The Contribution of the Christian Missions to British Colonial Education

Abstract

The English have traditionally encouraged the establishment and maintenance of schools based on private initiative—the so-called voluntary principle. It was this tradition coupled to the philanthropic movement of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries that saw Christian mission schooling firmly established throughout India and the British colonial empire by the 1920s.In 1854, in India, and in 1925, in Africa, Christian missions were given official recognition and made eligible for government financial assistance. The ensuing partnership proved to be a mixed blessing. The Colonial Office was supportive of mission schools as long as they conformed to broad educational principles, and Colcnial administrations saw their role, at least until 1945, as supplementing rather than replacing mission schools. There were, however, frequent tensions in the partnership over matters of control and accountability, especially at the local level where governors and bishops often eyed each other suspiciously. Perhaps even more significant were the ongoing conflicts between rival Protestant denominations and the almost universal distrust of Roman Catholic missions by their Protestant neighbours.It has been claimed that mission schools had a divisive effect on colonial society because they cut across caste, race, social class and gender and produced new elites. It is certainty true that they exerted an influence on national life far in excess of their numbers. Even now, it is still difficult to make an accurate assessment of their overall contribution to colonial education. The expedient nature of mission schooling as a means to an end needs to be balanced by the fact that the missions were the first to take an active interest in the welfare of native peoples. The missionaries have been criticised as agents of cultural imperialism but it is equally true that most of them were devout people who gave them lives to what they were convinced was a worthwhile course. Whatever their shortcomings, just as they had done in England in the early nineteenth century, they laid the basis for all the education systems in Britain's diverse andfarflung colonial empire.