 in New Zealand, 36, 37 Jackson, Eleanor, 35 Jamaica, factory school for slaves, 83, 230 Jenkins, Kuni, 19, 64, 189, 214 Jesuit missionaries, Canada, 51–6 Johnson, John, 159, 181 Johnston, Anna, 18, 112 Jones, Alison, 19, 64 Jones, Peter, 152–3, 156–7, 160–61, 173, 177 Kaitaia, New Zealand, 198–9, 219 Kamptee, India, 130 Kanpur, India, 121 Kaur, Baljit, 19 Kawakawa, New Zealand, 188 Kemp, Charlotte, 200 Kendall, Thomas, 63–6, 186, 192

269

Kent, Eliza, 50–51 Kerikeri, New Zealand, 190, 200 Kindergarten Teaching in India (Brander), 143 kindergartens in Canada, 181–2 in England, 139, 140, 142 Froebel’s influence, 139, 140 in India, 140–45, 146 in New Zealand, 222, 223 subjects and lessons, 141–2, 144 teacher training, 140, 141–4, 146 Kirby, Peter, 84 Krishna (Hinduism), 44–5, 45 Kumar, Krishna, 116 Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education, Calcutta, 49–50 Lahaina, Hawaii, 159–60, 165, 175–6 Laing, Miss (Calcutta teacher), 134–5, 137 Lanark school. See New Lanark school Lancaster, Joseph discipline by student jury, 98 gallery designs, 105–6 influence in Hawaii, 160, 165 influence in India, 139n134 influence in North America, 158, 160, 170, 171 influence on Owen, 71, 73 monitorial schools, 29, 73, 88, 160, 171 Lancastrian Society, 7, 29 languages use in Canada, 153, 172–3 use for conversion, 4 See also India, languages; Māori literacy; reading and writing instruction Leigh Smith, Benjamin, 85, 87, 88 Le Jeune, Paul, 54–5 literacy. See reading and writing instruction Locke, John child development theory, 22–3, 28, 197 on dance education, 76 Enlightenment discoveries, 9–10 influence in New Zealand, 197 London, England, infant schools, 83–8, 89, 102

270

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London Infant School Society, 84, 117 London Missionary Society (LMS) history, 26 in New Zealand, 62 popular ‘savagery’ scenes, 13 roles of ‘native’ converts in, 33 single female missionaries, 39–40 in South Africa, 230 Lorette, Quebec, 55, 56 Lunar Society, 24 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 124–5, 234 Mackenzie, Colin and Helen, 133–5, 137 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 172 Mackinac Island, Lake Huron, 161, 163 MacLean, Hope, 157, 159, 177, 179 Macnab, Henry Grey, 78 Madras, India historical background, 41–4 kindergartens, 141, 142, 144 monitorial schools, 29 teacher training, 142–3 Maketū, New Zealand, 204 Malthusian population theory, 86 Manitoulin Island, Canada, 176 A Manual of Instruction for Infants’ Schools (Wilson), 90 Māori assimilation resistance, 64 avid and able learners, 63, 64, 66, 215, 219 clothing by missionaries, 3, 64, 188, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197–8, 200–202, 208 converts, 67, 202 female teachers, 40, 200–203, 207 health, xx–xxi, 190, 206 historical background, 60, 220 Māori, as term, 10, 17 Pākehā child captives, 195–6 population, 60, 202, 222 travel literature, 13, 14 tribal groups, 60 view of missionaries, 68 See also New Zealand; Paihia mission, New Zealand; Treaty of Waitangi; Waimate mission Māori culture aggression, 63, 195–6, 197, 198

