Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood) 3030990400, 9783030990404

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MIGRATION, PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Edited by Daniel Gerster · Felicity Jensz

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

Series Editors George Rousseau, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Laurence Brockliss, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no historical series on children/ childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the identity and attraction of the new discipline. Editorial Board Matthew Grenby (Newcastle) Colin Heywood (Nottingham) Heather Montgomery (Open) Hugh Morrison (Otago) Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany) Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford) Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) Lucy Underwood (Warwick) Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen)

Daniel Gerster · Felicity Jensz Editors

Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Editors Daniel Gerster Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

Felicity Jensz Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics (2060) The University of Münster Münster, Germany

ISSN 2634-6532 ISSN 2634-6540 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ISBN 978-3-030-99040-4 ISBN 978-3-030-99041-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: clu This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We conceived of the ideas behind this book over many coffees when we both were still located at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität (University of Münster, WWU) Münster, Germany. Our shared interests included education, religion, and gender as well as local, national, and transnational histories. After Daniel’s move to the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH), we continued our work on the project receiving generous funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) for a grant to hold an international conference. Additional funding for this conference was secured from the International Office of the WWU, and further support was offered through the DFG Excellence Strategy—Cluster of Excellence 2060 “Religion and Politics. Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation”—390726036. We had planned to hold the conference in Münster, Germany, in November 2020, however, the global Corona-19 pandemic hindered this and we were forced to move to an online conference. One of the benefits of this format is the ease at which one could bring people from various timezone together in one place, ensuring a much wider reach of scholarship. In our case, we worked over seven time zones in fifteen countries. This helped ensure that our volume was global in content and perspectives with chapters examining boarding schools in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. We were not able to include South America or Australasia in detail, however, we hope that this volume inspires others to fill this gap. Aside from the people who contributed to this volume, we would v

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also like to acknowledge the scholarly comments and insights from the following people who also attended the conference: Bettina Blum (Paderborn, Germany), Esbjörn Larsson (Uppsala, Sweden), Ulrich Leitner (Innsbruck, Austria), Melissa Parkhurst (Pullman, Washington, USA), Marleen Reichgelt (Nijmegen, Netherlands), Lena Ruessing (Cologne, Germany), Waltraud Schütz (Vienna, Austria), Linda Sue Warner and George S. Briscoe (Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma, USA). Our thanks are also extended to our editor, Emily Russell, at Palgrave Macmillan and the series editors of Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood for ensuring the smooth completion of this volume. Thanks to Ezra for choosing the cover art, and to Mark and Tobias for being there for us. Hamburg Münster

Daniel Gerster Felicity Jensz

Contents

1

Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz

1

Part I Elites 2

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4

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Including Émigrés and Excluding Americans? The Philadelphia Female Seminary of Madame Marie Rivardi (aka Maria von Born) Jonathan Singerton Artisans and Aristocracy: Industrial Boarding Schools for Elite Africans in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Africa Rebecca Swartz Nazi Elite Boarding Schools and the Attempted Creation of a New Class System Helen Roche Catholic Boarding Schools and the Re-making of the Spanish Right, 1900–1939 Till Kössler

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Part II Marginalised 6

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Prisoners of Education: Chiricahua Apaches, Schooling, and the Lived Experience of Settler Colonial Inclusion Janne Lahti

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Recasting Poor Children: Basel Mission Boarding Schools in Colonial Malabar Divya Kannan

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Soviet Boarding Schools and the Social Marginalisation of the Urban Poor, 1958–1991 Mirjam Galley

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Part III People and Networks 9

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Spatiality, Semiotics and the Cultural Shaping of Children: The Boarding School Experience in Colonial India, 1790–1955 Tim Allender

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Logics of Immersion: Lake Mohonk and the U.S. Colonial Boarding School Oli Charbonneau

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Living on the Fringes: Boarding Secondary Schools in Nigeria and the Paradox of Colonialism Ngozi Edeagu

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Part IV Practices and Processes 12

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Girls’ Bodies as a Site of Reform: The Roman Catholic Boarding Schools in Flores, Colonial Indonesia, c.1880s–1940s Kirsten Kamphuis ‘Just a Bit of Fun’: Recreation, Ritual, and Masculinity in Irish Boys’ Boarding Schools, 1800–1880 Mary Hatfield

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Subverting Exclusion and Oppression: Historical Perspectives of Student Experiences at Boarding Schools for the Deaf in German-Speaking Countries Anja Werner Bullying in the Name of Care: A Social History of ‘Homoing’ Among Students in Ghanaian Boarding Schools De-Valera N. Y. M. Botchway and Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten

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Part V Epilogue 16

Epilogue: New Directions in the History of Boarding Schools David M. Pomfret

Correction to: Subverting Exclusion and Oppression: Historical Perspectives of Student Experiences at Boarding Schools for the Deaf in German-Speaking Countries Anja Werner Index

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Notes on Contributors

Tim Allender is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published extensively on colonial India over the past 20 years. His most recent monograph Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932 (Manchester University Press, 2016) won the Anne Bloomfield Book Prize, awarded by the History of Education Society (UK). Tim has also since published three co-edited books on History Didactics, Transnational Femininity, and on Visual Educational History. He is currently writing a monograph on Roman Catholic Religiosity and Empire. Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten is a Master of Public Health student at the Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis, USA. He lectured psychology at Eswatini Medical Christian University, Eswatini and his interest interface public health and indigenous perspectives. He is a contributing co-author of Social Psychology. Global and Southern African Perspectives (2019) and the lead author of Suicide in Low-and MiddleIncome Countries in The Palgrave Handbook of Sociocultural Perspectives on Global Mental Health (2017). De-Valera N. Y. M. Botchway is currently the Head of the History Department at University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and Professor of History whose eclectic research interests converge in several fields of African and African Diaspora history and studies. His publications include Boxing is no Cakewalk! Azumah “Ring Professor” Nelson in the Social History of

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Ghanaian Boxing (NISC, 2019), New Perspectives of African Childhood (co-ed., Vernon Press, 2019), and Africa and the First World War (co-ed, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018). Oli Charbonneau is Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Their research focuses on colonial empire, transimperial and transnational exchanges, violence, and American power in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. They are the author of Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World (Cornell UP, 2020). Their recent articles appear in Modern American History (2021), The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2019), and Diplomatic History (2018). Ngozi Edeagu is a Ph.D. Researcher in African History at Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS), University of Bayreuth, Germany. She focuses on African, global and colonial history, print media, and knowledge-producing institutions. Her latest publication is, “Educating a Transnational Elite: United States University Scholarships for Nigerian Students (1960−1975)”, in Diasporas: circulations, migrations, historie, Special Issue: Les étudiantes africaines et la fabrique d’un monde postcolonial: circulations et transferts, no. 37 (2021): 79−94. For more see https://www.linkedin.com/in/nedeagu/ Mirjam Galley is a historian from Berlin, Germany. After studying history and English at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she worked as a lecturer at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, where she started her Ph.D. on residential care in the post-Stalinist USSR. She finished her Ph.D. at The University of Sheffield in 2019 (Routledge, 2021). She currently works as an editor and project manager for transcript publishing in Bielefeld, Germany. Daniel Gerster is a historian and Senior Researcher at the Research Centre for Contemporary History (Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte) in Hamburg (FZH). He received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His main areas of research are the history of gender, religion, and education in Germany and Europe in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is author of Friedensdialoge im Kalten Krieg. Eine Geschichte der Katholiken in der Bundesrepublik, 1957–1983 (Campus Verlag, 2012) and co-editor of God’s Own Gender? Masculinities in World Religions (Nomos, 2018). He is currently working on a

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comparative study on masculinity in British and German boarding schools between 1870 and 1930. Mary Hatfield is an Independent Scholar with prior posts held at the University of Oxford and University College Dublin. Her research centres on childhood, gender, and class in Ireland with an emphasis on middle-class education. She is the author of Growing up in NineteenthCentury Ireland: A Cultural History of Middle-Class Childhood and Gender (Oxford University Press, 2019), the editor of Happiness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2021) and has published articles in Gender & History, History of Education, and the Irish Economic and Social History Journal. Felicity Jensz is a historian, at the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the University of Münster, Germany. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research includes British and German colonial history, coloniality, missionary education, and media history. She has published numerous articles and chapters including articles in Gender & History, History of Education, and Postcolonial Studies. Her most recent monograph is Missionaries and Modernity (Manchester University Press, 2022). Currently, she is working on a monograph on the afterlives of German colonies. Kirsten Kamphuis is a Junior Researcher at the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the University of Münster, Germany, where she studies religious women’s print cultures in Indonesia between the 1920s and the 1960s. She received her Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is currently working on a book about girls’ education in the Dutch East Indies, and has published on this topic in International Review of Social History (2020), BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review (2020), and Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth (2022). Divya Kannan is Assistant Professor, Department of History, at Shiv Nadar University Delhi-NCR, India. She completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi (JNU) and is interested in histories of education, caste, childhood, gender, and labour. She is also the co-founder and co-convenor of the online Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC). Her recent publications include an article in The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (2021). Currently, she is working on a book based

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on her doctoral research on evangelical missions and the education of the poor in colonial Kerala. Till Kössler is Professor for the History of Education, Childhood, and Youth at Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. His research interests include Spanish History, the History of Childhood, the History of Authoritarianism and Fascism, History of Time, and the History of Violence. He is the author of Kinder der Demokratie. Religiöse Erziehung und urbane Moderne in Spanien, 1890–1939 (Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2013) and co-editor of Kindheit und soziale Ungleichheit in den langen 1970er Jahren. Special Issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft 46 (2) (2020). He is currently working on a biography of the dictator Francisco Franco. Janne Lahti is a historian who works at the University of Helsinki, Finland, as an Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in 2009. His research focuses on global and transnational histories of settler colonialism, borderlands, the American West, and Nordic colonialism. He has published numerous articles and is the author or editor of six books, including German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). David M. Pomfret is Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of History at The University of Hong Kong. He writes on the history of childhood and youth in Europe and its colonies using transnational and comparative methodologies. He is the author or editor of six books and his most recent monograph Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford University Press, 2015) won the Grace Abbott book prize. Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at Durham University, having previously held Research Fellowships at the University of Cambridge and UCL. Her key publications include The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas (Oxford University Press, 2021), Sparta’s German Children (Classical Press of Wales, 2013), and co-edited Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Brill, 2018). She is currently researching the history of fascism and everyday life in interwar Europe.

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Jonathan Singerton is a Lecturer in European History at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this he was a Lecturer at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research revolves around central European connections to world history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His first book, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy, appeared in 2021 in the University of Virginia Press. He is currently completing a biography of Marie Rivardi (a.k.a. Maria von Born) as an example of personal mobility and reinvention in the Age of Revolutions. Rebecca Swartz is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She received her Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests include histories of education and childhood in the British Empire during the nineteenth century. She is currently working on histories of race and childhood in the Cape colony. Her first monograph Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833−1880 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. Anja Werner holds a Ph.D. degree in US history from the University of Leipzig, Germany. She specialises in transcultural history of knowledge production with a special focus on perspectives of Black and/or Deaf people on Western knowledges. She is currently finishing her second book on foreign influences on discourses about deafness in the divided Germany (1945−2002), including histories of sign language research and the development of cochlear-implants (CI) besides d/Deaf stakeholders’ perceptions of both.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Report card of Victorine du Pont (Hagley Museum and Library) The ‘Gothic Mansion’ in Philadelphia (The Port Folio) Percentage distribution of NPEA pupils and Adolf-Hitler-School pupils according to their fathers’ social station, compared with the social organisation of the German Reich Careers of fathers of graduands at NPEA Schulpforta in 1938–1939 Career choices of graduands at NPEA Schulpforta in 1938–1939 Chiricahua Apaches as they arrived to Carlisle from Fort Marion, Florida, April 30, 1887. Jason Betzinez is probably seated in the lower front, third from the right (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) Some of the same Chiricahua students as in the previous picture, now in a “civilized wardrobe” from 1891. Jason Betzinez is probably back row centre (Photo by John N. Choate. Cumberland County Historical Society, CCHS_PA-CH2-064b: https://carlisleindian.dickinson. edu/images/twenty-three-apache-students-version-2-189 1)

40 45

88 92 93

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 12.1

Fig. 12.2 Fig. 12.3

Jason Betzinez, circa 1900. Studio portrait taken in Pennsylvania prior to Jason’s departure to Oklahoma (Photo by John N. Choate. Cumberland County Historical Society, CCHS_PA-CH2-078f: https://carlis leindian.dickinson.edu/images/jason-betzinez-c1900) Queen Mary College, Lahore Loreto House, Calcutta, Refractory (© Loreto Archives, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin) Map of Flores showing the mission stations with churches and schools. The locations of the mission stations are marked with the symbol of a church. The mission stations of Larantuka and Lela, where the girls’ boarding schools were located, are identified with a circle (Source Taken from Kleintjens [1928, p. 13]) Schoolgirls in Lela examining each other’s hair, c. 1925 (Source Taken from Hagspiel [1925, p. 128]) Girls from the boarding school in Larantuka performing manual labour, c. 1925 (Source Taken from Zuster Maria Eliana [1925, p. 91])

137 197 199

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CHAPTER 1

Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz

In early 1879, the young Edmund F.E. Wigram started attending the prestigious Harrow School, a fee-paying boarding school for boys in the South of England. Edmund was the oldest child of Reverend Frederic E. Wigram, who had himself attended Harrow between 1848 and 1853.1 Edmund Wigram boarded at Harrow until the midterm of 1883. In terms of social background, at the time students at this boarding school primarily hailed from the British upper middle and upper classes, with graduates later taking on some of the most responsible and privileged positions in British society.2 In order to maintain their class-consciousness

D. Gerster Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH), Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] F. Jensz (B) Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics (2060), The University of Münster, Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_1

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and become ‘leading men’ of the British Empire, the students at Harrow, as in all English public schools at the time, were instructed in the Classics and in Protestant religiosity, and underwent a comprehensive programme of physical education, with a strong emphasis on team-games. Through this programme, combined with the formal prefect and fagging system as well as informal forms of bullying, pupils learnt to obey, but also to lead.3 At the time that Wigram was a student, pupils at public schools were not only of British descent, but might also come from continental families and distant locations in the Empire, including British India. The extended Apcar family of Arminian merchants from Calcutta, for example, sent at least ten of their sons to Harrow during the 1860s and 1870s.4 Such instances were not unusual, as British—and more broadly European—education was considered a means for intermediaries of the empires to become ‘Western-educated respectables ’,5 who engaged with cosmopolitan ideals, taking on aspects of British and European culture as well as their own culture, as it suited them. Four of the Harrow-educated Apcar men, for example, subsequently became members of the Calcutta bar, each demonstrating their respectable position as an attorney in British Indian society.6 Edmund F.E. Wigram, similar to many of his contemporaries who attended boarding school, continued his education at Trinity College Cambridge, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts and subsequently a Master of Arts, before becoming a curate of St. James’s in Hatcham (1889–1891). In November 1891, he was accepted as a Church Mission Society (CMS) missionary and was consequently sent to Lahore, in the Punjab, British India.7 His work there centred on education, including a position from 1893 as the temporary master at the Baring High School in Batala, which was also a boys’ boarding school.8 At the beginning of 1893, Edmund Wigram wrote of the work that he and his sister, Ellenor Selina Wigram, had before them in Batala, noting that: “The school motto translated into English is, ‘Light in the Punjab’. The motto of ourselves and our fellow-workers must therefore be, ‘Light in the School’, or in other words, ‘Christ’s Light in us’”.9 Unlike Harrow, which focused on shaping young British men for leading roles in Britain and its Empire, the Baring Boarding High School focused upon converting local pupils into Christians, in the hope that they might help convert other local people to Christianity. For example, Bhagwan Dass, a student of the school who was on his way home for the holidays in the late 1880s, wrote to his teacher Miss Charlotte

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M. Tucker, an honorary missionary for the Church of England Zenana Society, stating that: “God gave us the power to preach at nearly every place on our journey”.10 Yet, conversion was not an easy step to take, as Khair Ullah, another student, found. His relatives were disappointed in his decision to convert to Christianity, and he was subsequently rejected from his broader Muslim community.11 Thus, his decision to convert to Christianity while attending a Christian boarding school and subsequently to seek inclusion in a Christian community excluded him from his own religious and broader community. Khair Ullah, Bhagwan Dass, Edmund F.E. Wigram, and the Apcar sons are just a few examples from the many thousands of pupils attending boarding schools in various places across the globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their experiences were vastly different, yet they shared the experience of being separated from their families and childhood friends in order to sleep, eat, learn, and move within the boarding school’s limited spatial sites. This edited collection frames these boarding schools as a global and transcultural phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We examine the ways in which these schools, which became popular in the late eighteenth century and continue until today, extracted, and at times excluded, pupils from their original social background in order to train, mould, and shape them so that they could fit into their perceived position in broader society—a form of inclusion. Here we are interested in the concepts of inclusion and of exclusion in order to describe a historical process and the slippages between such categories, rather than assuming a normative understanding of these terms. At times, the projected notions of a pupil’s position in society reflected those of the parents, and in other places, the imagined future for the child was vastly different, and the pupil was rejected from the community from which they originated, falling between the gaps of societies. In this way, boarding schools predominantly affected the education of two particular groups: the children of underprivileged classes and those of the ‘elite’, with these groups widespread around the (European dominated) world. Boarding schools, like education institutions more broadly, utilised global and transnational networks and interdependences of ideas, practices, and people—as exemplified in the cases of Bhagwan Dass, Khair Ullah, and the larger Wigram and Apcar families.12 This edited volume brings together detailed case studies dealing with various aspects of the issues raised above. The historians writing these case studies of boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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come from a wide range of countries. In this volume, they focus on the transnational and global similarities and interdependences, but also on the local and temporal differences and particularities of boarding schools. Within our collection, we are particularly interested in the experiences of people either at boarding schools or affected by these institutions, the global networks which they form, as well as the processes and practices that boarding schools both engage in and help to create. In this introduction, we outline some commonalities of the case studies, but also some differences and contradictions. We begin by attempting to define what exactly we understand as a boarding school, sketching very briefly the history of the phenomenon as such, as well as the varied forms of institution which existed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a second section, we situate our collection within the broader historical research that has been undertaken on boarding schools, as well as within research on global and transnational entanglements in education. In a third step, we introduce the structure of the volume and its chapters in more detail.

