Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830-1910 - Paperback

by Felicity Jensz (Author)

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

Back Jacket

The nineteenth century saw dramatic change in the self-assumed role of evangelical Protestant mission schools as one of the primary institutions of moral reform in the nineteenth-century British colonial world. Drawing on key moments in the development of missionary education from the 1830s to the beginning of the twentieth century, this study examines the changing ideologies behind establishing mission schools and the provision of 'liberal and comprehensive' education in shaping non-Europeans into 'useful' and 'modern' members of empire. It examines the Negro Education Grant in the West Indies, the Aborigines Select Committee (British settlements), and missionary conferences as well as drawing on local voices and contexts from Southern Africa, British India and Sri Lanka to demonstrate the changing expectations for, engagement with, and ideologies circulating around mission schools resulting from government policies and local responses. By the turn of the twentieth century, many colonial governments had encroached upon missionary schooling to such an extent that the symbiosis that had allowed missionary groups autonomy at the beginning of the century had morphed into an entanglement that secularised mission schools. The spread of 'Western modernity' through mission schools in British colonies impacted upon local cultures and societies. It also threatened Christian religious moral authority, leading missionary societies by the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 to question the ambivalent legacy of missionary schooling and to fear for the morality and religious sensibilities of their pupils and indeed for morality within Britain and the Empire.

Author Biography

Felicity Jensz is a historian in the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the University of M?ster, Germany