cannibalism, 204 childrearing practices, 60, 195, 198, 204–5, 207, 208, 220, 227 fishing, 204–5 girls clothing, 66 mothers and babies, 193, 194 swings, 232, 233 traditional knowledge, 60, 62 traditional religion, 67 tribal conflicts, 198–9, 203–4 Māori literacy able and avid learners, 65–8, 186, 191, 205, 206, 212, 220 educational materials, 65, 68, 191, 194, 206–7, 214 female interest in, 191, 193, 194, 213–14, 214 government policies (after 1850s), 222–4 language use, 19, 68, 186, 206–7 missionary printing press, 68, 211, 212 statistics, 202 teaching one another, 68, 190–91, 220 use in everyday life, 19, 68, 206–7 Māori Sovereignty (Awatere), 223 maps. See geography instruction Maraetai, New Zealand, 207 marching. See physical movement Marksman, Peter, 159 Marsden, Samuel, 62–4, 67–8, 186, 192, 198, 203 Marshall, Charles, 195–6 Matamata, New Zealand, 203 mathematics instruction educational materials, 99–100, 100, 164–5, 165, 171 in Great Britain, 99–100, 100, 104 in India, 128 in New Zealand, 215, 218 in North America, 164–5, 165, 169, 171 Matthews, Joseph and Mary Ann, 196–9, 219 Maunsell, Robert, 207 May, Andrew, 15 Mayo, Charles and Elizabeth, 92–3 Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (Rennell), 11, 11 mentally ill children, 103

Index Merrill, Moses and Eliza, 163, 167 Methodists camp meetings, 153 denominational competition, 62 history, 26, 56 missionary strategies, 56, 156, 158, 173–4 teacher training, 158–9 See also Case, William; Grape Island mission missionaries civilizing of ‘noble savages,’ 27 colonialism and moral missions, xvi–xix domestic life models, 38–9, 41 evangelical child model and Original Sin, 227, 228 evangelical societies, 21, 25–7 evangelism and Enlightenment, 8, 27 evangelism and secular focus, 32, 38, 40 family units and helpers, 30–32 female roles, 30, 31, 38–41 females, increase in, 31, 40 gender and empire, 32n53 institutional presence, 38–9, 51 Locke’s influence on evangelicals, 28 ‘native agency’ and, 31, 32–4 personal backgrounds, 31 self-sustaining missions, 30–31 socializing children vs. re-socializing adults, 58–9 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5, 56, 153, 173–4, 174 training, 39, 46 See also Canada, missionaries; India, missionaries; itinerant preachers; missionary societies; missionary texts; New Zealand, missionaries Missionary Magazine and Chronicle (LMS), 13, 18 ‘A Missionary Map of North America’, 52 The Missionary Register (CMS), 18, 58–9, 185 missionary societies in Canada, 26 colonial vs. local projects, 27–31 debates on ‘too much civilizing,’ 28

271

early history, 25–7 for education of females, 40 educational materials, 29–30 in Great Britain, 25–7, 50 humanitarian causes, 21, 56 in India, 117–19, 121–3, 126, 129 in United States, 26, 159–60 See also Church Missionary Society; London Missionary Society; Methodists; missionary texts; Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society missionary texts absence of female perspective, 40, 185 absence of indigenous perspective, 18–19, 40 on Hinduism, 44–7, 45 interpretation of, 17–18, 112–13, 185 missionaries as explorers, 13, 36, 37 on New Zealand missions, 184, 185–6 as pedagogical clearinghouse, 29–30 See also historical sources on infant schools; travel literature Mississauga Ojibwa, 52, 149–50, 152 See also Grape Island mission Mohawk Village, Grand River, Canada, 57, 157, 163 monitors in infant schools bridge of gaps in culture and language, 232 in Great Britain, 73, 88 in Hawaii, 160, 165 in India, 29, 133–4, 138–9 in New Zealand, 200 in North America, 158, 160, 170, 171 overview, 29, 232 phrenologists’ views on, 96 See also Lancaster, Joseph Montessori education, India, 145–6 Moon, Paul, 204 More, Hannah, 28 Morgan, John and Maria, 208 Mount Elgin Institute, Ontario, 178 Mundy, Louisa, 137–8 music and dance instruction ages of children, 80 gallery lessons, 107–8 in Great Britain, 73, 74, 76, 80, 87 hymns, 84, 134, 169

272

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods in India, 127, 128, 129 Locke’s views on, 76 in New Zealand, 212, 214–15, 217, 218 nursery rhymes, 127, 128, 129 phrenologists’ views on, 95 pleasure principle, 76 teachers and piano players, 76, 107 in Trinidad, 84 types of dances, 74, 75–6 See also physical movement