A Word on ‘Boarding Schools’: Common Features and Different Purposes We take boarding schools here to be discrete sites where the school’s pupils are educated on the property, eat meals in a common space, and sleep exclusively on the school property during term time. The admission to boarding schools is limited by means of social and group selection, by entrance exams, or costs, and their internal structure is characterised by specific power relations between pupils and teachers, but also amongst pupils, by timetables that regulate the students’ lives as well as by cohesion or fragmentation of social networks within the schools. We include in our analysis boarding schools for the elite and those for children from low socio-economic backgrounds, or children considered ‘at risk’ and subsequently extracted from their birth families and primary social background by the broader society. The majority of our case studies examine schools exclusively for boarding pupils. Some of the schools in our collection could also be termed residential homes, for the children were not allowed to return to their families before finishing school, or were considered not to have a family to whom they could return. Generally speaking, boarding schools for ‘at risk’ pupils were funded by the state or benevolent supporters, compared to elite schools which often had high tuition,

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boarding costs, and entrance exams associated with them. Indeed, as the case studies in our volume demonstrate, boarding schools were institutions that mostly targeted the elite and the abject, as ways of shaping national and colonial subjects. Increasingly from the eighteenth century, these subjects were created as waves of globalisation and ensuing colonialisation engulfed much of the world. Histories of boarding schools have tended to focus on either elite schools or on schools for marginalised sectors of the population. In bringing the histories of these together in a transnational perspective, we open up the conversation between various types of schools. In his seminal study on asylums, Erving Goffman categorised boarding schools as one kind of “total institution”, arguing that they were similar to army barracks, work camps, and colonial compounds. As such, they belonged to one group of such institutions which were “purportedly established the better to pursue some worklike [sic] task and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds”.13 Even though Goffman’s categorisation might plausibly be criticised due to its ahistorical assumption that boarding schools were totally “cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time”14 —a criticism that we also make—his concept provides valuable guidance for navigating the ‘inner world’ of boarding schools. His concept emphasises how groups of teachers, students, and house staff15 played different roles within the school community, how they were related to each other in formal and informal power structures, as well as the tensions which could exist within these groups—for example, between headmasters and ordinary teachers, or between older and younger pupils. Goffman’s concept also suggests ways in which different social actors tried to make sense of their life in boarding schools, including through everyday practices and rituals that were guided by tradition and house rules, and enforced by rewards as well as (corporal) punishment. Goffman’s concept succinctly encapsulates the world into which a student entered when she or he first went to boarding school. Having successfully applied, or being forcibly sent there, the pupils regularly went through a series of formal and informal initiation rituals that signalled their admission into the school community. Such rites de passage could be a simple handshake between parent and schoolmaster, symbolising the official handover of the children, or more physically extreme experiences, such as when the child’s hair was cut to normative cultural standards,

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or when they were dressed in the school uniform. Commonly, admission also included an informal initiation ritual, such as when older and more experienced students forced the newcomers to drink repulsive beverages or abused them with physical violence.16 Such informal initiation rituals also had the intention of showing the younger students where they stood within the hierarchy of the school. The power structure within boarding schools was of course first and foremost moulded by the relationship between pupils and teachers; the latter often trying to enforce their position through a meticulous disciplinary regime of observation and supervision, of gratification and punishment.17 Headmasters often played a prominent role within the hierarchy, as did older pupils who as prefects were entrusted with the power to oversee younger students and to discipline them to a certain extent. In addition to the formal disparity between pupils—nowhere more obvious than in the fagging system of the Victorian public school—there frequently existed informal hierarchies amongst students, established by means of reputation and bullying.18 Mary Hatfield in her chapter describes how the practice of fagging was evident in nineteenth century Ireland, whereas in their chapter, De-Valera N.Y.M. Botchway and Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten demonstrate how these European-inspired traditions were transferred to colonial spaces, such as Ghana, and became part of the boarding school culture. Power structures and disciplinary regimes substantially predetermine everyday life in boarding schools, but they only partly determine the aims and purpose of the school. Focusing only on these power structures and disciplinary regimes overlooks other experiences, such as community building, support structures, and entanglements with communities external to the school. Nevertheless, spatial regimes did determine how teachers and students could make use of space, that is, in setting boundaries to activities outside and inside of the school, and in establishing rules regarding where the pupils had to learn, play games, and sleep. Spatial regimes also overlapped with temporal regimes in the form of daily timetables and weekly schedules which the teachers regulated. These temporal regimes determined when students (and teachers) had to wake up, be in class or have lunch, and one might enjoy leisure time and join in activities such as singing and dancing.19 Yet power structures and disciplinary regimes could only marginally determine curricular content and the subjects taught at the boarding schools in question. Structures and regimes differed largely from school to school, depending on the student body, which was mostly either composed of the children of marginalised

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classes or those of the leading strata. Practices and rituals in both kinds of boarding schools varied. Schools for the underprivileged mainly focused on the instruction of basic knowledge, manual labour, and simple piousness to form the children into diligent workers, faithful believers, and loyal citizens. Those for upper-class children offered ambitious courses in classics and modern languages, and encouraged independency through games and debating classes.20 Such examples underscore the importance of placing boarding schools, their participants, and their practices within their historical and cultural context. In this regard, Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of a close entanglement between a society, its elites, and hegemonic cultural ideas and the educational institutions of the time clearly surpasses the generic concept of boarding schools as ‘total institutions’, as outlined by Goffman.21 Michel Foucault also provides us with ways of thinking about boarding schools, along with other institutions such as army barracks, as ways in which ‘modern’ societies can discipline individuals through uses of time, space, examinations, and hierarchies.22 The disciplining of time and space are a continuum between European convent schools in the Middle Ages and present-day boarding schools. Nevertheless, what differentiates our ‘modern’ boarding schools from the former are integrated pedagogical concepts and the overwhelming function of the schools as a conduit which guides the majority of the pupils into their prescribed place in society after the termination of their education. This sits in contrast with the European convent schools of the Middle Ages, which, although commonly considered the origin of ‘modern’ boarding schools, had a different educational focus, primarily in their training for religious orders. Outside of Europe, religious schools, such as the Buddhist temples and monastic colleges called Pirivena in Sri Lanka, also boarded young scholars and similarly provided a mostly religious education.23 Religious education was also a significant aspect of the first ‘modern’ European boarding schools. Especially during the Age of Reformation, Protestants and Catholics alike founded new schools to educate their children. These schools often offered boarding options.24 One well-known example is the Franckesche Stiftung in Halle which was established and directed by the Protestant pedagogue and theologian August Hermann Francke (1663–1737). The Franckesche Stiftung in Halle is recognised as one of the first ‘modern’ boarding schools in continental Europe. It provided a day school, but also a boarding school for orphans, as well as one for members of nobility.25 While contemporaries identified these

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institutions as ‘schools’ focusing on the education of young children and youth alone, secondary and tertiary education have long been a part of the higher education system. Thus, universities can also be deemed another important inspiration of the ‘modern’ boarding school system. This is evident in relation to the German ‘Bursen’ as well as to the fact that in the British case the public school system had its origin partly in the Oxbridge tutorial system.26 Another point of origin of boarding schools as we recognise them today is to be found during the time of the European Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century. Since then, and especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the system of boarding schools was successfully spread around the globe—as we argue in this volume. Underlying the transformation of boarding schools was the fundamental idea that education was the appropriate means for all men—in the thinking of the European Enlightenment not uncommonly understood as male persons only—to become (self-)critical and responsible citizens. A common belief held that universal education had to begin at a young age and be as distant as possible from the ‘wrong’ type of social influence in order that education would be successful. Boarding schools were able to provide exclusion from some aspects of society as they separated pupils from their local environments. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau elaborated on these thoughts most broadly in his treatise Émile, or On Education, which was first published in French in 1762. The work is divided into five books that correspond to five different periods of a person’s life. It follows the education of the young Émile, who is predominantly raised far away from society and its apparently bad influence, in order to develop his own mental and physical strengths and grow into an independent ‘new’ citizen and man.27 The ideas of Rousseau and other thinkers of the Enlightenment resulted in the foundation of a number of experimental boarding schools in different European countries, such as the institute established by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann in Schnepfenthal in Thuringia in 1784.28 More generally, Rousseau’s treatise encouraged the belief that every human being could be transformed by means of a general European-inspired education. The idea that children—especially boys—should receive systematic and extensive education from an early age prevailed in European societies in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and inspired many attempts to introduce compulsory schooling in various European locations. Yet, although some educational ‘reformers’ of the nineteenth century shared the general

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conclusions of Rousseau and his contemporaries, others did not follow their positive perception of the child as an innocent being which had to be nurtured and enabled. On the contrary, they—many of whom were Protestant theologians—doubted their innocent nature and stressed that “education’s chief end was to rectify the ‘corrupt nature and evil disposition’” of children.29 Increasingly such ideas were levelled at the poor, with the writings of the early nineteenth-century British pedagogue and instigator of popular education, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, illustrating the need for education for the children of the poor working class in order for the betterment of self and society.30 Apart from attempts to ‘reform’ the offspring of poor and socially disadvantaged families in social homes, until the end of the nineteenth century it was generally believed that the best education a child could receive was at home. Yet solutions had to be found when home-education was impossible. For children of the upper classes, this was often the case when they had to attend (secondary) schools in specific locations. In Germany, for example, in order to attend further schooling (Gymnasium) older boys often needed to be sent away from home, stay in foreign cities and live in private pensions, many with dubious reputations.31 In England, where boys from upper-class families traditionally attended preparatory and public boarding schools from the age of six, they were generally without supervision when not in class. This changed in the early nineteenth century, starting with educators such as Thomas Arnold, who as Headmaster of the elite school Rugby introduced the housing system to the English public school, assigning every boy to a ‘house’ over which a master presided.32 Although newer research has critically examined the actual impact of Arnold’s ‘reforms’ and has emphasised the importance of other reformers such as Edward Thring of Uppingham,33 together these initiatives led to a partial familiarisation of public boarding schools—for boys as well as girls34 —and their close entanglement with the leading families of their countries, their ideas and traditions. While educationalists, headmasters, and teachers tried hard to include parents and families of upper-class children in boarding school education, this was not at all the case with the education of children from underprivileged families. Attempts to ‘rescue’ children from poor and underprivileged backgrounds are common throughout history. Yet, following the Enlightenment idea that education could help all people to become better individuals, boarding schools became especially popular with social reformers from the first half of the nineteenth century. Coupled with

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the semantics of charity and brotherhood, which accompanied religious sentiments in many European societies at the time, there was a tremendous growth in children’s homes such as orphanages, ragged schools, and training ships.35 Mostly established by Christians with middle- and upper-class backgrounds, these institutions were intended to teach children basic knowledge, manual skills, and moral values to enable them to gain respectability in their stations in life. Yet, even though parents and families often sent their children willingly to such institutions, there are also many reported examples of “philanthropic kidnapping”.36 In these cases, children were forcefully taken away from their parents under the presumption that the parents could not care for their own children, or under the presumption that the families of the children could not uphold (Protestant) family values. While parents often had little chance to contradict such decisions and children did not enjoy the same liberties as the upper-class offspring in their boarding schools, children in both residential homes and elite boarding schools had opportunities to adapt and integrate, or resist and oppose the exclusionary environment in which they were willingly or forcibly placed. It is thus the residential children’s homes, rather than the elite public schools for upper-class children, that serve as the primary example for the global spread of the boarding school in the time of Empire. From the turn of the nineteenth century, at a heightened period of British humanitarianism, there was a concerted effort to provide for children of the poor and children in the colonies, partly as a form of care and partly as a means of disciplining society.37 Men such as Andrew Bell, a chaplain in Madras, India, adapted monitorial systems for British schools, demonstrating the entwined connection between multiple spatial ties and also across socially constructed categories such as race and class.38 Simultaneously, Joseph Lancaster developed a monitorial system, which was used by the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) for the poor in England and the colonised throughout the Empire. These two examples are paradigmatic of the ways in which pedagogical concepts such as the monitoring system spread throughout the British Empire, including into boarding schools in the colonies. Such schools harboured similar world-views, based upon British nineteenth-century notions of liberalism, humanitarianism, and racial hierarchies. The curricula of the BFSS schools were heavily Biblebased and infused with British ideas of morality, demonstrating a close link between Enlightenment education, social reform, and evangelism.39 The boarding school was an important form of schooling in the colonies

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which was used to spread Christian morality, especially amongst children considered to be orphans or children of ‘heathen’ mothers. In British India, boarding schools were also used to provide education to children of army personnel and their local Indian partners, as Tim Allender has demonstrated.40 They thus represented sites which were used to mitigate anxieties about race, religion, gender, and class. Within other (post)colonial settings, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, boarding schools were used by governments, often with the collaboration of religious groups, to break children’s connection with their communities and to force European episteme upon them as a way to “kill the Indian, and save the child”.41 After attending boarding schools, Indigenous pupils were expected to be integrated into settler colonial society, with new notions of their place within society drawn from European episteme. The employment opportunities predominantly available to former Indigenous pupils in settler colonies and in the African colonies were low-status and low-paid manual or domestic roles. These, as Rebecca Swartz demonstrates in her chapter, were not the roles that African elites envisaged for themselves. Through instruction and indoctrination in (often) Christian boarding (and residential) schools in settler colonial spaces, under the logic of elimination, Indigenous pupils were actively denied access to Indigenous land, culture, and language.42 Although there were some cases in which Indigenous people actively used boarding-school education to integrate into settler colonial society, as Janne Lahti demonstrates in his chapter on the Chiricahua Apache Jason Betzinez, the more common experience was marginalisation from both their culture of origin as well as settler colonial society.43 The ubiquitous marginalisation of Indigenous peoples from settler societies provided structural inequalities that consequently concealed the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children at the hands of those who were meant to be protecting them, and precluded discussion of such topics in mainstream debate.44 In Canada, a government commission has examined the legacies of Canada’s Residential Schools and noted the litany of abuse to which First Nations peoples were subjected.45 In Australia, a National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, known as the Bringing Them Home Report, highlighted the forced removal of Aboriginal children and the abuse that many children were subjected to in institutional homes and training schools.46

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The abuse of children under care in boarding schools was, and is, tragically not limited by class, race, space, or time.47 Such abuse can disturbingly be found in boarding schools across the globe and across the socially constructed categories of class and race. That said, the marginalisation of Indigenous people from settler society compounded the silencing of victims and facilitated the continuation of abusive practices. Within boarding schools not all children were victims, nor were all teachers perpetrators. The chapters in our collection describe abuse and violence, but also resistance and resilience to boarding-school violence. This was expressed in many ways, from passive to active resistance, with children, parents, and also teachers engaging in various acts. By placing various forms of boarding schools in the same framework we do not intend to diminish or relativise traumatic experiences of children, their parents or communities, nor are we suggesting that the strict discipline of an elite boarding school is comparable to the cultural genocidal practices of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. Rather what we hope to highlight by examining various forms of boarding schools within the same frame is to show both that exclusionary practices may have underscored inclusionary ideologies, and the ways in which external influences seeped into the allegedly exclusive space of the boarding school.

Research on Boarding Schools: State of the Art and Our Approach Our edited collection is one of the first to produce a global and transnational history of boarding schools. It focuses more on the people involved and their practices and networks than the history of a single institution or one particular ‘system’. Studies of boarding schools, particularly those with a narrow focus on elite schools in Europe and the United States, often focus on structural aspects of the schools, with many studies on contemporaneous boarding schools having an ideological agenda, such as to defend the privatisation of education. Such studies commonly either deal with the idea of a generalised system of elite boarding schools or focus on the peculiarities of singular schools.48 Since the late nineteenth century, former students, teachers, and admirers of European and American boarding schools have published recollections of their alma mater to praise its achievements and highlight its many famous alumni. These laudatory histories have often neglected the many other pupils who lived a ‘normal life’. They have also often failed to address critical questions

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of physical and sexual abuse and of class, gender, and racial bias. In the early twentieth century, the genre of school memoirs was professionalised, which led to numerous monographs that uncritically recounted the history of a single elite boarding school. It was also around this time that academics began to examine elite boarding schools as a generalised system of elite education. The English public schools were of special interest in this regard, with historians and sociologists exploring their political function in elite formation and policy-making in the British Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.49 With the rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, experts increasingly examined the social function of such schools and extended their scope beyond Great Britain to the United States and beyond.50 Following the trends in other historiographies, historical research on boarding schools went through a major shift in the 1980s when cultural historians began asking questions about everyday life, various types of practices; gender; class; and—still very marginally—about transnational and global entanglements. The development can be illustrated with regard to the historiography on British elite boarding schools. Books such as John Chandos’ Boys Together (1984) or Christine Heward’s Making a Man of Him (1988) strongly focus on the everyday life of boys in English public schools during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These books demonstrated the large discrepancy between the ideology of elite education and its quotidian practices, which included physical abuse in the form of fagging and bullying and sexual misconduct from pupils and teachers, as well as intimate friendships and alternative masculine behaviour. In order to come to their conclusions, cultural historians turned to non-traditional sources such as diaries, letters, and punishment books, and read traditional sources such as pupils’ registers against the grain.51 One of the most prominent researchers on British public schools from the perceptive of cultural history has been James A. Mangan. In his many publications on Athleticism and the British Empire, he has demonstrated how the cult of games increasingly prevailed in everyday life in British public schools since the 1860s, evolving into its own ideology that shaped the image of the public school boy by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.52 Mangan was also a pioneer in exploring the expansive connections between public schools, their elite ideology, and its impact on the British Empire. He elucidated how the pupils in these schools learnt to use instruments of power and persuasion, which

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they later used when they served as civil service officials or military officers in the British colonies.53 Mangan’s studies are examples of how to draw out the transnational and global dimensions of historical research on boarding schools.54 As such, his work is a form of global entangled history, which examines the cultural transfers of ideas, people, and things through space and time.55 Global studies of education have demonstrated how ideas, pedagogies, people, textbooks, and instruments have travelled the globe, replicating old practices and creating new ones. One of the first studies to attempt to examine a central aspect of education transnationally was Laurence Brockliss’ and Nicola Sheldon’s 2012 Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c. 1870–1930, with many other studies following.56 Esther Möller and Johannes Wischmeyer have argued for three interconnected aspects of transnational educational spaces, namely: organisations and actors, ideologies and discourses, and spaces.57 These three interconnected aspects are also reflected in many of the contributions in our volume. Commonly within the framework of transnational or global histories, British India has been a focus of British Imperial historians and boarding schools. One reason for the intense focus on India is due to the transfer of knowledge and educational ideologies between Britain and India, with the aforementioned studies of Tim Allender and Jana Tschurenev demonstrating the productive nature of this research approach. Beyond the confines of the British World, there have been many fruitful examinations of German-American, French-Arabic, and FrenchBritish imperial transnational spaces of education.58 These transnational studies contribute to a new approach in the history of education, yet one that has not yet been fully taken up in the history of boarding schools, which is the one that we follow here. In countries with settler colonial histories, there has been increased scrutiny on the role of boarding schools as institutions of cultural destruction and genocide. Particularly in light of the Australian Bringing Them Home Report, and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which considered residential schools to be a means of (cultural) genocide of First Nations peoples, there has been a focus upon these schools within both a national and transnational context.59 In the national context, studies include both overviews of the system of residential/boarding schools as well as the histories of individual schools. In this literature, there are also a growing number of histories that draw upon oral histories and autobiographies to detail individual experiences. The experiences

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described are often related to the trauma that boarding schools influenced and the intergenerational trauma that they generated.60 Increasingly, there has been an attempt to place studies of residential schools for Indigenous students in a comparative framework by contrasting the experiences of children in various residential schools for Indigenous peoples. This is the framework of a 2019 collection edited by Stephan James Minton, which brought together scholars examining the devastating histories of residential schools for Indigenous peoples, and which focused upon the genocidal aspects of the schools.61 That book focused mainly on how abusive systems were characterised and legitimised as benevolent within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our collection also contains case studies of boarding schools for Indigenous students; however, we have not tried to replicate the work of Minton by attempting to include case studies from all settler colonial spaces. Rather we see our collection as complementing the work of scholars such as the authors in Minton’s collection, since the case studies in our collection place boarding schools for Indigenous peoples within broader global developments in the sphere of boarding schools, simultaneously demonstrating the connections between and comparisons beyond the settler colonial setting. This is critical, given the growing importance of connected or entangled histories within history of education. Such ideas run throughout the following case studies, with our contribution here being to bring together a global history of boarding schools that is limited neither to one region, nor to one institutional group. One innovative contribution of our volume to expanding the history of boarding schools is to bring together various case studies that examine institutions in a transnational and global history framework. We do this by focusing on two key aspects: people and networks, as well as practices and processes. Our case studies concentrate on people who participated in experiences of exclusion and the inclusion of children from broader society. A second area of interest is connected to the processes and practices of boarding schools, particularly in contrast and in relation to ideas and ideology. As the nineteenth century progressed, the formalisation and professionalisation of teaching resulted in increasing amounts of material that was subsequently archived. The case studies here draw on traditional sources such as school registers and ‘official’ publications such as school magazines and yearbooks. However, they also use archival sources in innovative ways to uncover personal histories beyond the official register. Beyond traditional sources, the authors in this collection also

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use non-traditional sources such as student writings, autobiographies, oral histories, photographs, and sources external to the schools to elucidate the experiences of exclusion and inclusion of children from broader society within the global boarding-school context. People involved in the boarding-school experience included the pupils themselves, both girls and boys, who came from various social, religious, national, and ethnic backgrounds. Such heterogeneous backgrounds present their own challenges when examining the history of boarding schools in a global perspective. Teachers, educators, and founders of boarding schools were also involved in creating pupil’s experiences as well as their own, as too were missionaries and civil servants in the colonial context, who themselves often worked within a boarding-school setting. In most cases, non-teaching staff such as nurses, cooks, groundsmen, and service staff were also engaged in processes of inclusion and exclusion. In the case of elite boarding schools, the non-teaching staff had different social backgrounds from the pupils, underscoring social differences.62 Unfortunately, the voices of these people are often unrecorded. In examining the personal life stories of different actors and the ways in which they were involved in facilitating inclusion and exclusion in the experiences of boarding schools, we are interested in examining the social, ethical, religious, and gendered backgrounds of the participants in the boarding school experience, and how these affected the ways that various people operated within the confines of the schools. For example, Edmund F.E. Wigram, who was born into a family of Anglican missionaries, had an upper-middle-class background and was raised in the tradition of the English gentleman at the public school of Harrow. He went to the colonies, convinced that he would ‘bring light’ to the people there. In doing so, the differing background and different intentions and reasons which led boys such as Khair Ullah and Bhagwan Dass to attend boarding schools were mostly irrelevant to Wigram’s aim of ‘enlightening’ people, reflecting broader notions of contemptuousness for non-Europeans embedded in late nineteenth century European imperialism.63 Our case studies are interested in analysing similar encounters between people of different backgrounds in boarding schools around the globe, particularly those of a transnational character. People’s encounters took place through different processes. In the case of boarding schools, processes were aimed to exclude the pupils from their primary social environment in order that they might later be included into society more broadly. Although the processes may have

