The Rise, Success and Dismantling of New Zealand's Anglican-led Māori Education System, 1814–64

Abstract

Anglican missionaries, serving under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), were the first Europeans to settle in New Zealand. Within months of arriving in the country in 1814, they began to convert the language of the indigenous Māori into a written form in order to produce religious texts that would assist with Māori education and conversion. The CMS missionaries also established schools for Māori which later grew into a de facto state education system until the colonial government accelerated its plans for a secular school regime from the mid-1840s. Despite the sometimes awkward religious and cultural entanglements that accompanied missionary proselytizing in this era, the mission schools established by the CMS flourished in the succeeding decades, elevating Māori literacy levels and serving as a highly effective tool of Anglican evangelization. This article traces the arc of the CMS mission schools from their inception in 1814 to their demise in the early 1860s, a period during which the British, and later New Zealand, government's stance towards the mission schools went from ambivalence, through assistance, to antipathy.