National Education Society (NES), 29–30, 67, 232 ‘native,’ as term, 17 natural history instruction in Canada, 172 in India, 133–4 in North America, 73, 74, 169 needlework instruction in Canada, 176, 178 in New Zealand, 214–15, 218 New Credit River, Ontario, 173, 178 New Eagley mills, Bolton, England, 82 New Lanark school, Scotland ages of children, 72–3, 78, 79, 80, 81 buildings and site, 72–3, 74, 75, 77 child care service, 72–3, 77–8, 86 compulsory attendance, 86 discipline, 75, 76, 77, 95 educational materials, 77, 78 employment preparation, 72, 78, 80–82 Gaelic-speaking children, 230 geography instruction, 80 music and dance, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80 overview, 15, 72–3, 77 phrenologists’ views on, 96 playgrounds, 77, 78, 79, 102 reading skills, 79, 80 tourist attraction, 73, 75, 76 uniforms, 74, 75, 76 See also Owen, Robert A New View of Society (Owen), 15, 71, 78, 81 New York Infant School Society, 161, 165 New Zealand Cook’s exploration, 10, 188 health of indigenous people, xx–xxi historical background, 5–6, 8, 16, 60, 62, 192–3, 219, 221

historical background, map (1836), 61 historical trends, recent, 219–24 travel literature, 3, 13, 14, 36, 37, 195–6 See also Māori; Treaty of Waitangi New Zealand, education adult females, 213–14 domestic skills, 188–90, 193, 195 examinations, 66–7, 190 government policies (after 1850s), 221–4 kindergartens, 222, 223 residential schools, 206 separate schools for Māori, 198 New Zealand, infant schools British influences, 168, 172, 186, 202, 214–15 charity school model, 64 examinations, 66–7, 190 historical sources on, 184, 185–6, 188, 202 learning as pleasure, 202 Māori female teachers, 40, 200–203, 207 overview, 231–4 Wilderspin’s influence, 186, 198 See also Paihia mission; Waimate mission New Zealand, missionaries civilization before Christianization, 63 CMS missionaries, 62–7, 184, 185, 202 denominational competition, 62, 205 domestic skills, 188–90 ‘fenced’ boundaries, 189–90, 220 first British Anglican bishop, 210–11 first Māori Anglican bishop, 34 French missionaries, 62, 205 itinerant preachers, 36, 37 printing press, 68, 211, 212 separation from converts, 35, 185–6, 189, 192 statistics, 62, 202 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5 WMS missionaries, 62 Ngā Puhi people, New Zealand, 60, 63–6, 189 See also Māori; Paihia mission; Waimate mission

Index Ngāti Ruanui, New Zealand, 195 Ngauhuruhuru, New Zealand, 208 Oberlin, J.F., 77 Oddie, Geoffrey, 46 Ojibwa. See Mississauga Ojibwa On the Importance of Educating the Infant Children of the Poor (Wilderspin), 88, 229 Otamatea, New Zealand, 220–21 Otawhao, New Zealand, 208 ‘the Other’ colonialism and, xvi–xvii Foucault and social power, xv–xvi ‘heathens’ and ‘paupers’ and ‘savages,’ 28, 39, 69 representations, 3 re-socialization and respect for, 237 social hierarchies and, xix See also ‘Christianizing and civilizing’; ‘Englishness’; ‘the poor’ and education Otumoetai mission, New Zealand, 204–6 Outram, Dorinda, 5, 7, 9, 25 Owen, Robert child labour policy, 80–81 comparison with Wilderspin, 89 de Fellenberg’s influence, 77 on education of young, 80–81, 85–6 Enlightenment ideas, 13, 15, 71 Lancaster’s influence, 71, 73 literacy and young children, 22 malleability of children, 71, 76, 85, 94 A New View of Society, 15, 71, 78, 81 Pestalozzi’s influence, 24, 77, 92 phrenology and, 94 play and pleasure principle, 71–2, 202 prevention principle, 71–2 social relationships, 71–2, 80, 91 See also New Lanark school Owen, Robert Dale (son), 74, 76, 77 Pacific Islands region CMS early missions, 62 Hawaii, 159–60, 165, 175–6 research needed, 235–6 Paihia mission, New Zealand buildings and site, 187 domestic skills, 188–90, 193, 195