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been similar, individuals experienced their time at boarding school in different ways, with some of them gaining larger networks through their participation, and others being isolated from many aspects of society through their attending such schools. Our case studies thus use the concept of exclusion and inclusion not in a normative way, but rather to describe processes underlying the history of boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These included the creation and maintenance of networks in the larger spheres around boarding schools. These networks included, for example, community groups, colonial officers, military personnel, missionary personnel, and civil servants, who in turn linked the schools and their participants into broader religious, secular, governmental, community, and imperial networks. As such, the people involved outside the immediate boarding school setting helped to shape and form the context in which the boarding schools were able to perform (or not). Through focusing upon people, and the broader networks and communities with which they were engaged, we demonstrate that boarding schools in their capacity to exclude children from society were more porous than some scholars have suggested.64 Regardless of how geographically and socially isolated a boarding school may have been from society, it was always embedded in some local networks—and through its ideologies, histories, and political structures and funding arrangements, into facets of the broader community. The latter allowed, or hindered, the reintegration of children after they left the school. Once pupils left the boarding school, however, it was not always possible for their schools to know what had happened to them. While elite boarding schools in England and elsewhere create registers of ‘old boys’ in later years as a means to maintain contact and facilitate old boys’ networks, allowing historians to reconstruct the lives of graduates such as Edmund F.E. Wigram, not all boarding schools had the funding or the impetus to track former pupils.65 Although our case studies focus mostly upon the experiences of the child in the boarding schools, the focus upon the broader networks of the schools help us better to contextualise and understand the processes that lead to inclusion and exclusion from broader society. The focus on children in boarding schools is also further informed by concepts such as ‘childism’, which, as Ngozi Edeagu details in her chapter on boarding schools in colonial Nigeria, is a concept introduced into scholarship to insert the voices of children, and shed light on their agency in historical process.66 Reading sources with critical attention to childism

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provides insights into the experiences of children beyond the official narratives. Similarly, paying attention to the emotions of children provides fruitful insights into how children responded to the processes of inclusion and exclusion facilitated by the boarding school trajectory. Various chapters in this volume, for example those from Rebecca Swartz, Divya Kannan, Tim Allender, and Anja Werner, draw on concepts of emotional practices and emotional frontiers from the history of emotions to help inform their analysis of how children employed emotional practices to assert themselves and navigate their difficult life. Such methodological frameworks have the potential to provide fruitful insight into both the experiences of children and of those whose duty it was to care for them within boarding schools.67 The question of how pupils reacted to and experienced their time at boarding school depended on many different factors, including the admission process and the duration of their school experience. The time the children spent at boarding schools differed, as too did the age at which a child first attended, with these factors influencing how children reacted to being at boarding school, and how they were able to adapt to their changed living situation. For some pupils, such as Edmund F.E. Wigram, attending boarding school was part of the family tradition, and undoubtedly his experiences in England shaped the way that he taught in an imperial environment. For other boarding-school pupils, like Khair Ullah, attending boarding school created at least a momentary break with his community and provided him one access point into a global network of educational ideas and Western notions. For other students, such as First Nations children forced to attend Residential Schools in Canada, the complete breaking of ties with community was a governmental aim of the boarding school experience, which has caused intergenerational trauma and contributed to cultural genocide.68 Through this complete break, First Nations children were considered able to be ‘reset’ to Western norms instilled through education. For other children, the boarding-school experience provided them with new identities that could be integrated with existing community ideas, but which could also include ‘new’ Western/cosmopolitan identities. As these studies demonstrate, reactions to boarding schools differed between individuals, as well as with time and space; cooperation and adaption could occur more readily in situations in which students had a vested interest in attending boarding school, with opposition and resistance to boarding schools occurring more commonly within systems where the

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child had few alternative outlets to vent their dissatisfaction. As with any period of life, in remembering the experience, some pupils are indifferent, whereas for others the experience of boarding school was foundational in a positive way and allowed for reintegration into their original community, while for many unfortunate others the experience was devastating, leading these ‘survivors’ to embark upon a difficult life without the tools that they needed to navigate the social inequalities which they encountered. The boarding schools in our case studies had different routines that facilitated the process of inclusion and exclusion of children in different ways, both within the school and within the broader community context. Such processes were facilitated through the curricula, and expectations on the child’s time, as well as their engagement in institutional structures. For example, elite schools across the globe commonly taught classics as a form of cultural capital for elite formation.69 In boarding schools for perceived abject members of society, the daily routines commonly included an amount of manual labour that was intended to reduce the expenditure of the schools, as well as to provide the pupils with skills considered suitable to their perceived place in society. Yet, as Rebecca Swartz in her case study demonstrates, there was disgruntlement when manual skills were taught to the children of African elites in the nineteenth century, reflecting conflicting notions of the needs of pupils. The freedom that children were allowed at school also affected their experiences. In some schools, leisure time was highly regulated through engaging with sport. Sports, as Mary Hatfield demonstrates in her contribution, were a non-academic means of shaping the boys in Irish boarding schools in the nineteenth century to fulfil contemporary notions of masculinity and Britishness. The spaces in which children were taught and slept also affected their experiences, with ideas of privacy and entitlement reflected in these public and private spaces. As Anja Werner elucidates in her study of boarding schools for the deaf in German-speaking countries during the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, space could be delineated into ‘official oral spaces’ such as classrooms, as well as ‘illicit sign spaces’ like living quarters, with punishment being given for the transgression of such spaces. Punishments, as a form of power relations, were a central aspect of the boarding-school experience, and, as many of our case studies demonstrate, contributed to the process of inclusion and exclusion of children in the boarding-school setting and beyond.

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Transnational Boarding Schools: Structure of the Volume and the Case Studies This edited collection is dived into four sections. Part I: Elites examines boarding schools for various groups of elite students in the United States, South Africa, Nazi Germany, and Spain, and in doing so demonstrates the political and social functions of promoting different notions of ‘elites’ in boarding schools. In his contribution, Jonathan Singerton discusses the role of Madame Rivardi’s Seminary for Young Women in Philadelphia as a site for creating exclusionary spaces for daughters of elite aristocrats, especially European émigrés, amid a growing egalitarian movement in early American society. In this example, Singerton demonstrates how boarding schools for females could construct multiple inclusionary spaces, including for European refugees such as Rivardi, and how boarding schools played an imprint role within the transatlantic transfer of cultures and peoples during the revolutionary age. Rebecca Swartz complicates the notion of elite by examining some of the tensions around the meanings of ‘elite’ status in a settler colonial context. In her examination of industrial boarding schools for elite Africans in mid-nineteenth century South Africa, she demonstrates the overtly political function of these schools as tools of the colonial government to ensure the loyalty of the African elite, and ultimately, to ‘pacify’ the ‘tribes’ in this region. Yet, this was not easily done, as pupils, parents, and some teachers had different ideas about the function of these boarding schools, and thus more broadly questioned the perceived position of elite Africans in the expanding settler-colonist dominated space. In her chapter, Helen Roche also focuses upon the political function of a system of boarding schools known as the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas/NPEA). These particular boarding schools were established by the National Socialist government during the Third Reich in order to train future elites for the Nazi regime. Her contribution further complicates the notion of elite boarding schools, as the children at these schools were drawn from all classes, rather than only serving the needs of a largely aristocratic elite. Through being educated in the Napola system, children were socially engineered to become elites within the Nazi political system. However, as Roche demonstrates, exclusionary class tensions were still manifest within the Napola system, indicating that political ideologies were not always easily able to translate into inclusionary practices. Till Kössler also takes up the concept of political elites in his work on Catholic boarding schools in Spain in the early twentieth

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century. He argues that, rather than being dark and archaic institutions firmly rooted in a pre-modern, traditionalist Spain, Catholic boarding schools were highly important spaces and laboratories for a new, albeit contradictory, authoritarian social order. Their importance derived from the fact that they were important meeting spaces between the Catholic Church, the Spanish (conservative) middle classes, and right-wing political movements. Together, these chapters further complicate the notion of an elite boarding school. Moreover, these case studies link elite boarding schools into a broader framework of social and political mobility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal conflicting notions of what inclusion might entail after students had left the boarding school system. In Part II: Marginalised, three chapters focus upon boarding schools that were established for children deemed to be marginalised, and through doing so shed light on the construction of ‘marginal’ sections of society and structural inequalities in cross-cultural encounters, as well as between classes within a society. Through case studies from North America, British India, and Soviet Russia, the chapters demonstrate various political and social ideologies behind educating marginalised children to be (re-)integrated into mainstream society. Janne Lahti examines the lived experiences of the Chiricahua Apaches at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania around the late nineteenth century. As prisoners of war, Chiricahua Apaches were removed from their homelands in Arizona and New Mexico, with some being sent to a purpose-built boarding school, Carlisle. The school tried to mould the Chiricahuas into loyal subjects of the settler state by making them into ‘clones’ of whites; by renaming them with Christian names, and altering their behaviour, appearance, and sense of self, thus fundamentally changing what it meant to be a Chiricahua. Through using Apache oral testimonies, memoirs, and school records, Lahti discusses these changing and ambivalent notions of indigeneity, belonging, and participation, asking what it meant to be an Apache at Carlisle. The chapter highlights the experiences of a Chiricahua student, Jason Betzinez, who gradually embraced whiteness, in contrast to other Chiricahua who rejected the school and saw its goals as genocidal, exploring various life trajectories for survivors of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In Divya Kannan’s case study, the marginalised children were local children in south India who were taken into missionary boarding schools to be educated as the foundations of ‘model’ Christian communities. In nineteenth-century Malabar (northern districts of present-day Kerala) the establishment of boarding schools by

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missionaries led to varying contentious ideas of childhood and orphans. Kannan demonstrates how missionaries employed coercive measures to admit poor children into their orphanages, arguing against the ‘barbarity’ of Indian parenting and norms of childhood. Her chapter traces the politics of these secluded institutions and argues that the missionary project of schooling poor children in colonial south India was marked by ambiguity and racial tension arising from colonial encounters. Class was, and remains, a reason for marginalisation, as Mirjam Galley demonstrates in her case study on Soviet residential schools. A network of boarding schools was established in the late 1950s to raise ‘the builders of communism’ and thus support those parents who struggled to bring up their children. The network ended up disproportionately targeting children from socially marginal families. Gallery’s chapter demonstrates how the criminalisation of poverty, and, later, a medicalisation of deviance through residential childcare led to the spatial and consequently social isolation of such children. These three chapters demonstrate that, despite the hope of boarding school administrators that this type of school would act as a conduit to ‘better’ lives for the students after they left, the experience of boarding school marginalised some children even further from the society into which they were meant to be included, and created deeper divisions between them and their communities. The ideologies behind boarding schools could connect schools over time and space, as demonstrated in the three chapters in Part III: People and Networks. In his contribution, Tim Allender examines the experimental characteristics of Indian boarding schools over two centuries. The chapter takes a broad view of the different mentalities that drove Indian colonial boarding schools, with some being transnational in their formation, while others were India-specific. He follows the trajectories of humanitarian benevolent organisations which propagated strong religious Christian ideologies with the drive of changing the children’s outlook, to more recent boarding school movements that are perceived as inclusive sites of foundational social outreach. In doing so, he also charts the interaction between global moments and local initiatives. In his contribution, Oli Charbonneau charts the development of boarding schools as an American imperial project through the lens of the Lake Mohonk conferences which were held from the 1880s until the First World War. This period saw the expansion of American imperialism into the Caribbean and Pacific, and with it the belief that reform projects such as boarding

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schools could facilitate acculturation and national citizen-making. Charbonneau examines these Mohonk meetings, which drew together the operators and overseers of a network of boarding schools in the American empire, to demonstrate how they contributed to the creation of a racially inflected grammar of national inclusion and imperial exclusion. As he further argues, these boarding school served as circulatory nodes for pedagogical developments from other imperial terrains, demonstrating the entangled nature of boarding school mentalities and ideologies around the turn of the nineteenth century. The idea of boarding schools as sites of alternative as well as complimentary voices is taken up by Ngozi Edeagu in her case study on boarding secondary schools in colonial Nigeria in the twentieth century. At this period of Nigeria’s history, secondary-school education was available only to a privileged few in institutions established by European missionary societies and functioned primarily as a training ground for pupils wishing to become local teachers, commercial clerks, and civil servants. Yet these institutions were criticised for being too deeply embedded in Christian ideologies. Edeagu argues that participants in the Nigerian colonial boarding school system were “living on the fringes” of both African societies and European colonial ideals, but were immersed in wider anti-colonial processes, with curricular and extracurricular activities helping to produce a fertile milieu for the creation of agitators and non-conformists beyond the local boundaries of the schools. These chapters together illustrate tensions between colonial and imperial ideologies and local realities, while simultaneously demonstrating some of the commonalities in discourses about boarding-school inmates in periods of heightened imperialism and racial marginalisation. The last section of cases studies, Part IV: Practices and Processes, examines how concepts of gender and the body were used to discipline children within boarding schools. Kirsten Kamphuis examines discourses around expected gender norms in elite Roman Catholic missionary boarding schools for girls on the island of Flores in Dutch East Indies at the end of the nineteenth century. The Catholic sisters were very critical of local cultural practices surrounding gender relations and marriage. Kamphuis argues that everyday educational practice at the girls’ schools, while aimed towards the teaching of Christian domesticity, hinged on a conception of indigenous girls’ bodies as a site of moral reform. Girls were subjected to a disciplinary regime that focused heavily on religious instruction and domestic labour. Religious sisters paid much attention to the outward appearance of their pupils, such as their hair and clothing. This scrutiny

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was underwritten by both Roman Catholic doctrine, which emphasised modesty, and by a racist ideology that dismissed people from Flores as evolutionarily backward. Local girls and their families, however, did not always accept the strict disciplinary regime at the schools, with Kamphuis also elucidating moments when this external discipline was actively resisted. In a further contribution, Mary Hatfield examines the physicality of boy’s bodies in Irish boys’ boarding schools during the nineteenth century. She argues that the movement of boys’ bodies in regulated ways through physical activity was an important aspect of boarding-school life, and ranged from sanctioned forms of sport and recreation to more aggressive and disruptive forms of protest, bullying, and fighting. The case study thus considers how schools differentiated between healthy forms of physical competitiveness and other unsanctioned acts of student violence. The differentiation between sanctioned and non-sanctioned use of the male body provides us with an institutional construction of masculine success and failure, and suggests how adult projections of boyhood shaped children’s experience of a boarding school education. Far from being ‘just a bit of fun’, Hatfield argues that the physicality of a boarding school education allowed boys to imagine and act out ideas about their position in society, and to defend the rights and independence which they envisioned as their natural inheritance. Anja Werner examines boarding schools for the deaf in German-speaking countries as sites of both inclusion and exclusion. She argues that boarding schools for the deaf contained ‘official oral spaces’ such as classrooms where students had to communicate in spoken language, as well as ‘illicit sign spaces’ such as living quarters, in which they would use forbidden sign language with each other. These attributes were not fixed and could change depending on who commanded them (hearing teachers or deaf students). The proclaimed inclusionary goal actually served as an exclusionary mechanism, for it encouraged students to develop a negative self-image as defective hearing persons, and also prohibited the exploration of Deaf Culture. In the final chapter, De-Valera N.Y.M Botchway and Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten examine the bullying praxis of ‘homoing’ in Ghanaian boarding schools. Through uncovering the colonial roots of this contemporary practice, they argue that the practice is a colonial vestige of the British fagging system, and an ancillary of home-grown traditional beliefs and attitudes in Ghana linked to the use of corporal punishment to discipline the bodies of students in schools. Botchway and Boahen-Boaten’s case study reminds us, as do the contributions from Kamphuis, Hatfield, and Werner, that the

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experiences of the physical self in the physical space of a boarding school had ramifications for the life trajectories of pupils and their understanding of self and their place in society long after their schooldays were finished. In an epilogue, historian of childhood David Pomfret offers a succinct overview of the ways in which these chapters contribute to the history of boarding schools, and highlights the new agendas in boarding school history which this volume forges. Boarding schools which have the purpose of excluding children and youth from their primary social settings to educate them as wholesomely as possible in order to that they be included into the broader society originate from the Age of Enlightenment, a period which is considered the foundational age of ‘modern’ education. The foundation of ‘modern’ education was based on the belief that all people are born equal, and that each child should have the chance to become a ‘good citizen’, independent of its social and racial background, gender, and religion. In order to do so, educators, statesmen (and seldom women) as well as many parents supported the expansion of a general school system. School education was complemented by boarding where it was otherwise impossible or difficult for children to attend school, or where it seemed wise to politicians and educators to separate them from their primary environment, especially if they were from socially underprivileged or marginalised backgrounds. Consequently, the studies within this volume demonstrate in detail how boarding schools relate to progressive ideals of equality and freedom, and how they became instruments of social suppression as well as political oppression. This is especially true in relation to the colonial context, as well as in the history of First Nations and Indigenous peoples, but it can also be seen in connection with the education of underprivileged classes in European countries. Yet even though it becomes incontrovertibly clear that the experiences of boarding school differed greatly, depending on the social and cultural background of the pupils, the studies within this volume also found commonalities in practices such as the prefect and fagging systems, or a strict timetable. These can be explained partly by the fact that all of the institutions examined had a common origin, and partly by their shared transnational history—a fact which has to date been largely overlooked, and which the studies in this volume have begun to explore.

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Notes 1. Stogdon (1925, p. 32 and p. 359). 2. Within the British context, ‘public schools’ were fee paying schools that were for those who could afford to pay for them and predominantly had a boarding component. This is in contrast with the notion of ‘public schools’ often used in the United States and elsewhere to describe schools offering universal free education. 3. For the public school world in general, see Chandos (1984). For Harrow, see Tyerman (2000, esp. pp. 302–402) for Harrow and its connection to imperialism. 4. According to the Harrow printed records, there were six sons of A.A. Apcar’s alone: Thomas A. (1861–1865), Apcar A. (1865–1869), John A. (1966–1971), Seth A. (1870–1872), Alexander A. (1871–1874), and Joseph A. (1877–1878). See Stogdon (1925, pp. 147, 191, 201, 248, 265, and 331). There were four more Apcar boys from other relatives, being: Seth T. (1862–1866), Alexander A. (1864–1866), John A. (1865– 1868), and Gregory (1869–1871). See Stogdon (1925, p. 157, p. 180, p. 185, and p. 235). 5. See, for example, discussions of such men in Reed (2016, esp. Ch. 4). 6. Foster (1885, p. 10). 7. Subsequently, he held the role of principal of the Divinity School at Lahore (1896–1907) and was later an honorary fellow of Lahore University (from 1902). See Stogdon (1925, p. 162). 8. Church Missionary Society [CMS], Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East Ninety-Fifth Year, 1893–1894 (London: Church Missionary House: 1894), p. 123. 9. CMS (1894, p. 119). 10. The Church Missionary Gleaner, vol. 14/15 (December 1888), p. 183. 11. The Church Missionary Gleaner, vol. 14/15 (December 1888), p. 183. 12. See, for example, Fuchs (2007), Fuchs (2012), Popkewitz (2013), Caruso et al. (2014), Swartz and Kallaway (2018). 13. Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, p. 16). 14. Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, p. 11). 15. Goffman himself stresses the importance of house-staff with regard to English public schools, see Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, p. 107). 16. For initiation rituals in British public schools, see De Symons Honey (1977, pp. 219–222), and Chandos (1984, pp. 63–85). Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, pp. 26–27) also emphasises the important role of rite de passage. 17. Foucault (1975). 18. The earliest and most famous description of power structures in boarding schools is of course found in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays by

1

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

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Thomas Hughes (1857). See also Garthorne-Hardy (1977, pp. 181–183), Chandos (1984, pp. 63–85). On the scheduling of activities see Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, p. 17). On the spatial regime of boarding schools, see Hamlett (2015a, pp. 62–110), and ibid. (2015b). On the influence of games, see Mangan (1981), Mangan and McKenzie (2000), Dishon (2017). Bourdieu (1989). Foucault (1975). Ruberu (2007, orig. 1967). Synders (1965). Jacobi (1976). Stichweh (1991). Rousseau (1762). See as well Bloch (1995). Benner and Kemper (2001, pp. 137–187). Fletcher (2008, p. 8). Kay-Shuttleworth (1868), Kay-Shuttleworth (1832). Groppe (2021). For an introduction on Arnold, see Bamford (1975), Gathorne-Hardy (1977, pp. 70–79). On criticism of Arnold, see Neddam (2004). Tozer (2015). De Bellaigue (2007). Higginbotham (2017). Murdoch (2006, p. 79). Bellenoit (2007), May et al. (2014), Mangan (1988), Swartz (2019), Jensz (2022), Manktelow (2018). Tschurenev (2019). Sedra (2011). Allender (2016). There is a growing literature on the legacies of boarding and residential schools for Indigenous peoples. See, for example, Haebich (2000), Miller (2009), Adams (1995), Fear-Segal (1999). See, for example, Wolfe (1999), Kaomea (2014). See, for example, Edmonds (2010), Minton (2019). Milloy (1999). The reports are available through the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation website https://nctr.ca/reports2.php (last accessed 13.3.2021). Commonwealth of Australia, Bringing Them Home Report, 1997: https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/pdf/social_jus tice/bringing_them_home_report.pdf (last accessed 9.3.2021). Mak et al. (2020). Gaztambide-Fernández (2009).

