Abstract
The Koningin Wilhelmina School was a prestigious Dutch-language Protestant school for the daughters of the Javanese nobility in Yogyakarta. Opened in 1907 through the efforts of a group of elite Protestant women in the Netherlands, supporters of the Dutch Reformed mission saw the school as a tool to reform the spiritual and moral lives of young Javanese girls. At the same time, the school presented local parents with an opportunity to anchor their daughters more firmly in the Javanese colonial elite. This article investigates how the Dutch teachers at the school tried to provide their Javanese students with a surrogate Christian family to create distance from their milieu of origin. An analysis of letters by Koningin Wilhelmina School graduates shows how this particular effort to partly remove children from their own culture opened the door for highly diverse life trajectories. De Koningin Wilhelmina School was een prestigieuze school voor de dochters van de Javaanse adel in Yogyakarta, met Nederlands als voertaal. De onderwijsinstelling, die in 1907 geopend was met hulp van een groep vrouwen uit de Nederlandse protestante elite, werd door de gereformeerde missie gezien als een instrument om het spirituele en morele karakter van Javaanse meisjes te hervormen. Tegelijkertijd gaf de school ouders uit de hogere Javaanse klasse de mogelijkheid om hun dochters deel uit te laten maken van de Nederlandstalige koloniale elite. In dit artikel wordt onderzocht hoe Nederlandse leraressen op deze school hun leerlingen van een alternatieve christelijke familie probeerden te voorzien, om zo afstand te creeren tussen de kinderen en hun oorspronkelijke milieu. Een analyse van brieven van oud-studenten van de Koningin Wilhelmina School laat zien hoe deze poging om kinderen deels van hun eigen cultuur te vervreemden uiteindelijk voor deze alumni mogelijkheden creeerde voor zeer uiteenlopende levenskeuzes.
Highlights
The Koningin Wilhelmina School was a prestigious Dutch-language Protestant school for the daughters of the Javanese nobility in Yogyakarta
Opened in 1907 through the efforts of a group of elite Protestant women in the Netherlands, supporters of the Dutch Reformed mission saw the school as a tool to reform the spiritual and moral lives of young Javanese girls
An analysis of letters by Koningin Wilhelmina School graduates shows how this particular effort to partly remove children from their own culture opened the door for highly diverse life trajectories
Summary
Wellensiek, the Javanese Marjani fondly remembered her years at the Koningin Wilhelmina School (Queen Wilhelmina School, kws), a Dutch-language Protestant school for elite Javanese girls in the city of Yogyakarta. Dutch colonial actors used the schools for their attempts to reform Javanese family life following a particular European bourgeois – and, in the case of the kws, an explicitly Christian – model. Johanna Kuyper, a daughter of the prominent Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, started organising a support committee for the school after having worked as a nurse at the Protestant hospital in Yogyakarta.[15] Both Johanna Kuyper and her sister Henriëtte would remain central figures in fundraising efforts for the kws for years to come. The school was eventually able to attract considerable numbers of students precisely because the social position of certain priyayi groups was undergoing important changes at the beginning of the twentieth century
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