273

girls school, 187–8 infant school, 185–6, 189, 202–3 overview, 66–7, 67, 185–7, 193, 202–3 Pākehā, as term, 10 Patagonia, infant school students, 229 Pearson, John Dorking, 138 pedagogy disregard for indigenous pedagogies, 227–8 Enlightenment theories, 22–5, 71, 227–8 kindness principle, 71 Lancaster’s monitors, 29 malleability of children, 71, 76, 92 missionary publications on, 29–30 overview, 2, 23–5, 92, 227, 231–2 Owen’s social relationships, 71–2, 80, 91 Pestalozzi’s object pictures, 24–5, 92–3, 175, 232 phrenology’s influence, 93–7, 169 pleasure in learning, 23–4, 25, 92 rote learning, 24, 74, 104, 228 Swedenborgian ideas, 93–4 Wilderspin’s system, 88–92, 231 See also child development theory; discipline and behaviour management; educational materials; teachers’ resources; and specific subjects Perkins, W.H. and Ann, 119–22 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich influence in Great Britain, 24–5, 92 influence in North America, 169, 172, 175 object pictures, 24–5, 92–3, 175, 232 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 160–61, 165, 167–70 Philip, John, 230 phrenology and infant schools, 93–7, 169 physical movement marching exercises, 76, 80, 87–8, 107, 129, 165 mental development and, 101–2, 103, 104 in Wilderspin’s and Stow’s systems, 95, 99 See also music and dance instruction; playgrounds

274

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plantation factory schools, 82–4 playgrounds absence in Canada, India, and New Zealand, 215, 232, 233 discipline, 97–9 equipment (bricks, ropes, balls), 99–101, 101 equipment (swings and poles), 100–101, 101–4, 232 gender differences, 101, 102 in Great Britain, 77–9, 88–9, 90, 91, 100–101, 102, 231–2 mathematics activities, 99–100, 100, 104 overview, 97–104, 100–101, 231–2 in Philadelphia, 170 phrenologists’ views on, 95 rows of children, 105 Plenty, Bay of, New Zealand, 206 Polack, Joel, 198 Pompallier, Jean-Baptiste, 62 Poona, India, 130 ‘the poor’ and education charity school movement, 27–8, 64, 188 disorderly home assumption, 8, 108–9, 236 elision of ‘heathen’ and ‘pauper,’ 28 in Great Britain, 84–9 in India, 115, 125, 133n108 impact on parents, 108, 231, 236 Macaulay’s views on, 124–5 overview, 1, 27–8, 69, 234–5 school rules, 109–10, 169 in South Africa, 230 in United States, 160–61, 164–5, 165–6, 167–70 See also Calcutta, India, schools for females; St. Mary’s Infant School, Walthamstow, London Porter, Andrew, 6, 26–7, 33 Porter, Eliza Chappell, 161, 163, 167 Porter, Roy, 13, 15 ‘Portrait of Masters Thomas and John Quick’ (Hoare), 9 Practical Education (Edgeworth), 24–5, 97–8 Princeton, N.J., infant school, 176