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49. See Mack (1973, orig. 1938), Bamford (1967), Gathorne-Hardy (1977). 50. For Britain, see Simon and Bradley (1975), De Symons Honey (1977). For the United States, see McLachlan (1970), Levine (1980). 51. Chandos (1984), Heward (1988). 52. Mangan (1981), Mangan and McKenzie (2000). 53. Mangan (2014). 54. See, for example, the contributions in the edited collection by Mangan (1988). 55. See Fuchs and Stuchtey (2002), Budde et al. (2006). See lately, for example, on the global history of the middle class: Dejung et al. (2019); and on education: Fuchs and Vera (2019). 56. Brockliss and Sheldon (2012). See also, Fuchs (2007), Fuchs (2012): Swartz and Kallaway (2018), Tschurenev (2019). See also Möller and Wischmeyer (2013), May et al. (2014), McLeod and Paisley (2016), Kallaway and Swartz (2016), Swartz (2019), Fuchs and Vera (2019). 57. Möller and Wischmeyer (2013, p. 20). 58. Hauser et al. (2016), Möller (2013), Isensee et al. (2020), Pomfret (2016). 59. Minton (2019, esp. Ch. 2). See also National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: https://nctr.ca/map.php (last accessed 10 March 2021). 60. See, for example, Fear-Segal and Rose (2016). 61. Minton (2019). 62. See Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, p. 107). 63. See Stogdon (1925); The Church Missionary Gleaner, vol. 14–15 (December 1888), p. 183. 64. Goffman (1970, orig. 1961, p. 16). 65. Stogdon (1925, p. 359). 66. Wall (2022). 67. See also Hamlett (2015b), McListy et al. (2015), Vallgårda et al (2015), Vallgårda (2015). 68. See, for example, Milloy (1999), Minton (2019). 69. See, for example, Gathorne-Hardy (1977, pp. 136–143), Chandos (1984, pp. 30–47, pp. 247–267).

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PART I

Elites

CHAPTER 2

Including Émigrés and Excluding Americans? The Philadelphia Female Seminary of Madame Marie Rivardi (aka Maria von Born) Jonathan Singerton

In the early United States, schooling formed an integral component in ensuring the longevity of the republican experiment. Republican governance required a strident commitment to morals that only sound educational practices could foster. American women assumed an integral role within society as ‘republican mothers’ who “guaranteed the steady infusion” of virtue through domestic nurture and primary education of future citizens.1 As temperate moral characters, women appeared to be ideal educators for good-spirited republicans, but could not otherwise participate fully in society as it would be a demotion of their supposed natural

J. Singerton (B) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_2

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inclinations.2 Although early American society in the aftermath of the American Revolution denied women full political and social citizenship such as exercising suffrage, holding public office, and owning property rights, women were able to carve out a societal space.3 Institutions such as finishing schools, academies, and literary associations sustained the entry of elite women into what has been called a ‘civil society’ composed of “a public inhabited by private persons”.4 Through the management of civil organisations such as schools, women in early America constructed a formidable cultural power based on education, martial, and social status. As integral as education was to the well-being of the early American republic, school roles were a permeable occupation, open above all to talented, morally rigorous individuals from various backgrounds.5 Nevertheless, exclusive practices could emerge within this inclusivity to practitioners. Distinctions based upon socio-economic, religious, or racial lines crafted artificial boundaries within American schooling. Episodic immigration produced similar delineations within educational structures and practices. This chapter focuses on one period of migratory influx, namely the incorporation of French émigrés in the United States starting in the 1790s, and its exclusionary effects upon the boarding school culture in the early republic.6 Madame Rivardi’s Seminary for Young Women in Philadelphia was a force for creating exclusionary spaces for daughters of elite aristocrats, especially of European émigrés, in this period. Founded in 1802, Madame Rivardi’s seminary was a byword for excellence up until its spectacular financial collapse in 1814. Young girls were to become a model of genteel womanhood, procurers of wealthy suitors, champions of domesticity, and learned practitioners of ‘feminine’ subjects. The pupils adhered to a strict curriculum designed for their integration into a cultivated society. Young women who trained at the Rivardi’s seminary became destined for preordained roles as wealthy spouses, elite hostesses, and social networkers. Good education proved pivotal in negotiating successful women’s entry into American society. As the seminary’s chaplain expressed in 1807 at the school’s annual address, “The advantages which result to a female, whose education has been well secured, are incalculable. In society, she has other themes to engage the conversation than those which reptile scandal or protean fashion supply”.7 Serving the increasing desire for education of women were a multitude of schooling establishments throughout the republic.8 By educating the scionesses of some of the leading families in the United States, the Rivardi seminary functioned

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as a reinforcement of the separation between the social strata of early America—to mix domestic and foreign elites and to demarcate them away from the general populace. In the case of the Rivardi’s Seminary, the situation was extreme. The school’s focus lay on a principled French style of education, featuring an extensive acquisition of European languages and norms of social etiquette. Pupils had to master French, and their grammar was scrutinised so they could converse and write in the language fluently. The same reviews went for Italian and German but to a lesser degree. Partly this stemmed from the major proportion of the school’s population, the émigré community of French expatriates who fled from the French Revolution to Philadelphia in the 1790s. Another influential factor was the school’s founder, Madame Marie Rivardi.

“The Mansion of All the Virtues and Graces”: The Rivardi’s Seminary, 1802–1814 The female seminary reflected the personality of its eponymous founder, Madame Rivardi. Born in Prague as Maria von Born, eldest daughter of the polymath scientist and freemason Ignaz von Born, she came of age in Vienna as a celebrated socialite famed for her intellect and beauty. Her tempestuous marriage to the Ragusan Count Tomo di Bassegli ended with her abandoning him for a Swiss military engineer John Jacob Ulrich Rivardi with whom she absconded to North America in the early 1790s.9 Her father, without any male offspring, treated her without prejudice towards her gender, enabling her curiosity, stimulating her talents, and ingratiating her into his cosmopolitan world of intellectuals.10 In many ways, she desired the same for the female youth in the United States. In a Statement of the Rules and Regulations of her seminary issued in 1806, she outlined the philosophy behind her school: “to secure and accelerate the progress of her pupils, to excite a spirit of emulation without giving rise to envy or jealousy, [and] by this means the heart and the mind are equally cultivated and improved”.11 The primary aim of her school was to impart these qualities in young elite women. Tinged by her own personal experience of destitution, she desired young women to have their own means of self-preservation within a prescribed eighteenth-century social order.12 The internal arrangement of the seminary reflected the desire to imbue pupils with confidence and broad education. On trips along trails by the Schuylkill River, students collected flora and fauna specimens for

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their own natural history cabinets—much like Maria had done with her father. Classes on botany supplemented guest lectures organised regularly throughout the year on the arts and sciences. Excursions to the city’s museums and art galleries facilitated practical demonstrations. Subjects included typical ‘practical’ and ‘ornamental’ disciplines such as English grammar, arithmetic, history (both secular and sacred), geography, philosophy, and music. French was the only compulsory foreign language in keeping with the strong affiliation of the school’s student body. Spanish and Italian were optional as was dancing, needlework, and equestrianism. Pupils composed their own music, performed their own plays, and recited their own poems.13 A system of review and reward enshrined a premium on good moral conduct and academic advancement. The most coveted award went only to those who Madame Rivardi thought the most charitable, altruistic, or benevolent. Daily recitations received grades ranging from ‘excellent’ to ‘very bad’ and a chart, hung in each classroom, displayed the rankings of each student. Pupils who had distinguished themselves with regular excellence received a special invitation to sit with Madame Rivardi for a French conversation at dinner. This practice of ‘high table’ and systematic ranking among pupils engendered competition and self-improvement (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1 Report card of Victorine du Pont (Hagley Museum and Library)

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Exposure of student performance aided the dual construction of the pupils’ confidence as well as the school’s reputation within society. Public examinations took place on the first Tuesday of each month. These events celebrated the success of students who performed their latest recitations of English or French classics, provided musical entertainment, or executed dance routines for the delight of parents, patrons, and Philadelphia’s luminaries. Exhibitions of drawings, needlework, and penmanship further impressed guardians and friends. The rest of the year, however, students remained sequestered within the school community. Interaction with outside members, especially boys of a similar age, earned scrutiny, and guests were only infrequently tolerated. Trips outside could occur on weekends but in the presence of a chaperone. The school year lasted twelve months with three fortnightly breaks occurring at Easter, late summer, and Christmas when pupils could visit home. Contact with parents and friends came through letter writing, a cornerstone of the educational programme, and pupils reserved a specific evening each week to write letters home and to reflect on their progress.14 In the summer months, the whole school relocated to the countryside to escape the oppressive heat of the city and only returned to Philadelphia for the cooler season between September and May. Besides the extra stimulation from a new environment, this regular rhythm held the added benefit of instilling the aristocratic practice of relocating between summer and winter residences among the girls. Staff composition imparted the greatest level of patrician atmosphere at the school. Although staff members altered throughout the duration of the seminary, the majority remained French speaking. Many of these individuals were refugees arising from the Napoleonic Wars or revolution in the Caribbean. Denis A. Volozan, the school’s art instructor, for example, came to the United States in 1799 from Lyon. He was heavily involved in the French émigré community as a charter member and director of the Société Bienfaisance de Philadelphie, which organised aid for French refugees.15 Another refugee was Pierre Thouron, who arrived in 1802 as the French teacher.16 Though he and Volozan moved on after a few years, there was one continual French expat clique in Rivardi’s employ. Jean Brevost along with his wife and daughter had originally settled further west in the planned French colony of refugees at Azilum, Pennsylvania, but dwindling prospects of the colony’s American backers and a declining population who chose to return to France after Napoleon Bonaparte’s takeover forced the settlement project to be abandoned.17

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The Brevost trio stayed in the United States, taking up accommodation in the school and assisting with day-to-day operations. Their daughter Antoinette Brevost completed her schooling at the seminary. A model student, she began assisting with classes and became a school governess.18 The strong French community allowed Rivardi to claim the seminary as a true beacon of Francophone education. There was an equally healthy French element within the student population. Refugee children from mainland France and the French Caribbean flocked to the school. This pattern reflected the broader influx to Philadelphia. By 1793, the peak year of the revolutionary exodus to Philadelphia, as many as 5000 Francophones joined the 45,000 inhabitants between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers.19 Many seeking asylum were dejected nobles hoping to recreate a degree of the ancien régime in the American republic. Gallic coffeehouses, grocers, bookshops, and, of course, schools opened as a result. Education became a pressing issue. Aristocratic families needed new connections and intermarriage between respected families required well-rounded children who were versed in the usual tenets of a European education and proficient in both English and French. The Rivardi’s school contained around sixty pupils on average each year. The majority of them were Francophones but even within this cohort, there was a majority of mainland French and a minority of West Indian French. The ‘creoles’, as the West Indian children identified themselves, preferred to stay within their own circle. They held understandable reasons. Creole girls suffered a double stigma compared to their Gallic counterparts. First, they grew up in the Caribbean where formal female education was virtually non-existent. Their linguistic deficiencies, especially in English, severely disadvantaged their ability to mix with the English-speaking Americans. Second, many of them had known a double asylum with refuge first taking place in the Spanish Caribbean where they found life had more resonance with their familiar plantation society than the ostentatious Francophile school in Philadelphia. Such was the case for the Cadoret sisters who found adjustment to seminary life difficult and initially refused to take part in any communal activity.20 American students, in the minority generally, found it hard to accept the Caribbean creoles. One pupil refuted accusations of vanity from her creole classmates after she refused to take part in their gossip sessions or attend a small celebration. “Never before residing at Mrs. R’s had I believed that people live for the enjoyment of intrigue”, she wrote to her French friend with scorn.21

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A practice called ‘mothering’ ensured some mixing among the diverse collection of children present at the Rivardi’s seminary. Four classes separated the girls academically between the third and second classes (lowest) to the middle and first classes (highest) which denoted age or ability. Under this system, older girls became symbolic ‘mothers’ to ‘daughters’ in the lower years. This not only alleviated some staff burdens but also created a level of endearment between pupils and provided older girls with the experience of controlling younger children in anticipation of motherhood. Inside and outside the school, the girls maintained the ‘mother-daughter’ relationship. ‘Mothers’ tended to their ‘daughters’ when they were ill, reminded them of their obligations, reprimanded them for failing to write letters on time, and, throughout the process, developed deep bonds of friendship. When one ‘mother’ graduated from the school, her ‘daughter’ often stayed in touch. In several cases, the emancipated ‘daughters’ playfully questioned how they could survive without their ‘mother’s’ companionship during sicknesses or without visits.22 Strong friendships among pupils made for a powerful demonstration of Rivardi’s project to enamour women with their own kind. For this reason, her school won approval from like-minded women, most notably First Lady Dolley Madison who recognised Rivardi’s institution to be “the Mansion of all the virtues and Graces which contribute to the happiness and lustre of our sex”.23 Such recognition counted in elevating the profile of the school.

“Gothicating”: Excluding and Including in Philadelphia The Rivardi’s seminary in Philadelphia was an elitist institution. Excluding unacceptable members occurred along financial lines. Attendance at the Rivardi’s seminary cost a significant amount. There were two categories of attendance, but neither one was cheap. Day-schoolers frequented the school but did not live there unlike the boarders who lived on school premises for most of the year. Day-schoolers were typically American girls from wealthy Philadelphia families whereas boarders were typically French children whose parents lived in different states. Southern planters, however, increasingly saw value in educating their daughters in elite schools closer to the urban centres of American society as a means of evaluating their cultural status and downplaying their rural remoteness.

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American boarders, therefore, hailed primarily from the southern families like the Huger, Izard, Pinckney, and Stone daughters. Day-schoolers paid half rate. Guardians paid a base cost for tuition per quarter, $34 for day-schoolers, along with lodgings for boarders, rising to $55 minimum a quarter. Additional fees entailed costs for laundry and supplies of books, ink, and parchment. Rivardi enumerated everything. On one occasion, she charged the cost of a new toothbrush.24 The total sums could be somewhat extortionate. One French émigré sent both his daughters to the school, but by the time the second joined two years later, he had spent $520 for the eldest daughter alone.25 Families were willing to shoulder these costs, equating price with prestige. In return, they expected an exclusive education; something obtainable only by the richest families and which, by its limited accessibility, raised the standard of their daughter’s association. Representing exclusivity was integral to Rivardi’s success. She prided herself on the prestige of her “establishment”, as she preferred to call the school.26 The establishment was itinerant for several years within Philadelphia, but the physical space of the school accentuated its exclusive reputation. The Statement on the Rules and Regulations from 1806 makes clear the importance of space in defining a suitably grandiose institution for prospective parents. “The largest school-room […] is seventy feet by twenty-five, is exposed to the South, well lighted by eleven large windows, and heated by two stoves”, ran one description, emphasising the appropriateness for concerts, balls, and public receptions.27 Rivardi sought to manifest the school’s prowess by occupying ever-grander premises. In 1811, the seminarians relocated to a large four-storey mansion on the corner of Twelfth and Chesnutt Street. It was the pinnacle habitation for the school made possible by a subsidised rent from the landowner Godfrey Haga, one of the school’s promoters. Philadelphians knew the spacious house as the ‘Gothic Mansion’ for its medieval revivalist style.28 The structural prominence underscored both the position of the school within Philadelphia’s society and the European overtones with its castled edifice. This was exclusivity by architectural fiat. Moving into the Gothic Mansion stressed the separation between school inhabitants and the riffraff of Philadelphia society (Fig. 2.2). Rivardi’s pupils revelled in their luxurious new surroundings. In fact, a new word appeared in their vocabulary to reflect their new status in Philadelphia: ‘gothicating’. The term referenced their grandiose accommodation for hosting classes, performing plays, and, most of all, for

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Fig. 2.2 The ‘Gothic Mansion’ in Philadelphia (The Port Folio)

entertaining guests at the school. As they unpacked their trunks in the new mansion, some schoolgirls could not wait to inform their friends of the newfound affluence and “gothic” adventures awaiting in the “castle” of Philadelphia.29 Creole pupils rejoiced at having lavish spaces for grand balls like in Europe. They hoped to rid themselves of the usual male “swains” who attended galas at previous school premises. Wishing to demonstrate their higher status, many of them wrote home for extra allowances to purchase new gowns and dresses suitable for a public debut at the Gothic Mansion.30 Scores of visitors descended to see the new rooms. Prospective male suitors scouted opportunities to attend the open galas and woo a young French scioness or wealthy American heiress. There could be too much of a good thing, however. One French boarder wrote home to complain about the level of frivolity unleashed by the relocation. She was thoroughly “disgothicated” from all the pompous talk among staff and students alike.31 Yet overall, the final premises of the Rivardi’s seminary united the girls in their feelings of social superiority and denigrated those less fortunate to receive a Rivardi-style education.

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Exclusion from without strengthened inclusion within. Despite the initial pangs from West Indian pupils, integration among the girls occurred with great rapidity. Linguistic hurdles fell within the first year or so when all French-speaking pupils had mastered varying degrees of English and American pupils became increasingly daring in their attempts to communicate in French, even in their private correspondences.32 French speakers, however, remained susceptible to losing their sense of belonging. Linguistic attrition softened their resolve towards their heritage and sparked alarm in some family members who spotted spelling errors and sloppy grammar in their native tongue. One aunt sent back a caustic commentary on an error-ridden letter from her niece and warned against becoming overly ‘Americanised’.33 Although inclusivity did not turn French pupils into assimilated Americans, it did form a distinctive coterie of young women who upheld their own notions of social cohesiveness. Common taste in literature unified pupils and stimulated the exchange of opinions lasting beyond their graduations. Romantic literature provided ample adhesiveness. Works by Lord Byron, Madame de Staël, and Oliver Goldsmith became staple diets.34 Sir Walter Scott’s poems and plays met with acclaim among all seminarians. Apart from their beloved ‘Scotti’, famous histories and tales of heroic women (mainly European queens) filled their imagination and underlined their communal sense of feminine confidence.35 In this elite boarding school, exclusion served to separate young women from society by cultivating their moral instincts and instructing them with a fine education. American and émigré parents alike made the investment in good education to deter the prospect of their child marrying into greater impoverishment and to increase the likelihood of ‘marry up’ or at least marrying equal relative to their current socioeconomic rank. Appearing as a ‘gothicated’ person came via attendance at elite exclusive institutions crafted by entrepreneurs like Marie Rivardi. At the same time, schools like Rivardi’s enabled inclusivity among socio-economic elites in Philadelphia and beyond. Integrating American with French émigrés allowed for socialisation which transcended sociolinguistic lines. Through institutions like Rivardi’s school, émigré girls found their place and entry point into American society.

