Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies by Helen May et al. (review)

In the nineteenth century, visitors to Robert Owen’s innovative school at New Lanark might have observed a striking sight: boys and girls—the children of factory workers, and perhaps destined for a life of factory labor themselves—dancing in flowing Roman togas. In an illustration of the scene (Empire, figure 2.1), ladies in bonnets and gentlemen in tailcoats watch the children caper barefoot across the floorboards in a vast schoolroom decorated with a giant map and outsized images of exotic jungle animals. The dancers’ unusual clothing reflects the influence of Bernard Christoph Faust, a medical doctor who advocated dressing children in Roman garb; in the tradition of Rousseau, Faust argued that the tight confines of adult clothing forced children’s bodies into unnatural postures that might impair healthy growth.

As the children in the illustration dance free and unconfined, they enact a Rousseauian pageant of “natural” education; “noble savages” unburdened by the constricting responsibilities and postures of adulthood, they have something in common with the proud and savage animals stalking freely across the wall. Yet the children at New Lanark were also taught during geography lessons to be grateful that they were civilized Christians and not “Cannibals or Hindoos” (qtd. in Empire 74). From this perspective, the images of globalism that decorate the walls—the map and the exotic animals—represent not icons to inspire, but rather obstacles to be mastered. John Locke had argued as early as 1693 that teaching children to dance exerted a civilizing influence. By taming their so-called savage impulses, the dancing children at New Lanark might also equip themselves for the imperialist and “civilizing” mission of taming the British colonial territories.

Such contradictions and complexities are at the heart of Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods, whose authors contend that English educational practices that had been developed to train working-class children at home were transplanted, sometimes with only a few modifications, to “civilize” children in the British colonies. This direct transfer of educational methods drew, of course, on widespread and disturbing assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. In his vast compendium London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew records his visits to the most impoverished neighborhoods of “darkest” London, drawing analogies between the poor in their urban jungle and the so-called primitive natives of the colonial territories. The British and Foreign Schools Society (founded in 1808 as the Lancastrian Society) incorporated this conflation of perspectives in its very name; the education of children in the colonies, like the education of the English working class, would be tailored to create selfdisciplined, respectful subjects, good Christians who never challenged the lessons of the colonizers. At the same time, this educational project would be viewed by its proponents as a liberating one, freeing “uncivilized” children from the shackles of ignorance and superstition. In fact, missionary teachers would sometimes embrace new, experimental, and supposedly enlightened approaches to education, similar to those developed at New Lanark.

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods tackles the difficult project of inscribing a narrative that was never fully recorded by those who strove to enact it. The school records, lesson plans, journals, and letters produced by English missionary teachers in the colonies generally obscured the effects and ramifications of their efforts, either willfully or as a result of their own confused agendas. Thus this monograph takes on a complex interdisciplinary project; it engages with nineteenth-century educational theory, missionary culture and evangelical doctrine, and an array of indigenous histories in order to trace what the authors describe as an “invisible” narrative, one that has been inscribed only in fragmentary form. Chronicling the founding and development of missionary schools in three British colonies from the 1820s through the 1850s, the authors, in their own words, open “a window” on “the momentous impact of the collision of ideas and consequences that resulted from missionary teaching and colonial conquest...