‘Procession of a Hindoo Woman to the Funeral Pile of Her Husband’ (Hodges), 12, 12–13 Puckey, William and Mathilda, 199 Puriri, New Zealand, 200–201 Qu’Appelle Industrial School, Saskatchewan, 181 Quebec, Huron missions, 51, 53–6 Quebec City, Quebec, 54 Quinte, Bay of, Canada, 56, 149–50, 149–52, 151–2 race and ethnicity childhood category and difference, 227, 232 English as ‘white,’ 41 ‘higher culture’ impact on ‘lower culture,’ 56 in India, terminology, 50n121 in New Zealand, 68, 222–3 racial hierarchies, 35, 41, 68, 221 re-socialization and respect for difference, 237 in South Africa, 35, 230 stereotypes in citizenship education, 74–5 in ‘three-self formula,’ 35 Wilderspin’s racial hierarchies, 228–9 Raikes, Robert, 27 Rangihoua, New Zealand, 63–6, 186, 192 Rayman, Ronald, 160 reading and writing instruction Enlightenment ideas, 22 in Great Britain, 88 in India, 128, 132–3, 138 in New Zealand, 68, 191, 197, 206, 214, 214–15 in North America, 160 repetition of words, 175 See also Māori literacy reading and writing materials alphabet frames, 88 books, 22, 68, 128, 132, 197 copy-books, 132 as items of exchange, 68 letter cards, 128 local sources, 206–7, 231–2 pictures with words, 175

Index printing press in New Zealand, 68, 211, 212 sand writing, 138, 160, 206 slates, 68, 132, 191, 197 Red River settlement, Manitoba, 57–60, 59 Reel, Estelle, 175 religious instruction Bible study, 64, 145, 157, 169, 174 in Canada, 157, 163, 169, 172, 173 catechism, 27, 134, 185–6, 199, 234 in Great Britain, 24 hymns, 84, 134, 169, 229 in India, 134 literacy instruction for conversion, 163, 173 model of ‘evangelical child,’ 227–8 in New Zealand, 64, 215 use of indigenous languages, 4 Rennell, James, 11, 11 Report on the Affairs of the Indians in Canada (Bagot Report), 176 Report on Public Instruction in Upper Canada (Ryerson), 102–3 residential schools in India, 132, 134–5, 137–8 indigenous health and, xx–xxi, 206 in New Zealand, 212, 221 in Switzerland, 83, 85, 88, 92, 177 in United States, 180–81 See also Waimate mission, New Zealand residential schools, Canada American influences, 180–82 church-run residential schools, 60, 181–2 early industrial schools, 176–80, 182 at Grape Island mission for girls, 132 at Red River settlement, 57–60, 59 resources for teachers. See educational materials; teachers’ resources Rice Lake, Ontario, 159, 172–3 Ridgway, R.B., 84, 91 Riggs, Mary, 156 Robertson, Archibald, 165 Roman Catholic missionaries in Canada, 51–6, 181 in India, 130–31, 138 in New Zealand, 62, 205 Rosenberg, Janis, 101, 103

275

rote learning. See pedagogy Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 22–5, 27–8 Ruatara, 63–4 Ruffee, C.A., 180–81 Russell, William, 175 Ryerson, Edway, 172 Ryerson, Egerton, 58, 102–3, 172n110, 177 Said, Edward, xvi–xvii Saidapet, Madras, India, 142–3 St. Lawrence region, Canada, 150–53 See also Grape Island mission St. Mary’s Infant School, Walthamstow, London, 88, 104–5, 106, 108–9, 229 Sainte-Marie mission, Midland, Ontario, 53–4 Salmon, David, 228 Salmond, Anne, 10 Sanderson, Michael, 82 Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), 159–60, 165, 175–6 Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, 163 ‘Sauvagesse de la Nouvelle Zelande,’ 14 ‘Sauvagesse Iroquois’ (Grasset de Saint-Sauveur), 14 ‘savage,’ as term, 17 school supplies. See educational materials science. See natural history instruction Scotland, first missionary. See Duff, Alexander Scotland, infant schools. See New Lanark school, Scotland Scotland, missionary societies, 26 Seaborne, Malcolm, 105 Sedra, Paul, 8, 29–30 Seguin, Edward, 103 Sekundra, India, 38 Selwyn, George Augustus, 210–11, 212 Semple, Neil, 153 Semple, Rhonda, 39–40 Serampore, India, 26 sewing. See needlework instruction Shahwahnekzhih (Henry Steinhauer), 159, 160–61, 162, 174, 174 Shefrin, Jill, 231 Sillery mission, Quebec City, 54 Silver, Harold, 71, 89, 94, 228 Simon, Judith, 206, 222–3