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“More as a National, Than as a Local Establishment”: Constructions of Legitimacy Operating an independent boarding school in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia posed challenges to Marie Rivardi. She relied upon a wide network of individuals to construct an institutional reputation and legitimise business in the eyes of her clients and promoters. Central among these individuals was her husband John Jacob Ulrich Rivardi, the school’s accountant, general administrator, and tutor in arithmetic, epistolary style, Italian, and German. Although the school’s name bore Madame Rivardi, the Statement of Rules and Regulations issued to parents and supporters made clear in the first lines that the establishment was “under the care and direction of Mr. Rivardi”.36 Veiling the business with masculine ownership bolstered the school’s profile as a stable enterprise in a time when solely female-run firms were not the norm.37 Yet, behind it all, Marie Rivardi remained the driving force of the school’s good fortune. Her name adorned the report cards and received her signature as certification, her letters to parents warned or praised their child’s performance, and her public persona remained intimately tied with the reputation and development of the school. A fundamental aspect of the legitimacy-building efforts by Marie Rivardi was the cultivation of a powerful group of supporters. French émigrés who sought prestigious schooling for their children were naturally inclined to enrol them into a reputable establishment catering to their cultural sensitivities. Enticing American children into the establishment and ensuring its financial success with wealthy patrons, however, required recognisable American backers. To this end, Rivardi enlisted several prominent Philadelphians as members of her board of trustees. The most renowned figure was Benjamin Rush, a celebrated physician and signer of the Declaration of American Independence who agitated strongly for female education.38 The board otherwise contained notables such as merchant Anthony Morris, Secretary of the Navy (and future Secretary of State) Robert Smith, Episcopalian Bishop of Pennsylvania William White, and J. B. McKean, the Pennsylvanian governor’s son. Added to this was the French-born member of the American Philosophical Society, Pierre Duponceau, who lent considerable intellectual gravitas to the school’s mission. It also helped that many trustees sent their own relatives to the school such as Julia Rush and Eliza McKean. Obtaining associations of distinguished persons afforded Rivardi’s institution an air

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of legitimacy as the city’s finest championed its purpose with their own names. Yet metropolitan approval was not enough for Marie Rivardi who sought to turn her establishment into the finest educational institution in the United States.39 She appealed to national leaders in emulation of royal patronage. She was fortunate to have close ties with many of the early American leaders. Her spouse’s military background earned them many friends in Washington, but the new Jefferson administration had interrupted their carefully cultivated allies on the federal level. Rivardi chose a direct approach to the new President of the United States, pitching Thomas Jefferson directly for his endorsement in 1807. In appealing to the “First Magistrate”, she deliberately emphasised the American character of her school, downplaying the French overtones and émigré element in the school. The greatest number, she claimed, came from “different states of the Union” making her school “more as a national, than as a local establishment”.40 Indeed, there was some level of truth to her assertion. At one time or another, families from Delaware, Maryland, New England, and the Carolinas sent their young into her care. Five girls from two different Missouri families also attended the school.41 Geographic outreach counted for little and appeals for presidential patronage did not translate well, however. Jefferson showed no signs of interest in the school, its headmistress, or her project. Undeterred, Rivardi persisted with the next administration under President James Madison. An indirect inroad with the Madison administration came via Anthony Morris and his daughter Phoebe Morris, one of Rivardi’s pupils, who spoke highly of the move to the Gothic Mansion within the First Lady’s circles.42 Soon after the move, Rivardi invited the Madisons to attend a public examination and gala concert, but they declined though they expressed their general admiration for the school.43 Rivardi learned the hard way about differing styles of American and European patronage. Sponsorship from metropolitan elites was not always enough. Even with the support of the governor’s family, Rivardi stumbled when trying to convert connections into financial benefit. In early 1807, Rivardi also petitioned the Pennsylvania state legislature for the right to hold a lottery amounting to $20,000 in order to further the expansion of her seminary. The bill failed on the second reading without appeal.44 Simply courting eminences failed. Proving institutional function served a better approach to build legitimacy and garner wider support. Yet, for

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this tact, she had to employ other methods to construct the profile of her school. Promotion through local media proved an effective tool in enhancing the standing of the Rivardi’s seminary. Close affiliation with Philadelphia publishers such as Mathew Carey, Joseph Dennie, and William Bradford allowed Rivardi to disseminate her school’s progress in printed form. Friendly articles in the Port Folio, the foremost intellectual magazine in the city, promoted the seminary to urban literati as an exemplar of educational standards.45 The December 1805 edition carried a school prospectus which Dennie, the editor, described as “finely calculated to nourish the best qualities of the female mind”.46 Similarly, continual advertisements in local newspapers refreshed the public’s awareness of the ‘Mrs. Rivardi’s Academy’ through repeated updates of the school’s whereabouts and openness to new admissions. Within one three-year period, Rivardi took out over 160 notices in the widely circulated Aurora General Advertiser of Philadelphia. From 1802 to 1812, there were nearly 225 advertisements featured about her school.47 Printed remembrances supplemented the physical presence of the school within the city and the interpersonal marketing among influential supporters. Rivardi used these advertisements in particular to notify residents of the seasonal relocations to the countryside. Although trivial, these advertisements functioned as performative legitimisation. It announced the twice-annual oscillation of the school between premises, reminding readers of the accommodations on offer to pupils and the practice of seasonal retreats. The known locations of the summer retreat magnified the display of privilege. In Germantown, Rivardi occupied one of the largest dwellings leased to her by the sheriff Godfrey Dorfenille.48 Pupils relished the idyllic scenes on offer. “I regret with you that we shall not have another opportunity to rove thro’ that delightful country near Germantown”, wrote one girl after graduating, “for though a boarding school is a confinement to many, I think my friend with me will acknowledge that it is a very delightful season”.49 In 1805, an epidemic forced a relocation to Mill Creek, west of the city and prolonged the retreat from May until November.50 Knowing the power of presentation, the choice was deliberate. Mill Creek was a gentrified area outside Philadelphia where aspiring socialites sought accommodation. Rivardi leased a grand farmhouse formerly belonging to Matthew McConnell who, during his tenure as the first president of the Philadelphia stock exchange, developed the grounds to bolster his country squire persona. It featured ample

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gardens and a private orchard.51 By turning inconvenience into opportunity, Rivardi emulated social climbers like McConnell via relocation to affluent premises. And she naturally made sure the readers of the Aurora knew about it. Rivardi’s efforts to legitimise her business ultimately faltered following the sudden death of her husband in 1808. He had suffered from wounds sustained during Russian military service and sought convalescence on the island of Martinique towards the end of 1807.52 His passing marked a significant blow for Rivardi who faced the management of the seminary along with raising their three children alone. Initially, she substituted his former role within the school with help from Jean Brevost. Yet she could not replace her most trusted advisor. The Statement on Rules and Regulations made clear the teamwork between husband and wife. “Mr. and Mrs. Rivardi never leave the house at the same time”, read one criterion reflecting their commitment to the school and trust in each other.53 For several years, administration ticked over and relocation to the Gothic Mansion seemed to seal the success of the school but events beyond Rivardi’s control struck again. First, a rising crescendo of fervent republican patriotism among Americans which marginalised émigré culture and aristocratic display reached an apogee around the outbreak of war in 1812. Second, French exiles began to return to their homelands following the quelling of revolution in the Caribbean and in anticipation of restoration of the pre-war order in Europe. Combined together, these circumstances proved fatal for French-styled establishments such as Madame Rivardi’s seminary. In 1814, debtors called in Rivardi’s credit which she was unable to repay. Lavish outlays necessitated by the demands of exclusive practices—such as removing to Germantown in the summers, hosting public events, and occupying the Gothic Mansion—made for uncomfortable accounting when a dwindling supply of students provided less and less income. Without financial recourse, Rivardi prepared to abandon her project and join the exodus back to Europe. Yet her financers prevented her desertion and had her imprisoned in debtors’ gaol until suitable repayments could be organised. Together with her daughter, who joined her out of solidarity, she languished there for several months until freedom allowed her to return to Europe. Her desperate pleas from within the gaol to former promoters and wealthy parents received only apathetic responses.54 In 1815, Marie Rivardi left the United States to resume her broken life as the countess di Bassegli in Vienna. Despite years of carefully

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constructed legitimacy and professionalism, her financial ruin came swiftly and without consideration for the brand she had fashioned for herself and her establishment in Philadelphia. The Rivardi’s seminary served as a vehicle for integrating French émigrés into early American society by providing young women with an elite education modelled on European forms of refinement. The school exemplified the function of many other boarding schools, contemporary and later, where children of both “old and new wealth” could mingle.55 Defining their learning agenda around socially performative tasks such as music acquisition, language training, epistolary style, and European literature refashioned both émigré children and American pupils into model prospective partners for elite males. Indeed, many of the Rivardi students married up into affluent circles. In May 1814, Louise Pageot des Noutières, known to her friends as Estelle Pageot and one of the West Indian students in the school, married Louis Barbe Charles de Sérurier, the French consul general—and later ambassador in Washington—in what was a highlight of the social calendar.56 Her marital success secured a prominent life where she impressed numerous American luminaries and presidents for years to come.57 Similarly, Theresa le Ray de Chaumont, daughter of an impoverished French land speculator, left Rivardi’s seminary before concluding her studies in order to take the hand of the French nobleman Pierre Armand, marquis de Gouvello, who had newly arrived in the United States.58 American pupils married into well-to-do circles too. Rebecca Ralston, daughter of the Philadelphia banker, married John Chester, the famous New England theologian and university scholar whereas Anne Potts Smith married into the French-speaking Lammot family. Her children eventually married into the émigré du Pont family whom she knew intimately from the two du Pont daughters who attended Madame Rivardi’s school with her.59 New familial bonds after graduation reflected the successful inclusion of French émigrés into American society. At the same time, the elitist trappings of the seminary maintained the separation from less affluent families. In creating an education facility for the continuation of European cultural norms, Marie Rivardi consciously cultivated an exclusive social class where only costly education and sufficient adherence to ancien-régime norms permitted membership. This class formation was not a process closed to Americans, but rather filtered only the acceptable socio-economic candidates based upon familial wealth, status, and acumen. In subscribing or promoting this style of education, American elites attuned themselves to Francophile culture and tastes,

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which they willingly adopted in the hope of preserving their affluent social ties and status. Historian James McLachlan emphasised the development of boarding schools within the United States as a response to domestic situations rather than a direct implantation of the educational models existing in Great Britain.60 Yet Rivardi’s example illuminates how refugees and renegades like her helped to fashion the style of schooling in early America. Cross-pollination rather than co-evolution gave rise to an early model within the boarding school system. As a result, Philadelphia emerged as a centre of aristocratic education because of the extensive community of French expatriates arriving in the 1790s as revolutionary waves tore through France and the French Caribbean. As in other states with a high proportion of exiled Francophones, teaching became one mainstay of new employment and social advancement. These new institutions sought to engrain the social sensitivities of elites through female instruction in the humanities, arts, epistolary craftsmanship, and via the construction of close-knit, closed social groups. By cultivating social refinement in one of the major American metropoles, Rivardi actively contributed to the wider exclusivities prevalent in early American society. Geopolitical and wider social transformations curtailed the longevity and impact of the Rivardi’s seminary, however. The boarding school succeeded for a certain time due to revolutionary turmoil, which engendered both Francophile feelings of solidarity among Americans and a wave of French expatriates fleeing political instability in France and the French Caribbean. Rivardi, herself an exile of sorts, thrived on the need for elite schools to maintain a semblance of old European society by émigré parents. In many ways, she emulated other school leaders who catered for émigré groups in diasporic settings. Her institution and its initiative were part of a global phenomenon of educational establishments responding to the demand for a continuation in émigré civilities and conformities.61 Yet the school’s fortunate underpinnings could only last for so long. Once the revolutionary era gave way to the restoration period in Europe, émigrés either returned or by then had simply adapted to their new diasporic location. Rivardi’s personal campaign to construct a legitimate reputation for her school was ultimately not enough to overcome the demise of this historical trend. The moment had passed and with it, Rivardi’s experiment to include émigrés by setting them apart in American society.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editors Felicity Jensz and Daniel Gerster for their expert assembly of this volume as well as to the participants of the Exclude to Include: Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools, their Participants and Processes during the 19th and 20th Centuries conference for their stimulating discussions and thought-provoking questions. I am also grateful to the staff of the Hagley Library and Museum at Wilmington, Delaware whose generous support and access to material in June 2018 has facilitated much of this chapter.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Kerber (1980, p. 11), Robbins (2004, pp. 16–21). McMahon (2012, pp. 2–3). Clayton (2015). Kelley (2006, p. 7). Clifford (2014). For the period in general, see Furstenberg (2014). Staughton (1807, p. 8). Bowie (1944). The author is currently preparing a biography of Maria von Born. Existing accounts include: Riley (2010), Flügel (2013) and Tomi´c (2018). Riedl-Dorn (1996). Library of Congress [LoC], Jefferson Papers, Series 1. A Statement of the Rules and Regulations observed in Mrs. Rivardi’s Seminary, South Second the Corner of Union Street enclosed in Marie Rivardi to Thomas Jefferson, 6 January 1807. For a similar view, see Johnson (1980b). Johnson (1980b, pp. 21–22). Johnson (1980b, p. 17). Sellin (1968). Blaufarb (2005, p. 225). Murray (1944), Jensen (1984). Johnson (1980a). Herbert (1984), Potofsky (2003). Hagley Library and Museum [HLM], WMSS 6A9, Eliza Ralston to Victorine du Pont, 31 March 1809. HLM, WMSS 6A9, Anna Potts Smith to Victorine du Pont, 8 October 1808. HLM, WMSS 6A9, Antoinette Brevost to Victorine du Pont 10 February 1809; WMSS 6B18, Evelina du Pont to Victorine du Pont, 27 February 1809.

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23. Dolley Payne Todd Madison to Marie Rivardi, 10 May 1812, in Holly C. Shulman, The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, University of Virginia (2004): http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde/DPM0340. Accessed 30 Dec 2017. 24. Johnson (1980b, p. 22). 25. HLM, WMSS4, Box 5, Receipts for Victorine du Pont, 17 January to 1 December 1807. 26. HLM, WMSS 4A5, Marie Rivardi to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, 24 February 1808. 27. LoC, Jefferson Papers, Series 1, ‘Statement’. 28. Anon. 1811. Dorsey’s Gothic Mansion. The Port Folio (Philadelphia), 5 February. 29. HLM, WMSS 6A9, Antoinette Brevost to Victorine du Pont, 2 June and 15 December 1811. 30. HLM, WMSS 4A5, Marie Rivardi to E. I. du Pont, 16 August 1811. 31. HLM, WMSS 6B18, Victorine du Pont to Evelina du Pont 17 June 1811. 32. Letters by Americans Rebecca Ralston, Anna Potts Smith, and Harriet Kingston contained French phrases and sentences to the Du Pont children, see, for example, HLM, WMSS 6A9, Rebecca Ralston to Victorine du Pont, 15 October 1808. 33. HLM, Bauduy Family Papers, Box 1, Judith Pauline Zoé de Bernard de Sassenay to Mimika Bauduy, 7 September 1802. 34. Imprints from Eleutherian Mills Historical Library known to have been read by the daughters of Eleuthére Iréne du Pont, see Hinsley (1976). 35. Johnson (1980b, pp. 30–32). 36. LoC, Jefferson Papers, Series 1, ‘Statement’. 37. Small-scale business such as tavernkeepers, grocers, and apothecaries were available to women in the early United States, see Tannenbaum (2002), Hartigan-O’Connor (2009, pp. 39–68 and pp. 181–191). 38. Straub (1967). 39. HLM, WMSS 4A5, Marie Rivardi to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, 24 February 1808. 40. LoC, Jefferson Papers, Series 1, Marie Rivardi to Thomas Jefferson, 6 January 1807. 41. Two Pratt girls came from Saint Geneviere, Missouri and the Mullphany family sent three sisters to Philadelphia. 42. Johnson (1980b, p. 3), Clark (1914, pp. 125–136). 43. HLM, WMSS 4A6, Marie Rivardi to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, 25 May 1812. 44. Anon (1807, pp. 68–69). 45. Lanzendörfer (2012). 46. [Dennie]. 1805. Education. The Port Folio, vol. 5, 14 December.

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47. The first was in the Aurora General Advertiser (Philadelphia), 8 November 1802. 48. Keyer et al. (1907, pp. 209–210). 49. HLM, WMSS 6A9, Rebecca Ralston to Victorine du Pont, 15 October 1808. 50. Aurora General Advertiser, 28 May and 23 November 1805. 51. Mester (2016, pp. 25–32), Reinberger and McLean (2015, p. 29). 52. The Port Folio, 27 February 1808. 53. LoC, Jefferson Papers, Series 1, ‘Statement’. 54. Notre Dame University Archives, Archdiocese of Baltimore Collection, MABA 4.07/D.09, Marie Rivardi to John Carroll, 10 March 1815. 55. Levine (1980, p. 91). 56. Johnson (1980b, p. 33). Pageot was the daughter of a French merchant who had been active in Cape Town before joining the French legation in San Domingo and then in the United States. 57. Feller et al. (2013, p. 143). 58. Schaeper (1995, pp. 335–339). 59. HLM, Acc. 761, Margaretta Lammot du Pont Papers, passim. 60. McLachlan (1970). 61. For similar circumstances, see Reboul (2017, pp. 105–109); for later examples, see Hassell (1991).

Bibliography Anonymous. 1807. Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, vol. 17. Lancaster: Burnside. Blaufarb, Rafe. 2005. Bonapartists in the Borderlands: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815–1835. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Bowie, Lucy Leigh. 1944. Madame Grelaud’s French School. Maryland Historical Magazine 39: 141–148. Clark, Allen C. 1914. Life and Letters of Dolley Madison, 125–136. Washington DC: Roberts. Clayton, Andrew. 2015. The ‘Rights of Women’ and the Problem of Power. Journal of the Early Republic 35 (2): 295–301. Clifford, Geraldine J. 2014. Those Good Gertrudes: A Social History of Women Teachers in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feller, Daniel, Laura-Eve. Moss, Thomas Coens, and Erik B. Alexander, eds. 2013. The Papers of Andrew Jackson, vol. 9. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Flügel, Helmut W. 2013. Maria von Born (1766–1830): Biographie einer emanzipierten Österreicherin in einer Übergangszeit. Berlin: ProBusiness Verlag.

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Furstenberg, François. 2014. When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation. New York: Penguin. Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. 2009. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Hassell, James E. 1991. Russian Refugees in France and the United States Between the World Wars. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 81 (7): 1–96. Herbert, Catherine A. 1984. The French Element in Pennsylvania in the 1790s: The Francophone Immigrants’ Impact. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (4): 451–469. Hinsley, Jacqueline A. 1976. The Reading Tastes of Educated Women of a Manufacturing Family in America. Unpublished MA Thesis. Wilmington: University of Delaware. Jensen, Joan M. 1984. Not Only Ours But Others: The Quaker Teaching Daughters of the Mid-Atlantic, 1790–1850. History of Education Quarterly 24 (1): 3–19. Johnson, Mary. 1980a. Antoinette Brevost: A Schoolmistress in Early Pittsburgh. Winterthur Portfolio 15 (2): 151–168. Johnson, Mary. 1980b. Madame Rivardi’s Seminary in the Gothic Mansion. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104 (1): 3–38. Kelley, Mary. 2006. Learning to Stand & Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kerber, Linda. 1980. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Keyer, Naaman H., C. Henry Kain, John Palmer Garber, and Horace F. McCann. 1907. History of Old Germantown, vol. 1. Germantown: McCann. Lanzendörfer, Tim. 2012. From the Periodical Archives: Joseph Dennie, the Value of the Editor, and the Creation of the ‘Port Folio.’ American Periodicals 22 (1): 94–106. Levine, Steven B. 1980. The Rise of American Boarding Schools and the Development of a National Upper Class. Social Problems 28 (1): 63–94. McLachlan, James. 1970. American Boarding Schools: A Historical Study. New York: Scribner’s Sons. McMahon, Lucia. 2012. Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mester, Joseph C. 2016. From Philadelphia Country House to City Recreation Center: Uncovering the Architectural History of the Building Known Successively as Blockley Retreat, Kirkbride Mansion, and Lee Cultural Center Through Building Archaeology. Unpublished MA Thesis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

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Murray, Elsie. 1944. French Experiments in Pioneering in Northern Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 68 (2): 175–188. Potofsky, Allan. 2003. Émigrés et Réfugiés de la Révolution française aux ÉtatsUnis. In Réfugiés/exilés aux États-Unis, 1776–2000, ed. Catherine Collomp and Mario Menendez, 33–50. Paris: CNRS. Reboul, Juliette. 2017. French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution. London: Palgrave. Reinberger, Mark, and Elizabeth McLean. 2015. The Philadelphia Country House: Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Riedl-Dorn, Christina. 1996. Ignaz von Born (1742−1791) – ein siebenbürgischer Naturforscher. Stapfia 45: 347. Riley, Helene M. A. 2010. Tale of Two Continents: Das merkwürdige Leben der Maria von Born. Germanic Notes and Reviews 41: 67–85. Robbins, Sarah. 2004. Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schaeper, Thomas J. 1995. France and America in the Revolutionary Era: The Life of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, 1725–1803. Providence: Berghahn Books. Sellin, David. 1968. Denis A. Volozan, Philadelphia Neoclassicist. Winterthur Portfolio 4: 118–128. Staughton, William. 1807. An Address, Delivered October 1807 at Mrs Rivardi’s Seminary, on the Occasion for the Examination of the First and Middle Classes. Philadelphia: Kimber, Conrad & Co. Straub, Jean S. 1967. Benjamin Rush’s Views on Women’s Education. Pennsylvania History 34 (2): 147–157. Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. 2002. The Healer’s Calling: Women and Medicine in Early New England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Tomi´c, Viktorija Frani´c. 2018. Prilozi za Biografiju Mimi von Born, Supruge Hrvatskog Prosvjetitelja Toma Basseglija. Anali Dubrovnik 56 (1): 299–361.

CHAPTER 3

Artisans and Aristocracy: Industrial Boarding Schools for Elite Africans in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Africa Rebecca Swartz

In the 1850s, Sir George Grey, Cape colonial governor, funded a network of boarding schools for boys, and later girls, along the Cape frontier in South Africa. The schools, which were ostensibly ‘industrial’ schools, had a clear political function: they were to be used as tools of the colonial government to ensure the loyalty of the African elite, and ultimately, to ‘pacify’ the ‘tribes’ in the region. Grey saw the establishment of industrial schools as essential to the future of the colony, arguing that they would “advance the peaceable occupation of the Interior of Africa by a European Race, and the civilisation and advancement in Christianity of the Races living within, or immediately beyond the borders”.1 Grey’s experience as colonial governor in New Zealand during a period of warfare shaped his

R. Swartz (B) University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_3

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belief that these schools could be part of the apparatus of humanitarian colonial governance in the face of intense settler colonial expansion in South Africa. At the same time, Grey provided funding for two industrial schools in other areas: one at Zonnebloem in Cape Town, and the other in the neighbouring Natal colony, at Ekukhanyeni (Place of Light).2 From the outset, the industrial boarding schools were shaped by tensions surrounding their purpose. As industrial schools, they were designed to train labourers and artisans, finding positions for the pupils in the service of settlers. Given the elite background of many of the pupils however, this was challenging, as pupils, parents, and some teachers had different ideas about the use of these schools. This chapter draws out some of the tensions faced in these industrial boarding schools, particularly around the meanings of ‘elite’ status in a settler colonial context. The mission-run industrial boarding schools occupied a liminal space between white colonial society and the African elite, particularly those of royal or chiefly status. On the one hand, missionaries hoped to draw in elite members of local communities to solidify their influence in particular regions. On the other, the industrial branches of the schools were training students to occupy skilled but ultimately subservient positions in colonial society. As race was increasingly associated with intellectual capacity over the course of the nineteenth century, black people were often constructed by colonial officials, settlers, and some missionaries as better suited to ‘practical’ rather than literary education. Students and parents often resented this form of education, favouring literary teaching. Given that the majority of African children did not attend any form of schooling during the period under discussion, all of the pupils in these institutions were a form of elite—being taught to read and write and acquire manual skills that were valued within the colonial economy positioned them differently to the majority of amaXhosa people. Nonetheless, there were limits to how their status in society was imagined by colonial officials and some missionaries: by virtue of their race, they were seen as in need of civilisation, whether they were high ranking children of chiefs or displaced populations who had little choice but to seek refuge at mission stations. The students were thus repositioned as being included in a version of Christian civilisation, but excluded from equal status to white settlers. At the same time, they often faced exclusion and displacement from their own communities.

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This chapter draws on a range of sources about the industrial boarding schools set up under the auspices of Grey’s grant, including government reports, missionaries’ correspondence and writing, as well as published secondary accounts. These archives primarily represent the voices of missionaries and colonial officials. Wherever possible, however, the chapter highlights the responses of pupils themselves, including attempting to consider the emotional impact of these boarding institutions on the individuals and families they affected. The sources relating to the different institutions under discussion here are not uniform. Schools like Zonnebloem and Ekukhanyeni, which drew in chiefly pupils, have garnered more attention in both primary and secondary literature than some of the short-lived industrial training institutions funded by the scheme.3 Lovedale, which was a very successful Scottish mission school, and formed the basis for the first higher education institution for African pupils, Fort Hare University, has similarly been the subject of scholarly attention.4 Amongst Lovedale’s pupils were individuals like Tiyo Soga, who was the first black South African to be ordained as a minister in the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland.5 In the 1860s, many of its students contributed to the Xhosa newspaper Indaba (The News) and played important roles in African nationalist politics in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 Given that many elite institutions have fuller archival records, there is a natural bias towards their study in the history of education literature.7 In this chapter, however, I complicate the singular focus on elite institutions by focusing both on those that were better known and those that have been historically overlooked. This challenges a retrospective reading of these institutions as exclusively sowing the seeds of anticolonial nationalism: while there is certainly evidence of this being true in some cases, these institutions also disrupted African communities, separated children from families, and reinforced racialised thinking about the suitability of ‘practical’ education for black students. Moreover, these schools only ever catered to a very small minority of African students. As Andrew Paterson explains of mission education in the Cape in the early twentieth century, mission school attendees represented a small fraction of the population, and those attending schools with specific industrial branches was, by 1912, only about one per cent of the total school-going African population.8 In some ways, therefore, all of the pupils attending schools in the period under discussion were part of an elite, as schooling was an

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exclusive experience. Many students were also elite because of their position in pre-existing social hierarchies as members of the royal or chiefly classes. The first part of the chapter focuses on the broader scheme for industrial schools, drawing primarily on information from Salem and Heald Town, two Wesleyan industrial boarding schools, and Lovedale. In the second part of the chapter, I examine records from Zonnebloem and Ekukhanyeni that give a sense of teachers’ and pupils’ experiences of the industrial boarding school system. The chapter, therefore, treads a delicate balance between recognising the elite pupils who attended these schools, and attempting to illustrate that for the majority of industrial school pupils, their lives were not subject to individual commentary. It does so through exploring a range of implicit and explicit comparisons and tensions at the time: between boys’ and girls’ education, between colonised and metropolitan elites and their education, and literary education and industrial training.

Industrial Boarding Schools at the Cape, 1855–1863 Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Cape colony, initially colonised by the Dutch and subsequently by the British, had seen a series of violent frontier wars between colonisers and the amaXhosa. While Dutch colonisers had initially seen the Cape as little more than a refreshment station en route to the East, subsequent waves of settlement had seen numbers of Dutch and later British emigrants settle in the colony. For Indigenous people, this meant continued waves of colonisation, displacement, and dispossession, coupled with increasingly rigid racial thinking about the status of Indigenous people as inferior to settlers. By the time that the industrial schools under discussion here opened, the eighth frontier war had recently concluded. An extreme drought in British Kaffraria in the early 1850s left amaXhosa people weakened and starving. A few years later, in 1856–1857, a lungsickness epidemic struck the area, exterminating large numbers of cattle, a critical source of milk, meat, and wealth. At the same time, Xhosa prophetess Nonqgawuse predicted that if Xhosa people killed their remaining cattle, their situation could be restored to the precolonial order.9 These events meant that the Xhosa community was vulnerable, often with little choice but to engage in the colonial economy or with mission institutions.10

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The British Colonial Office, while supporting the frontier wars financially, despite the incredible drain on funds, also wanted to appear to have the interests of southern Africa’s Indigenous peoples at heart. When the Cape received responsible government in 1854, a fund was reserved from the annual revenue of the colony, to be used for the Aborigines’ (Border) department (the Schedule D fund). Industrial boarding schools were recipients of this aid, amongst other projects, for the benefit of ‘native’ peoples. The fund was to be used to train African youth “in industrial occupations and to fit them to act as interpreters, evangelists and school masters among their own people”.11 These funds were primarily given to pre-existing mission schools as a lump sum and were often used to subsidise the erection of boarding and other schooling facilities. Aside from a few exceptions such as Lovedale, the schools took in pupils who did not have the means to pay for board and lodging, or school fees.12 The schools, which began to receive government funding from 1855, were run by missionaries already present in the colony, including Wesleyan Methodists, Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Scots Presbyterians.13 Those involved with the schools’ funding believed that the schools should aim to become self-supporting: girl boarders would mend and wash clothing for the boys, and conduct housework, while the products of boys’ labour could be sold.14 By 1862, eight schools were being run under the grant, which covered salaries of teachers, stipends for pupil apprentices and the expenses of boarders.15 In spite of the widespread political upheaval in the region at the time, the industrial schools—and the mission activities that surrounded them— were not uniformly welcomed by local people. A report from Heald Town in 1856 indicated that parents were anxious about sending their children to the school, fearing that the “government intended making the boys soldiers”.16 There were similar suspicions elsewhere, and these were often justified. For example, a Church of England periodical from 1867 said that Ekukhanyeni in Natal had started for two reasons: that “the tone of the natives would be raised through their future rulers, and they meanwhile would be hostages for the good behaviour of their fathers”.17 There was a tension between pupils and their parents actively choosing to enrol in these schools, and being left with little choice but to take advantage of opportunities offered by missionaries. There was significant debate between missionaries about the necessity or utility of boarding schools in the South African context. While other settler colonies like Australia and Canada followed systems of residential

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schooling for Indigenous children, in South Africa, there were concerns about whether boarding facilities would provide the most expedient means of spreading the gospel. Over the course of the nineteenth century, in fact, day schools were favoured for the African population. These were generally based at mission stations or out-stations and followed the principle that children would be able to spread the gospel amongst their families and communities if they remained living at home. Of course, there were more practical concerns as well: the cost of boarding school facilities was significant, and in the absence of any significant government aid, the burden of their cost would fall to mission societies. Missionaries also reported the unwillingness of parents to part with their children for extended periods of time to attend boarding schools.18 As Henry Callaway, Anglican missionary in Natal put it, establishing boarding facilities was not a decision to be taken lightly: “We know very well what the result in England would be of collecting together a lot of boys and girls without being able effectually to oversee them”.19 Missionaries also had different opinions on when children should be sent to schools: Barnabus Shaw at Salem believed that interventions when students were between fourteen and eighteen were most important, as that was when the “character is permanently formed”.20 Heald Town’s headmaster John Ayliff disagreed, saying that younger children learnt English more quickly and were better able to adapt to the rhythms of life in the mission schools.21 These disagreements illustrate why there was no widespread effort to open boarding schools in South Africa during this time: not only were these facilities costly, but missionaries and colonial officials often disagreed on how exactly these institutions should function. The schools’ curricula varied, depending on the facilities and skills of missionaries and teachers stationed there. Generally, they offered a mixture of practical skills and basic literacy and numeracy. At Salem and Heald Town, activities included carpentry, agricultural labour, and masonry. Girl boarders did cleaning, mending, and housework in preparation for their roles as Christian wives and mothers.22 The industrial schools’ combination of mechanical work and religious and literary teaching chimed with the values of many nonconformist missionaries of the time. As James Stewart, second principal of Lovedale put it, “Christianity and idleness are not compatible”.23 The idea of work being combined with religious education thus had a strong moral underpinning. Like the other mission schools at the time, female pupils were generally educated to become wives. As Bishop of Cape Town Robert Gray stated,

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he hoped the schools would enrol more girls, “for I am quite sure that this work will be a failure if we do not provide Christian wives for these young men”.24 Teachers were often concerned about boys and girls interacting in the classroom and in leisure time. Salem’s headmaster reported that a governess should be immediately appointed for the girls branch in 1856, as there were “peculiar dangers” that could arise from boys and girls mixing in the boarding schools.25 As in other colonial contexts, while missionaries hoped to use schools to recreate Christian families, they wanted to manage the process of mixing between the sexes very carefully.26 In England, too, the regulation of sexuality was seen as a key part of boarding schools’ role: as Jane Hamlett has argued, open dormitories were favoured because “regulating sexuality was a crucial part of the creation of a broader moral system that promoted self-control and limited the expression of desire”.27 The transformation of students in these institutions included the regulation of their sexual and romantic relationships. Boarding schools could, therefore, pose a unique challenge and potential danger to ‘moral’ sexual relationships if mixing between the sexes took place without adult control. Simultaneously, these institutions aimed to inculcate pupils into English moral codes by isolating them from their African communities and ways of life. This made them sites of both inclusion and exclusion. Life for students was rigidly structured: for example, at Salem, which had opened in response to the grant, students woke up 6am, before performing outdoor labour.28 After washing in the river, they went to breakfast and prayers. Then students went to their school lessons, beginning with reading, spelling, and arithmetic, before turning to writing, history, geography, or physics on different days of the week. After lunch at 1 pm, they returned to industrial training from 2–6 pm, ate supper, had evening prayers and singing, and were in bed by 8.30 pm.29 This institution was “conducted and managed as one family, – all the boarders living at commons, and the head master and family dining with them daily in the common hall”.30 The general superintendent of the Wesleyan mission in South Africa recognised that this rigid structure might be alien for the pupils, saying in his annual report to the governor that “His Excellency will perceive that the whole day is usefully employed; my only fear is, that we may have overdone it, and that such constant occupation may prove rather irksome to youths who have not been accustomed to see such diligence in their elders”.31 As Giordano Nanni points out of Lovedale, these industrial mission schools were aimed at the “reform of

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indigenous temporalities” and were places where “pupils could be taught to work, rest, play and pray in accordance with the rhythms instituted, and approved of, by colonial society”.32 This would make students easier to incorporate into colonial society as disciplined workers, following the European calendar rather than adhering to African customs and temporalities. These temporal regimes were a common feature across boarding schools in different contexts, as Gerster and Jensz note in the introduction to this volume. Although the schools were ostensibly funded to encourage practical training, some schools managed to tailor curricula according to their own agenda. This exemplifies the tensions between industrial and literary training that shaped many of the schools under discussion here. For Lovedale, the missionaries and Governor Grey agreed that the school should maintain a focus on educating pupils to a high level, in order to train a generation of teachers, catechists, and evangelists. The expansion of the government-aided schooling system in the Cape during this period meant that more African teachers were required for outstation schools, and thus, Lovedale’s curriculum could be framed as preparing a new generation of teachers.33 Nevertheless, the school enlarged to include industrial branches with a carpenter and a mason. Boys entered into the institution as apprentices, with their indentures lasting four years. Parents signed off on these indentures if the boys were underage. William Govan, principal of the institution, reported that when the apprentices were not engaged in industrial pursuits, they spent their time in the seminary, where they learned to read and write in their own language and English, learned English grammar, British history, Natural philosophy, and science, as well as arithmetic.34 Unlike Ekukhanyeni and Zonnebloem, discussed in more detail below, glimpses of students’ voices and experiences of the institutions mentioned in this section are difficult to access. One account of the Heald Town institution came from T Ndwandwa, who had been a pupil at the school in the 1850s, and returned to give a speech at the school’s jubilee in 1906. Although written fifty years after he had attended the school, he recalled the names of some of the pupils he had met at the institution, the erection of the new school buildings, and even hearing the tales of England when missionary John Ayliff returned from a trip home.35 These kinds of student accounts are rare in the case of the majority of the industrial boarding schools, and like this one, are often recollections written long after the student had left the institution. It is therefore

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difficult to gauge students’ own experiences of these boarding facilities, particularly during the period they were enrolled there. The voices of past pupils are often excluded from the archival records. Nevertheless, the records relating to the schools’ operation indicate that the students’ time, relationships, education, and work were rigidly controlled in the geographically exclusionary spaces of the boarding school. Despite the government support for these industrial boarding schools, and some mission societies’ eagerness to teach industrial skills, missionary teachers quickly decried the insufficient funding to carry out industrial training on any significant scale and reported that white artisans were unwilling to train African people in trades, which was attributed to fears of competition in the workplace and overt racial prejudice.36 The schools garnered criticism from the outset: as Langham Dale, Superintendent General of Education in the Cape colony, put it in a letter to the principal of the Lovedale institution in 1883, the institutions had initially been criticised as “money wasted”, but once pupils had graduated from the schools, the public complained “these native tradesmen, taught in industrial schools, take bread out of the white man’s mouth”.37 The schools were in a process of attempting to create a skilled African workingand middle-class, one which could contribute to the colonial economy through skilled trades, and earn positions as teachers, preachers and clerks in the colonial service. While attempting to craft an African elite, which was Christian, literate and part of colonial society (albeit in a subordinate position), the schools moulded a group of pupils who were not welcome in all parts of settler society and did not quite fit into parts of their home life either.

Educating Elites: Ekukhanyeni and Zonnebloem While the majority of the industrial boarding schools took in pupils from the general population, two of these institutions, Zonnebloem in Cape Town, and Ekukhanyeni in Natal, both Church of England mission schools, aimed to draw in the sons and daughters of African royalty. Educating elite groups of Indigenous children was not unique to South Africa: there were similar institutions for the education of elites in other parts of the British Empire.38 As Karen Vallgårda notes of mission activity, “children were valued as a point of entry to local society more generally”39 Missionaries hoped the successful conversion and education of

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children could draw their parents to missions themselves, and colonial officials hoped this entry point would foster loyalty to the imperial project. In Natal, Secretary for Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, was able to persuade politically important local leaders to part with their children and send them to Ekukhanyeni.40 Anglican Bishop John Colenso and Shepstone agreed that certain parts of African society were admirable, and that under the correct influences of Christianity and civilisation, these could be maintained within a broadly Christian framework.41 They saw Ekukhanyeni as an important part of transforming African society, and Shepstone was key in persuading Natal Governor John Scott to assist the institution financially.42 Colenso’s initial plan for the school had not included boarding facilities. He had advocated for Church of England missionaries to go into African communities where they could “endeavour to bring this influence of civilisation and Christianity to bear upon the habits of the heathen at the fountain head”.43 However, he recognised the influence that children might have on their families, and decided that focusing on the education of sons and daughters of chiefs would be more successful than teaching “children of poor or needy parents, or parents more or less under missionary influence”.44 Son of Zulu king Mpande (referred to as Panda by Colenso), Mkhungo, was one of the first pupils enrolled in the school.45 Teachers were hopeful about the influence Mkhungo might have when he returned to his community. Principal Walter Baugh hoped that Mkhungo would one day rule “in the Zulu country”, and that “he may be a wise and good Chief, and rule his people well, & have Schools all over the land, and try to have all his people well taught”.46 Writing to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Baugh continued: Should it please you that we are enabled to gain an influence over this boy, & advance his education even to the point reached by those of our Senior Class, it is impossible to say what effect our work may thus have upon the future state of the Zulu nation, & of the parts of Africa beyond it. If ever the British Government interferes, as, I imagine, some day it must, in the affairs of Zululand, a youth like this, civilized, and [...] Christianized would surely be the person whose claims would be most likely to receive our support, more especially as he is even now regarded, both by friends & foes, as the rightful successor to Panda’s authority.47

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Within the school, teachers were careful to regulate the way that Mkhungo was treated. While they recognised Mkhungo’s political position, they were concerned that he should be treated the same as the other pupils. Baugh said he would not allow Mkhungo to have servants: “Ours was, in fact, a ‘Public School’, and he must learn to help himself, as any young nobleman would at Eton or Harrow”.48 When Mkhungo’s mother, Monase, came back to see if her son was being cared for at the school, she asked if “some special regard might be paid to his dignity”, insisting that “We must not teach the young lad, who was with him, the same things as we taught ‘Umkungu’. We might teach Umkungu, if we would, but not the other boy, his inferior”. Baugh eagerly asserted that “the reason why the English are so powerful is that all the people are taught – high and low alike – some things, such as reading, writing, & counting, which are needful for all. At least, this is our Queen’s wish”.49 Of course, Baugh exaggerated the egalitarian nature of English education, in the same breath comparing Ekukhanyeni and its pupils to the most elite boarding schools there, like Eton and Harrow. In fact, Colenso himself had taught at Harrow in England and was familiar with the nature of English public boarding schools. He went as far as to dub the school the “Kaffir [sic] Harrow”.50 At Ekukhanyeni, of the thirty-three pupils enrolled in 1857, all but two were said to be refugees, displaced by ongoing violence in the Natal colony and Zululand. Nevertheless, the school’s focus on educating the sons of chiefs was a constant refrain. Pupils were consistently compared to their counterparts in English public schools—notoriously exclusive spaces. Alice Mackenzie, who taught at the school and oversaw the girl boarders described Ekukhanyeni: “The boys of the school under their own master, such a troop of orderly merry fellows – 40 of them quite like an English school – all sons of important people in their own tribes”.51 Mackenzie commented that the “quite manageable & most pleasant pupils” reminded her of the disciplined boys at Rugby. She described the boys “[r]eading English so nicely, & doing sums, taking them down themselves out of the Bishop’s Arithmetic books & working them without any help, & bringing their slates to Mr Grubbe for correction just like the boys at home”.52 These comparisons confirm J.A. Mangan’s assertion about the “continuing association between British imperialism and the public-school system”.53 The constant comparisons with the boys at home served to “constitute childhood as a universal category”. However, this did not mean an

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erasure of racial difference: “many missionaries continued to conceive of the children’s ‘heathen’ parents as fundamentally and irredeemably different”.54 As Jane Hamlett points out of public boarding schools in England, students in these schools were “subject to powerful forces that fundamentally altered their emotional states, creating new forms of character and behaviour”.55 What made the transformation of Indigenous subjectivities in these schools different from the transformation of pupils in English public schools was that there was, at the heart of the process in the colonies, an ambivalence regarding the ability of students to truly transform, and an accepted notion of their society being inferior to what they were being offered in the schools. The schools’ processes of inclusion stopped short of fully accepting the pupils into all facets of colonial society as equals. There were also material differences in the environments that the children in Natal occupied when compared with those in England: in 1858, Colenso lamented that the funds he had were not sufficient to build new classrooms for the “poor boys, who now eat, sleep, play, study, and worship, 37 of them besides young men, all in one room”.56 Although Ekukhanyeni was funded as an industrial school, and taught ploughing, carpentry, and printing, Colenso tailored the curriculum to include a combination of both literary and industrial skills.57 There was significant pressure from the Natal governor to include industrial training in the curriculum. Colenso described the governor’s visit to the institution, saying “The Governor’s notion of ‘practical’ seems to be confined to the idea of raising cotton, and such-like out-of-doors occupations, which may make a native a better machine for the purposes of his European masters, but not a better or a nobler man”.58 Colenso believed the industrial training should be complemented by ‘secular education’, including lessons in science and arithmetic. Due to the elite background of many of the pupils, and Colenso’s own status as Bishop of the colony and ally of Shepstone, Colenso was able to convince the governor that a more literary education was suitable to the students, as it would prepare them to be teachers in new mission schools in the area.59 At Zonnebloem in Cape Town, there were similar aspirations for the future influence of the pupils. The school enrolled the sons and daughters of chiefs, including Henry Duke of Wellington Tshatshu, son of Dyani Tshatshu, a Ngqika chief, Sandile’s son and daughter, Gonya and Emma, Maqoma’s son, Mapolissa, and Mhlala’s son, Nathaniel. Opening in 1857, the school had the express aim of turning out English-speaking elite students who would be loyal to the British. Some of the school’s

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pupils were even sent abroad to study in England, confirming the status of the institution as part of a network of Anglican institutions aiming to produce a Christian elite.60 Like the industrial schools in the eastern Cape, not all parents welcomed the opportunity to send their children to the institution, even if it was specifically catered to elites. Mjuza, who was a headman and son of the prophet Nxele, sent his sons to the institution, but when it came time to send his daughters, went back on an earlier promise to send them. He said that he had hoped the girls would go, “But when I mentioned the matter to the girls’ mothers they positively refused”. The mothers in question said that they would report the matter to the Lieutenant-Governor if their girls were sent away, and that they did not object to education, but wanted their children close by where they could visit them often. Mjuza reported that in spite of his cajoling, the mothers refused “to consent to their daughters going to Cape Town but they have only cried and made a great noise about it”.61 This gives a sense of the emotional ties that were potentially challenged by these boarding institutions, and particular gendered concerns over the fate of girl boarders. Cape Town was far from the eastern frontier and frequent visits to the school would be impossible for most families. Although Zonnebloem was an elite institution, labour was still an important part of the scholars’ daily life. George Robb, who ran the industrial departments at Zonnebloem wrote that many of the boys were turning into good carpenters, “capable of executing any ordinary piece of carpentry in good style”.62 The 1859 report of the institution showed that five boys worked at shoemaking in the mornings, and a second group of five worked there in the afternoons.63 Four children had been apprenticed by the Bishop of Cape Town, Robert Gray, to local tradesmen.64 While this training fitted with ideas regarding the value of work in building the individual’s character, it also ran counter to many of the pupils’ elite backgrounds, and their own and parental aspirations for their future. Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, one student complained in a letter that they were being trained to serve white people in society, and that the industrial training was teaching them very little.65 Trying to balance the twin imperatives of training elites who would influence whole groups of people in their communities, and adhering to government guidelines regarding the necessity of industrial training, was not simple.