276

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Simpson, James, 93 Sinclair, Dr., 220 singing. See music and dance instruction sites of infant schools. See buildings and sites for infant schools Smith, William, 158–9 social class childhood category and difference, 227, 232 ‘downward filtration theory,’ 35–6 missionary backgrounds, xix, 28, 31 re-socialization for middle-class values, 109 urban infant schools, 170, 235 Zenana work in India, 49–51 See also ‘the poor’ and education social justice education, colonialism, and, xviii education of poor children, 108–9 Enlightenment education and, 8 health of indigenous people, xx–xxi See also ‘the poor’ and education Society of Jesus missionaries, Canada, 51–6 South Africa, 35, 117, 183–4 Southey, Robert, 75, 79 spelling. See reading and writing instruction spinning. See needlework instruction Spitalfields Infant School, London, 97, 117n22, 167 Spratt, John, 130 Stack, James West, 202, 206 Stanley, Brian, 27 Steinhauer, Henry, 159, 160–61, 162, 174, 174 Stephens, Laura, 56 Stinson, Joseph, 174 Stockton, Betsey, 159–60, 163–5, 170, 175–6 Stoler, Ann Laura, xviii–xix, 135 Stone, J.J., 144 The Story of My Life (Ryerson), 58 Stow, David galleries, 91, 105–6 phrenology and, 95 playgrounds, 91, 99, 101, 101 Summerfield, John, 159 Sunday, John, 152, 154

Sunday school movement, 27–8 supplies, school. See educational materials Swedenborgians and infant schools, 93–4, 167 Switzerland boarding schools, 85, 92, 177 See also de Fellenberg, Phillip Emanuel; Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich A System of Education for the Young (Wilderspin), 99, 100, 104, 107 Tagore, Rabindranath, 143 Taua, Meri and Hoani, 200 Taylor, Alan, 150 Taylor, Richard, 195 Te Kohanga Reo National Trust Board, 223–4 Te Papa, New Zealand, 203–4, 212 teacher-student relationships gallery influences, 104–8, 106–8 kindness and love, 71, 109, 131 rows of children, 105 See also discipline and behaviour management teacher training of female missionaries, 39 in India, 50, 120–21, 130, 132, 134, 140–44, 232 kindergarten training, 140, 141–4, 146 shortages of teachers, 231 in United States, 158–9, 168–9 in Wilderspins’ system, 231 See also monitors in infant schools; Wilderspin, Samuel teachers’ resources building and site plans in, 89, 90, 91 in Indian languages, 138–9 missionary periodicals, 29–30 in North America, 164, 168–9 overview of, 88–91 school rules in, 109–10, 169 Watts’ child’s catechism, 134, 185–6, 234 See also educational materials; Wilderspin, Samuel, works teaching devices. See educational materials theosophy, 92 This Horrid Practice (Moon), 204

Index Thomas, John, 26 Tinevelly, India, 130 The Training System (Stow), 101, 101 Tranquebar, India, 30n43 travel literature on Canada, 54–5 Cook’s voyages, 10, 12, 204 on India, 11–13, 12, 133–5, 136, 137 infant school representations, 3 influence on Enlightenment, 5 missionary publications, 18, 54–5 on New Zealand, 3, 36, 37, 195–6 tales of Hinduism, 44–7, 45 tales of itinerant preachers, 36, 37 tales of savagery, 12, 12–13, 195–6 Travels in India (Hodges), 12, 12–13 Treatise on the Management of Infant Schools (Goyder), 169 Treaty of Waitangi history, 6, 192–3, 208–9 interpretation disputes, 209, 223–4 land wars, 6, 34, 219, 221–2 mission closures after, 199, 209, 219 Trevelyan, Charles, 125 Trimmer, Sarah, 28 Trinidad, 84 Tschurenev, Jana, 28 Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda, 11–12 Turner, John Mathias, 112, 113–14 Turton, H.H., 220 United States Canadian visits with missionaries, 160–61 denominational competition, 163 female missionaries, 40 Indian education, 180–81, 183 missionary societies, 159–60 monitorial schools, 160 residential schools, 180–81 seminaries, 158–9, 160 ‘three-self formula’ for local religious authority, 33–5 United States, infant schools African American children, 160–61, 165, 170, 176, 235 British influences, 77, 160 historical trends, recent, 183 history, 165, 165–6, 167–70, 175, 183