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Conclusion The industrial boarding schools were, after a number of years of existing independently of the Cape Education department, brought under its management in 1865. The proposal was that for the schools to continue to receive funding, they should offer two or more of the following trades: carpentry, wagonmaking, blacksmith’s work, tailoring, shoemaking, printing, and bookbinding, household work (female), and provide a day school for children. Superintendent General of Education Langham Dale would remark a few years later that the “greatest hindrance” to the expansion of education was the lack of available jobs for educated Africans: it was not possible for all those who attended schools to become teachers. As a remedy, Dale encouraged industrial labour for boys—this would not only provide work when they completed their schooling, but would also correct what he saw as inappropriate relations between the sexes in African societies, in which it was common for women to partake in field labour.66 Overall, however, the decision to bring the schools under the auspices of the Cape Education department led to a reduction in funding to the institutions by almost half. Many of the institutions continued as government-aided schools, but now required increased subscriptions from mission societies, and in some cases, students had to pay fees. In schools like Zonnebloem and Ekukhanyeni, where chiefs’ children were sent for boarding education, colonial officials and missionaries wanted to draw on pre-existing patterns of authority within African society to win favour for their mission. Simultaneously, however, placing these same children into schools modelled on Eton or Harrow overlooked the complexity of local conditions and kinship relations. The context of settler colonialism, and the belief that children’s education could be harnessed to alter the character of a community at large, meant that while their status was recognised, it was also denigrated, as ‘less than’ English values and customs. They were thus simultaneously included in these institutions while being fundamentally excluded from any claims to equality. As Sen has written of elite English schools in India, these schools aimed to shift the nature of the elite: “This elite was to be rescued from its own cultural weaknesses, and brought morally, socially and politically closer to Britain, but without compromising the hierarchy of race and national identity”.67 The comparisons with elite boarding schools ‘at home’ and the use of these as a benchmark against which to test

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the African scholars’ progress revealed an ambivalence surrounding these schools’ purpose: they could not be judged in their own terms, but rather, needed to be understood in relation to elite institutions elsewhere. While many of the schools mentioned here went on to become seats of anticolonial and nationalist movements, with pupils who studied at Zonnebloem, Lovedale, and Heald Town being remembered as African nationalists, these cases were the exception rather than the rule. While missionaries and colonial officials were eager to advertise the success of these institutions in ‘winning over’ the elites, the reality was far more complicated. Not only did these schools only cater to a minority of children in the Cape colony at the time, they were not uniformly supported or welcomed by local communities. Moreover, it is difficult to know how these schools were experienced by the less elite pupils, particularly those whose names and backgrounds are not recorded in the archival material. The archival material also points to an in-between position for girls who enrolled in the schools. While they had access to literacy and skills which would allow them to work within the colonial economy, many missionaries framed their education as secondary to their ability to produce and reproduce a converted, Christian community. Historians of education and childhood should keep this tension in mind: many of the students and scholars we are able to ‘recover’ in the records are those whose identity or behaviour made them particularly noteworthy at the time, or shortly thereafter. It remains important to aim to uncover the experiences of the non-elites, girls, the everyday pupils, and those who may have, for different and personal reasons, chosen to rebel or comply with missionary and government aims.

Notes 1. Grey quoted in Gray (1876) to Wodehouse, 08.02.1869, A2.24, Zonnebloem archive BC 636, UCT MS Collection. 2. Although Ekukhanyeni was based in the neighbouring British colony of Natal, Grey funded the institution’s building costs, and supplied an annual grant of £500. Khumalo, ‘The Class of 1856’, 211. 3. For Zonnebloem, see Hodgson and Edlmann (2018) and for Ekukhanyeni, see Khumalo (2003) and Mokoena (2011). 4. For example de Kock (1996), Nanni (2012, Ch. 6). 5. Killingray (2012, p. 395). 6. Odendaal (2016, pp. 30–31).

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7. See Healy-Clancy (2013) and Robert Morrell (2001) on black and white scholars, respectively. 8. Paterson (2005, pp. 386–387). 9. Pereis (1989). 10. Lester (2001, p. 183). 11. Interdepartmental Committee on Native Education, UG 29/1936 (Pretoria: Government Printers, 1936), p. 10. 12. Interdepartmental Committee on Native Education, UG 29/1936. 13. On missionaries and education in the British Empire more broadly, see Jensz (2022). 14. ‘Formation of Christian Villages in Caffraria’, Home and Foreign Missionary Record for the Free Church of Scotland, (1 September 1855), 29. 15. Correspondence Showing the Arrangement Made for the Future Aid to be Given from Schedule D to Native Industrial Institutions and Schools, Founded Upon the Report of the Superintendent General of Education (Cape Town: Saul Solomon and Co, 1864) G29–’64, p. 23. 16. John Ayliff, Reports of the Native Industrial Schools at Salem and Heald Town for the Year 1856, G8–’57, p. 3. 17. ‘The Kafir College at the Cape’, The Net Cast in Many Waters (1 May 1867), 73. 18. See Barnabus Shaw, Salem, 1862 in 1863 Cape Education Committee report (Watermeyer Commission), Appendix VI, 4. 19. Report from Henry Callaway, Springvale, Callaway, 22 March 1864, to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), Rhodes House Library (RHL) SPG E15. 20. Shaw in Watermeyer Commission, 7. 21. John Ayliff to Sir George Grey, 30.05.1856, MSB 223/12, Sir George Grey Collection, South African Library. 22. Reports Upon the Progress of the Native Industrial Institutions, G7–’56. 23. James Stewart, Lovedale South Africa: Its Aims, Principles, and Results (Paper read at Missionary Conference London, 1878, revised and published at Lovedale, 1890), 6. 24. Robert Gray to Mrs Williamson, 17 April 1860, in Grey (1876), p. 457. 25. Reports Upon the Progress of the Native Industrial Institutions, G7–’56, p. 5. 26. Cruickshank (2008, p. 117), Jensz (2010, pp. 35–54). 27. Hamlett (2015, p. 126). 28. Hunt Davis (1969, p. 228). 29. Reports Upon the Progress of the Native Industrial Institutions, G7–’56. 30. Reports Upon the Progress of the Native Industrial Institutions, G7–’56, p. 2.

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31. Reports Upon the Progress of the Native Industrial Institutions, G7–’56, p. 4. 32. Nanni (2012, p. 188). 33. Shepherd (1971, p. 22). 34. Reports of the Native Industrial Schools at Salem and Heald Town for the Year 1856, G8 –’57, 4. 35. These included C Mahlutshana, Jacob Boom, George Mazamisa, Bani and Alom Selana, Sampson and Samntilili Mahlubi, Abraham Ntsimango, Thomas Nqcezula, Joseph Radisi, Xala Zazela, William and Dick Katangana, John Q Nobanda, T Mqedozwe, Ben Gele, and some girl boarders, Sarah, Fielda, and Ndlekazi Gcinga, Mityi Mhlanga, Alice Fakati, and E Mazamisa. A Brief Account of the Jubilee Celebrations in Connection with the Normal Training Institution, Healdtown, 1906, Methodist Church Pamphlet Box 1, 13–14, Cory Library, Rhodes University. 36. Swartz (2019, p. 119). 37. Langham Dale to Stewart, 22 Nov 1883, C51.3, BC 106, James Stewart Archive, UCT MS Collection. 38. For example, in New Zealand, Barrington and Beaglehole (1990, p. 170); in India, see Sen (2003, pp. 19–39). 39. Vallgårda (2015, p. 150). 40. Guy (1983, p. 64). 41. Guy (1983, p. 47). 42. Etherington (2019, p. 7). 43. Colenso to SPG, 9.11.1855, SPG D8, RHL. 44. Colenso to Labouchere, 4.4.1857, SPG D8, RHL. 45. For more on Mkhungo and Ekukhanyeni, see Swartz (2017). The sons of chiefs Zatshuke and Ngoza also attended the school. 46. Ekukhanyeni report, in Colenso to SPG, 08.08.1857, D8. 47. Ekukhanyeni report, in Colenso to SPG, 08.08.1857, D8. 48. Ekukhanyeni report, in Colenso to SPG, 08.08.1857, D8. 49. Ekukhanyeni report, in Colenso to SPG, 08.08.1857, D8. 50. Colenso to Labouchere, 4.4.1857, SPG D8. 51. Journal written by Miss Alice Mackenzie while at Bishopstowe. RHL, MSS. Afr. R.174, 12.04.1859. 52. Journal written by Miss Alice Mackenzie while at Bishopstowe. RHL, MSS. Afr. R.174, 12.04.1859. 53. Mangan (1988, p. 6). 54. Vallgårda et al. (2015, p. 19). 55. Hamlett (2015, p. 120). 56. Letter from Colenso to GS Allnutt, Bishopstowe, 01.04.1858, extracted in Cox (1888, p. 95). 57. Swartz (2019, p. 153). 58. Colenso to GS Allnutt, 03.07.1858, in Cox (1888, p. 111).

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59. Shepstone to Colenso, 28.05.1858, Encl. 1 in Scott to Stanley, 31.07.1858, Natal. Copies of correspondence between the Governor of Natal and the Colonial Office with respect to the £5000 reserved from the general revenues of the colony for the disposal of the Crown; and, of correspondence on the subject of the growth of cotton as now carried on by the natives, under the auspices of the government of that colony, HC 596 (1860), 50. 60. See Hodgson and Edlmann (2018, Ch. 5). 61. Translated letter from Mjuza, 09.05.1861, BC636, A 2.9. 62. George Robb to George Frere, n.d, BC636 A1.21. 63. Report of the Kafir Industrial Institution at Bishop’s Court, Protea, G15– ‘59, p. 1. 64. Report of the Kafir Industrial Institution at Bishop’s Court, Protea, G15– ’59, p. 4. 65. Swartz (2019, p. 148). 66. Interdepartmental committee on Native Education, UG 29/1936 (Pretoria: Government Printers, 1936), pp. 12–13. 67. Sen (2003, p. 38).

Bibliography Barrington, John, and Tim Beaglehole. 1990. “A Part of Pakeha Society”: Europeanising the Maori Child. In Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism, ed. James Mangan, 163–183. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cox, George William. 1888. The Life of John William Colenso, vol. 1. London: W Ridgway. Cruickshank, Joanna. 2008. ‘To Exercise a Beneficial Influence Over a Man’: Marriage, Gender and the Native Institutions in Early Colonial Australia. In Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History, ed. Amanda Barry, Joanna Cruickshank, Andrew Brown-May, and Patricia Grimshaw, 115–124. Melbourne: University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre. de Kock, Leon. 1996. Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Etherington, Norman. 2019. Bishop Colenso and Theophilus Shepstone: Partners in Christian Imperialism. Journal of Natal and Zulu History 33: 1–22. Grey, Charles, ed. 1876. Life of Robert Gray, Bishop of Cape Town and Metropolitan of Africa, vol. 1. London: Rivingtons. Guy, Jeff. 1983. The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso, 1814– 1883. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

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Hamlett, Jane. 2015. Space and Emotional Experience in Victorian and Edwardian English Public School Dormitories. In Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History, ed. Stephanie Olsen, 119–138. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Healy-Clancy, Meghan. 2013. A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Hodgson, Janet, and Theresa Edlmann. 2018. Zonnebloem College and the Genesis of an African Intelligentsia. Cape Town: African Lives. Hunt Davis, R. 1969. Nineteenth Century African Education in the Cape Colony: A Historical Analysis. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jensz, Felicity. 2010. Controlling Marriages: Friedrich Hagenauer and the Betrothal of Indigenous Western Australian Women in Colonial Victoria. Aboriginal History 34: 35–54. Jensz, Felicity. 2022. Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Khumalo, Vukile. 2003. The Class of 1856 and the Politics of Cultural Production(s) in the Emergence of Ekukhanyeni, 1855–1910. In The Eye of the Storm: Bishop John William Colenso and the Crisis of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Jonathan Draper, 207–241. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Killingray, David. 2012. Significant Black South Africans in Britain before 1912: Pan-African Organisations and the Emergence of South Africa’s First Black Lawyers. South African Historical Journal 64 (3): 393–417. Lester, Alan. 2001. Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain. London: Routledge. Mangan, James A. 1988. Introduction: Imperialism, History and Education. In Benefits Bestowed? Education and British Imperialism, ed. James A. Mangan, 1–22. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mokoena, Hlonipha. 2011. Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Morrell, Robert. 2001. From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1880–1920. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Nanni, Giordano. 2012. The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Odendaal, Andre. 2016. The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana. Paterson, Andrew. 2005. “The Gospel of Work Does Not Save Souls”: Conceptions of Industrial and Agricultural Education for Africans in the Cape Colony, 1890–1930. History of Education Quarterly 45: 377–404. Pereis, Jeff. 1989. The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 . London: Currey. Sen, Satadru. 2003. The Politics of Deracination: Empire, Education and Elite Children in Colonial India. Studies in History 19: 19–39.

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Shepherd, R.H. 1971. Lovedale: 1824–1955. Alice: Lovedale Press. Swartz, Rebecca. 2017. Educating Emotions in Natal and Western Australia, 1854–65. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18, n.p. Swartz, Rebecca. 2019. Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880. Cham: Palgrave. Vallgårda, Karen. 2015. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Vallgårda, Karen, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen. 2015. Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood. In Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History, ed. Stephanie Olsen, 12–34. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Nazi Elite Boarding Schools and the Attempted Creation of a New Class System Helen Roche

On 26 December 1940, the Vienna edition of the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, published a richly illustrated feature with a headline taken from one of Hitler’s recent speeches: “We envision a state in which birth means absolutely nothing, and achievement and ability everything!”1 However, the article did not merely regurgitate the Führer’s characterisation of social mobility in the Third Reich as predicated on its citizens’ ‘achievements’, but aimed to demonstrate that such principles had already been put into practice in the sphere of education. While the text of the article itself hymned the triumph of the new “socialist state of the future”, and the final fulfilment of the slogan “Make

H. Roche (B) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_4

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way for the capable!” (Freie Bahn dem Tüchtigen!), a telling combination of images and captions showcased pupils at a type of educational institution for whom these ideals had ostensibly become reality: Jungmannen at the National Political Education Institutes (Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten). These institutions, otherwise known as NPEA or Napolas, formed an extensive system of state-run boarding schools which admitted boys from the age of ten, and aimed to prepare them for leadership positions in all walks of life.2 By 1945, there were more than forty Napolas scattered across the ‘Greater German Reich’, educating around 10,000 pupils (approximately two per cent of the total number of school leavers).3 The article’s captions, which quoted directly from letters written by pupils (who were known as Jungmannen), highlighted the unprecedented opportunities for social mobility and an impressive all-round education which these boarding schools offered. Thus, one boy commented: My home is in the Wachau; my father works there in a stone quarry. I also have three brothers, and my father could never have permitted me to continue my studies, since this is hardly possible without any money. Here, at the ‘Napola’, this possibility was given me […]. We have countless advantages over a normal Gymnasium (secondary school). So, for example, we have our own indoor swimming pool; we learn to ride horses and drive motorcycles, and we get to know the whole of Germany through trips by train and by bike. Later on, I want to become an army officer […].

One of the other Jungmannen in question, whose father was a manual labourer too, also stressed the potential for social advancement which education at a Napola might offer: “At some point, I would like to attend the Diplomatic Academy, and here at school I’m seeking to prepare myself as well as possible”. Ostensibly, what could better substantiate the notion that the Nazi regime was making good on its promises of social inclusivity? This type of propaganda was extremely commonplace in press reports on the Napolas—with relentless stress being placed on the fact that the schools were constantly providing opportunities for boys from the very poorest backgrounds.4 Just as luxury holidays were propagandistically offered even to the Nazi state’s most humble workers, via the Strength Through Joy state recreation organisation (Kraft durch Freude), so a visit to the Napola could reveal that now “Workers’ sons are studying!