277

in New York, 164–5 overview, 234–5 performance at White House, 168 in Philadelphia, 160–61, 165, 167–70 research needed, 236 teachers’ resources, 168 See also Stockton, Betsey urban infant schools. See ‘the poor’ and education van Kirk, Sylvia, 135 Vardon, George, 177 Venn, Henry, 33, 36, 56 Vincent Square, London, 84–8, 89, 102 Vizagapatnam, India, 121 voluntary societies, 21 See also missionary societies Waikato River, New Zealand, 207, 208, 221–2 Waimate mission, New Zealand attendance register, 215, 216, 217 buildings and site, 3–4, 210, 210–11, 214, 218, 218 clothing, 3, 197–8 day schedules, 214–15, 217 gallery, 3, 211, 218, 218 historical sources, 197, 202 language use, 211–12 overview, 196–9, 210, 218–19 printing press, 68, 211, 212 reading and writing, 197, 213–14, 214 relocation to Auckland, 217 See also Bambridge, William and Sophie Waitangi, New Zealand, 219 Wales, infant school, 230 Walker, Ranginui, 64, 67, 68 Walthamstow infant school, London, 88, 104–5, 106, 108–9, 229 Watts’ child’s catechism, 134, 185–6, 199, 234 Weitbrecht, J.J., 131, 135 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMS), 26, 62, 178 West, John, 57–60, 59 West Indies infant schools, 83–4, 228–30, 235–6 research needed, 235–6

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Westminster Free Day Infant Asylum, London, England, 84–8, 89 White Earth Boarding School, Minnesota, 180–81 Whitefish Lake, Alberta, 174, 174 Wilcox, Eliza Merrill, 163 Wilderspin, Samuel comparison with Owen, 89 galleries, 89, 90, 91, 104–8, 107, 218, 218 at Infant School Society, 88 influence in India, 132 influence in New Zealand, 186, 202, 218, 218 influence in North America, 164, 169 overview of system, 88–91, 231 pedagogy, 89, 92, 202, 228–9 phrenologists’ views and, 95–6 playgrounds, 89, 90, 91, 98–104, 100 religious instruction, 88 rows of children, 105 school rules, 109–10, 169 schools in Wales, 230 Swedenborgian ideas, 93 at Westminster Infant Asylum, 87 Wilderspin, Samuel, works overview, 88 Early Discipline Illustrated, 230 Infant Education, 109, 186 On the Importance of Educating the Infant Children of the Poor, 88, 229 A System of Education for the Young, 99, 100, 104, 107 Wildman, James Beckford, 83, 230 Williams, Henry (William’s brother) at Paihia, 66–7, 67, 186–7, 193 at Puriri, 200–201

translator of Treaty of Waitangi, 208 at Waimate, 210, 212, 219 Williams, Jane (William’s wife; sister to Marianne), 24–5, 187–8 Williams, Marianne (Henry’s wife; sister to Jane), 25, 66, 187–8, 212 Williams, William (Henry’s brother), 68, 185, 215 Wilson, Ann (Daniel’s daughter), 117 Wilson, Daniel (William’s brother), 48, 117, 123, 145 Wilson, Isaac, 132 Wilson, Joseph, 85, 88 Wilson, Kathleen, 225, 226 Wilson, Mary Ann (Isaac’s wife), 50, 131–2, 134, 231 Wilson, William (Daniel’s brother) career, 117 galleries, 104–5, 106 on ‘instruction by amusement,’ 92 playgrounds, 101 teachers’ resources, 88, 90 at Walthamstow, 88, 104–5, 106, 108–9, 229 Winterer, Caroline, 234–5 Wise, Thomas A., 124, 125, 127–8 Wolff, Larry, 13 Wood, Charles, 51 Wright, David, 173 writing. See reading and writing instruction Yate, William, 193, 195 Young, Mary, 71 ‘The Young School Mistress’ (Chardin), 22, 23 Zenana work, India, 49–51