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Every opportunity for career advancement stands open to those who are high-achievers”.5 In accordance with Point 20 of the NSDAP Party programme, numerous articles and programmatic documents written by or on behalf of the government authority responsible for the schools, the Inspectorate of the Napolas, stressed that the social status of candidates, in particular their parents’ wealth or standing, made no difference whatsoever to whether they would gain a place at a Napola—not even if their father were one of the earliest and most loyal Nazi Party members.6 A particularly favoured conceit was the idea that the “spirit of socialism” ruled supreme at the Napolas, so that (for example), the son of a Major might live and work alongside the son of a foreman in a tram garage.7 As August Heißmeyer, the Inspector of the Napolas, put it in an interview with the Reich Youth Press Service in September 1936, “It would be a betrayal of National Socialism if we were to make the education of our future leaders a question of wealth or pedigree”.8 Instead, physical, racial and academic fitness were supposed to be the paramount factors in determining which applicants would gain a place at a Napola, and which would not.9 If this propaganda did indeed possess a sound basis in fact, then it would appear that the Napolas incorporated, or even embodied, some of the most ‘socialist’ elements of National Socialism, and that they might have been able, at least in part, to realise the quintessentially Nazi ideal of the racialised national community (Volksgemeinschaft ) as a classless society based on achievement, and stratified on racial rather than financial grounds of inclusion and exclusion.10 However, as always with the claims made by National Socialist organs and functionaries in this regard, one must beware of mistaking propaganda for reality. On the face of it, the Napolas were utterly opposed to the supposedly stultifying aspirations of the middle classes; indeed, the schools and their adherents often made most virulent pronouncements against the degenerate effect of “bourgeois comforts”.11 But how far was this actually the case? How effective was the schools’ programme of social engineering in practice? And were the Napolas really as revolutionary— and as divorced from previous, socially exclusive models of education—as they liked to pretend? This chapter will begin by considering the various ways in which the Napolas sought to efface class differences among their pupils—beginning with the extensive system of free and subsidised places which the schools provided, as well as other forms of assistance which were on offer in

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order to facilitate pupils’ social mobility. In this connection, I will also consider the programme of ‘missions’ (Einsätze) which all Jungmannen were expected to embark upon at the age of 16 or so, during which they spent several weeks living and working with mine- and factory-workers, in order to experience the travails of the German labourer at first hand, providing an avenue for inclusion into an imagined Volksgemeinschaft beyond the boundaries of the school. I will then move on to explore some of the class tensions which were still manifest within the Napola system, including both the predominantly middle-class nature of the schools’ recruits, and the school authorities’ desire to retain certain elements of ‘middle-class cultivation’ (bürgerliche Bildung ) in their programme. Finally, I will conclude by assessing how successful the Napolas may really have been both in terms of fostering social mobility, and in their crusade to eradicate ‘bourgeois elements’ (Bürgerlichkeit ).12

Effacing Class Differences Through Social Engineering: Mining ‘Missions’ and Subsidised Places The Napolas had first been founded in April 1933 by Bernhard Rust, then Prussian Culture Minister and later Reich Education Minister, as a birthday present for Hitler. The first three Napolas took over the buildings of the former Prussian cadet schools in Potsdam, Plön and Köslin, and the schools were often portrayed as inheriting (or appropriating) the military ethos of the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps and its hierarchy of ‘Prussian’ virtues: discipline, responsibility, orderliness, toughness, fortitude, courage and so forth. Those boys who were subjected to the schools’ gruelling week-long entrance examination would be expected not only to demonstrate their physical and intellectual prowess (as well as their ‘racial fitness’), but also to perform pure ‘tests of courage’ (Mutproben), which involved feats of daring such as jumping from a third-floor window or balcony into a blanket without hesitating, or diving from a threemetre high diving-board into the sea when they were unable to swim.13 Rust and his acolytes, some of whom (including the first Inspector of the NPEA, Joachim Haupt) had been cadets themselves, saw the cadetschool tradition as an important model for their brainchild, even giving

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the schools the “motto of a great Prussian soldier” (Moltke), “Be more than you seem!” (Mehr sein als scheinen).14 However, the “caste arrogance” which the cadet corps had tended to foster was anathema to the founders of the Napolas—as was the “cloistered” privileging of intellectualism cultivated at the Gymnasien. To this end, a generous means-tested system of free and subsidised places was constructed, in which approximately ten per cent of pupils were charged no fees at all, with a series of incremental steps rising from Class B (c. 240 RM per year, or 20 RM per calendar month) to Class M (c. 1,440 RM per year, or 120 RM per calendar month), according to parents’ net income.15 Free places were also offered to certain categories of Prussian and Reich civil servants.16 Individual schools were also encouraged to seek support from local government, town councils, firms and party organisations to sponsor subsidised places for boys from their local area, in order to provide even more opportunities for the children of financially disadvantaged citizens (Volksgenossen)—some of these initiatives do seem to have achieved some degree of success.17 In addition, those Napolas with so-called Aufbauzüge attached—classes starting at around the age of thirteen, for those boys who had missed out on being selected at the age of ten in their primary school (Volksschule)—offered a far higher ratio of free places, in a deliberate attempt to bring a larger proportion of working-class youth into the schools.18 A report from NPEA Rottweil from June 1939, in response to a demand from the Inspectorate for information about what social strata pupils’ parents belonged to, gives an interesting example of how this system worked in practice (this is a source with further implications, to which we shall return later on): The fathers of our Jungmannen were: Civil Servants 33, Salesmen 32, Teachers 19, Craftsmen 11, Landowners 7, Officers 5, Wehrmacht officials 1, Party or Party organisations 6, Engineers 5, Doctors 4, Foresters 3, Reich Labour Service 2, Careers Advisors 1, Publicans 2, Manufacturers 3, Architects 2, Solicitors 1, Pharmacists 1 […] In the year 1938, the contributions lay between 200 and 1,200 RM. The average rate comprised 510 RM. The contributions were distributed as follows: 6 Jungmannen paid the full rate of 1,200 RM 10 paid between 1,000 and 1,200 RM 12 paid between 750−1,000 RM 62 paid between 510−750 RM

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48 paid between 300−519 RM 15 paid under 300 RM 4 had free places.19

In this connection, it is worth noting that the Inspectorate made it a point of honour that no Jungmann should be expelled simply because his parents or guardians were unable to pay the school fees, and, in 1936, Heißmeyer concluded an agreement with Reich Organization Leader Robert Ley that, in cases where the local Mayor, Party offices (Kreisleitung ), or Gauleitung were unable to stump up the funds for a scholarship or a sponsored place, Ley’s German Labour Front (DAF) would foot the bill. Any other outcome, Heißmeyer declared, would be a negation of the schools’ paramount selection principle (Ausleseprinzip), in which social background and parental circumstances should have no role whatsoever to play.20 Such social assistance not only covered the payment of school fees, however, but also extended to all areas of school life. The Napolas provided their pupils with all the requisite uniforms and equipment, so that—as in the Hitler Youth—variations in social status among the Jungmannen could never be revealed by differences in dress.21 All pupils received exactly the same amount of pocket money (around 10 RM per month), and their families were strictly forbidden from sending further tips or top-ups to supplement this.22 Moreover, each headmaster (Anstaltsleiter) was charged with the duty of forcing all social distinctions to vanish from his Napola, and “particularly worthy, but socially badly-off Jungmannen” were to be provided with funding at his discretion to smooth their path, without their having to ask for it, and without their schoolmates knowing anything about it. This institutional generosity might include paying for journeys home in the holidays, or subsidising particularly expensive school trips. In 1934, the school authorities requested 3,000 RM to be set aside in the 1935 Prussian state budget for this specific purpose.23 The Inspectorate even made arrangements with bodies such as the Reich Student Affairs Office (Reichsstudentenwerk) that less well-off Jungmannen would be put forward for their funding-streams without having to participate in a special course or Lehrgang (which all ‘normal’ applicants would have been expected to undergo as a matter of course). Jungmannen were also given especially detailed careers advice, both by the Reichsstudentenwerk and by the SS-Central Office, while

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those exhibiting particular potential for and interest in the diplomatic service would be automatically put forward as candidates for the Foreign Office’s fast-track course, as well as being presented to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in person at their graduation.24 Perhaps, in some measure, the ambassadorial dreams of the labourer’s son quoted in the Völkischer Beobachter were not so far-fetched after all? One of the Napolas’ most innovative ‘social’ programmes of all, however, was the series of ‘missions’ (Einsätze) which the Jungmannen undertook on farms, in factories and down mines.25 These ‘missions’ were intended to break down class boundaries and barriers of social exclusivity by giving pupils first-hand experience of the hardships which workingclass Germans and ‘ethnic German’ farmers and labourers had to undergo. As Heißmeyer put it in a report to the Head of the Party Chancellery, Hans Lammers, in October 1940: The schools’ ‘total curriculum’ anticipates that every Jungmann in the 6th Zug (class) will work for an eight-to-ten-week period in the land service (Landdienst ) alongside a farmer or settler, and that every Jungmann in the 7th Zug will work for eight to ten weeks down a mine. The aim of the land service is not that of harvest help or help on the land. During their land service, the Jungmannen live individually with farmers and settlers […] in the borderlands, or in an ‘ethnic German’ area. During this time, they perform all the work that farmers’ sons or landworkers of their age have to perform, and share the anxieties and joys of the farming families. […] During the mine service the Jungmannen live individually with miners’ families and therefore learn to know their entire way of life and thinking. They work for around 14 days above ground; the rest of the time, under the supervision of a trustworthy miner, they work down the mineshaft. The aim of the schools’ mining service is […] to give the Jungmannen a forceful impression of the labourer and his world of work.26

These undeniably ‘socialist’ initiatives certainly featured extensively in the propaganda and press releases put out by the school authorities— indeed, very often, articles might begin with an eyecatching headline such as “Fifth-formers down the mine”, before launching into a much more generalised appraisal of the schools’ programme, only a small proportion of which would be devoted to the Einsätze per se.27 Still, the experiences that the Jungmannen had to undergo were nonetheless real for all that— as one of the foremen interviewed about the initiative for a feature with

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the SS periodical Das Schwarze Korps put it, despite the fact that “our work here isn’t child’s play”, “they work as if they were one of us”.28 Accounts by the Jungmannen themselves demonstrate how far they were assimilated into the world of backbreaking labour in the factories or mines in which they worked: We’ve fully settled in. We can’t be distinguished any more from the other Kumpels (miners); our togs filthy, hands square and chapped, we don’t burn our trousers any more on the mining lamps or bang our heads any more on every spur of rock. Above all, we replace a labourer, and they recognize our labour.29

Sometimes, this could involve suffering minor injuries—or even witnessing horrific accidents—at first hand.30 A recurring theme throughout these accounts—whether by the boys themselves, their teachers, the ‘Kumpels’ alongside whom they worked, or the firms employing them—is the respect which the Jungmannen quickly earned, due to their willing and disciplined demeanour, and their exceptional ability as apprentices. In the words of one of the mine foremen who came to visit NPEA Oranienstein, his original supposition that “How can schoolkids do so much work; they’ll just be a burden for us”, was soon vanquished by the reports which the miners brought in: “The biggest surprise for me was when I heard that the Jungmannen had paid for our visit from their own wages which they had earned [down the mine]”.31 Whether the families with whom the Jungmannen stayed would have been as impressed with their constant attempts to discuss the thornier facets of the Nazi Weltanschauung —which was considered an equally important aspect of their ‘mission’—is harder to judge. Nevertheless, this extremely ‘hands-on’ method of studying the ‘social question’,32 could hardly be seen as anything other than a triumph over previous class divisions, with boys proudly extolling the virtues of ‘comradeship of labour’, or even proclaiming “I’ve become one of them”.33 That the relationship with the workers was not wholly onesided can be exemplified not only by an exchange with a factory in Dinslaken, in which ten apprentices came to the Napola in question to take the place of the Jungmannen and experience the rigours of their training at first hand, but also by the frequent invitations to the miners and their families to attend celebrations at the schools, and the genuine penfriendships which seem to have been forged between Jungmannen and labourers.34

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Some Anstaltsleiter even saw these connections as providing a golden opportunity for recruiting still more pupils from the working classes; as Friedrich Lübbert, headmaster of NPEA Oranienstein, put it at a celebration to which all of ‘their’ miners had been invited in 1937: ‘It would be a particular pleasure for me to see one or another [of the miners] here again next year. Perhaps he will come with a Jungmann who has worked alongside him, but perhaps he will also bring his son to the entrance exam here.’ [The Jungmannen writing the report continue:] We had all already told the Kumpels that every capable lad could come to Oranienstein. The father’s wealth makes no difference. His ability alone is decisive. However, the Kumpels had been unable to think beyond the difference between rich and poor. […] Now they heard that we sometimes didn’t even know what the profession of our room-mate’s father was. My Kumpel proclaimed enthusiastically, ‘Oranienstein is the best social institution in the Third Reich’.35

But how far was this high praise for the schools’ ‘socialism’ and social inclusivity truly justified?

Recruitment Processes and Educational Practices at the NPEA: Pseudo-Inclusive or Genuinely Inclusive? As we have seen already, some statistics on the family background of pupils at the Napolas have survived. As the source from NPEA Rottweil (discussed above) shows, a whole spectrum of social strata were represented among the schools’ clientele. But the overwhelming majority of these boys’ fathers were arguably still employed in a fashion which could at the very least be deemed kleinbürgerlich or lower middle class— many could even be deemed bildungsbürgerlich, or part of the intellectual middle classes—and a similar state of affairs can also be found in the other cases where information from individual Napolas is still available.36 However, even more telling in this regard is a comprehensive graph comparing social origins for all NPEA-Jungmannen and all Pimpfe at the Adolf-Hitler-Schools, the other prominent type of elite secondary boarding school (which paid all pupils’ fees in full), with baseline statistics

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from across the Reich, which was published in the Statistische Monatshefte by the SS Statistical Office (SS-Erfassungsamt ) in November 1940 (Fig. 4.1).37 Although, according to this data-set, the Napolas do seem to have come somewhat closer to achieving their vaunted socialist goals than the Adolf-Hitler-Schools, the percentages still speak for themselves. The comparison need not surprise too much, given that the Adolf-HitlerSchools had only been in existence for less than five years at this point, and there were far fewer of them in any case (only twelve were ever founded). Only 13.1% of the Jungmannen were the sons of labourers, and 7.2% the sons of farmers; clerks and civil servants were still far better represented. All the free places and bursaries that the schools could offer were only a drop in the ocean in terms of educating the sons of workers. Indeed, unlike the Adolf-Hitler-Schools, the Napolas needed at least some proportion of their pupils to pay higher fees, just in order to balance the books. What was more, the fact that a certain number of free places were explicitly reserved for the sons of government officials would hardly have helped to redress the balance. One might even surmise, as Heidi Rosenbaum has suggested in connection with the surprising

Fig. 4.1 Percentage distribution of NPEA pupils and Adolf-Hitler-School pupils according to their fathers’ social station, compared with the social organisation of the German Reich

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predominance of Hitler Youth leaders from bourgeois backgrounds, that middle-class children would simply have been more likely to possess the kind of prior educational experience and fostering of their intellectual, sporting and extracurricular talents (or perhaps even something as basic as more balanced and extensive nutrition) that would allow them better to survive the rigours, first, of the schools’ gruelling week-long entrance examination, and then of daily life at a Napola.38 Meanwhile, although the programme of ‘missions’ was explicitly designed to acquaint the Jungmannen most forcibly with ‘how the other half lives’, in a sense, it presupposed that this was by no means the kind of life they would otherwise have experienced at first hand.39 Thus, the programme assumed—or even enhanced—the idea of class distinctions, except that the distinction this time was drawn according to a perceived paucity of political rather than financial capital. Even as the Napola authorities trumpeted the annihilation of all such class-based stratifications, ideas of ‘them’ and ‘us’ were being reinforced once again, only this time with the notion that these workers were not only poor, but less politically enlightened, and therefore needed ‘help’. Of course, it is hard to pinpoint any recruitment measures specifically aimed at (or even against ) the bourgeoisie. It was repeatedly emphasised in the schools’ promotional literature that the key to admission was pure ability and ‘racial fitness’ alone, and some prospectuses went out of their way to stress that primary-school teachers (who were the main agents of pre-selection for the entrance examinations) should never put candidates forward just because they were ‘social cases’ without any redeeming aptitude; the Napolas were infinitely far removed from mere ‘social care institutes’.40 But the end result remained the same: a higher proportion of middle-class Jungmannen than the sons of humbler Volksgenossen. Moreover, many of the educational ideals that the schools held dear still had some connection with the middle-class ideals of Bürgerlichkeit, whether in the form of the quintessentially English ideal of the ‘gentleman’, as embodied by the British public schools which formed one of Heißmeyer’s most beloved models for the Napolas, or in the links that Rust and his acolytes insisted upon retaining with the old ideal of humanistic learning at Napolas such as Ilfeld and Schulpforta. Of course, these ideals were smeared over with a veneer of National Socialist ‘brown’ varnish—as one commentator put it:

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The majority of the schools are based on the Realschule curriculum, but some also follow a humanistic curriculum. However, the humanistic foundation is not external, but draws on the inner spirit, the Weltanschauung, which supported the heroic way of life among the classical Greeks and Romans.41

Nevertheless, the links to a more bürgerlich past were there, if one only knew where to look. Even some of the pastimes which the Jungmannen had to engage with as a matter of course—riding, sailing, skiing, fencing— were activities which would previously only have been open to those in the higher social echelons.42 In fact, one could arguably suggest that there was rather less an eradication of class differences taking place at the Napolas, than a sort of sneaking gentrification in National Socialist guise. For, if Bürgerlichkeit can indeed be considered a question of culture, as many leading proponents of research on the German Bürgertum have argued, then it makes sense to search for survivals of that culture in determining how bürgerlich the Napolas really were.43 One does not need to be wholly seduced by outmoded historiographical exaggerations, such as the notion that Nazism was a fundamentally “lower middle-class phenomenon”,44 or that it represented the ultimate triumph of bourgeois illiberalism—what Hans-Ulrich Wehler has termed a bourgeois ‘pathology’45 —in order to acknowledge the continuities and connections which did exist between bürgerlich values and certain aspects of National Socialism. These ‘spheres of contact’ can be discerned both in general terms, and with particular regard to educational practice—which may go some way towards explaining why many parents from middle-class backgrounds seem to have been more than happy to have their sons educated at a Napola. Of course, there were certain aspects of bürgerlich culture which would never have been easily assimilated with the Napolas’ educational policy as a boarding school. Importantly, the Napolas were explicitly opposed to the German bürgerlich ideal of close-knit family life, which Jürgen Kocka has termed “an inner sanctum protected from the world of competition and materialism, from politics and the public, a sphere of privacy”, in which sons as well as daughters were far more firmly bound to the family home throughout their adolescence; for boarding-school life to replace family life as a matter of course was a far rarer thing in Germany than it had ever been in England, even during the first half of the twentieth century.46 This reluctance to entrust one’s children to the tender

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mercies of boarding-school life was a foible which the NPEA authorities explicitly wished to combat, as an article written for the women’s magazine Frauen-Warte by a member of the Inspectorate makes abundantly clear. The author, Gustav Skroblin, gently mocks parents’ willingness to send their daughter to a Pensionat so that she can learn “delicate bourgeois manners”, when they are so apprehensive of letting their children experience the true “social education” which the Napolas had to offer.47 On the other hand, the Napolas also offered, perhaps in a more extreme form even than the Hitler Youth, a programme which could also appeal to the predominantly middle-class adherents of the bündisch turn-of-the-century youth movement.48 As Ian Kershaw has noted, “the bourgeois youth movement inculcated in many young Germans an idealism that emphasised an organic, unpolitical love of Heimat and Volk, seen as self-consciously different from the patriotism, nationalism, and imperialism associated with France and Great Britain”.49 This was therefore another, though almost diametrically opposed, middle-class tradition on which the idealistic, supposedly progressive ethos of the schools could draw. Finally, we come to the question of social mobility. As we have seen, the idea of ‘progress through achievement’ was in some sense written into the Napolas’ constitution from the outset—but did it work in practice? Opportunities to enter the diplomatic corps or gain privileged access to university scholarships aside, did the NPEA genuinely promote upward mobility and social inclusivity for their pupils?50 And what would the implications be, if so? One telling set of documents which has survived in Merseburg may give us some clues in this regard, in the absence of more comprehensive statistics. Two files held in the Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt contain a collection of CVs written by graduands at NPEA Schulpforta in 1938– 1939, which, crucially, contain information about parents’ professions, as well as the pupil’s chosen career (Figs. 4.2, 4.3).51 Although this sample is statistically negligible in one sense, in another, it demonstrates quite graphically that the majority of the graduands in question were pursuing careers in the professions or in leadership positions which were at least equal to, and sometimes of higher social standing than, those of their parents. Interpreted in one way, this picture portrays less a levelling-out of class distinctions than what we might term a type of Nazified ‘bourgoisification’, in which working-class children were even more surely

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Fig. 4.2 Careers of fathers of graduands at NPEA Schulpforta in 1938–1939

raised into a higher and better-educated social caste (which placed some emphasis on previously bürgerlich values) than if they had attended a British public school. Thus, in response to the rhetorical question raised by Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto in their introduction to a recently published compendium of essays on the Volksgemeinschaft , “How and where […] were life aspirations of a basically bourgeois kind reconciled with the demands of a radically anti-individualistic state doctrine?”,52 one might present the NPEA as providing one answer. From this perspective, we might conclude that the Napolas were in fact rather more successful than institutions such as the Hitler Youth or the Reich Labour Service in promoting what Norbert Frei has termed a “perceived equality” between youths of different backgrounds, despite their inherent elitism.53 However, As Rüdiger Hachtmann has so tellingly put it, Volksgemeinschaft and elitism: at first sight the two concepts appear mutually exclusive. While Volksgemeinschaft suggests social equality for its

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Fig. 4.3 Career choices of graduands at NPEA Schulpforta in 1938–1939

members (the German Volksgenossen), elitism implies hierarchies and harsh social distinctions. Closer inspection, however, shows that this contradiction is only a surface one. Though the National Socialists did indeed want to ‘de-proletize’ German society and turn it into the master race above other nations, racial exclusivity did not conflict with internal differentiation: it was rather that boundaries of class were simply less important than boundaries of race. The Nazis were not aiming for a socially equal society. On the contrary, in numerous speeches and tracts they denounced such levelling as Marxist collectivism or naked Bolshevism.54

Yet this, too, would have had its attractive side for bourgeois and working-class parents alike. For working-class families, the opportunities offered by the NPEA could well have appeared to occupy a significant position within the constellation of Nazi social welfare programmes which offered middle-class opportunities and cultural practices to even the poorest ‘racially-valuable’ citizen, rewarding individual achievement and encouraging upward mobility which could, in some cases, be genuine

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enough.55 For the middle classes, too, the opportunities which the Napolas could provide for their sons’ advancement—as potential future leaders of their country—would also have seemed extremely attractive (even if this did mean that they were being schooled alongside a certain proportion of lower-class pupils)—thus helping to reinforce the idea that the new National Socialist society based on the Volksgemeinschaft could offer all of its citizens unprecedented opportunities for personal development.56

Conclusions To conclude, then: the Napolas’ mission to ‘widen participation’ radically seems to have only been partially successful. Yet, arguably, instead of diluting bourgeois predominance in elite education, the NPEA enabled it to continue unabated, despite the authorities’ avowed policy to enable social mobility above all for the sons of workers and farmers. Was this a failure of the ‘socialist’ element in the Napolas’ National Socialist programme—or an instrumentalisation of sorts by the middle classes? One might suggest that such a development was more or less inevitable from the outset, given the gruelling demands made of applicants, which still implicitly favoured those with access to sports clubs or good sports equipment, and an above-average academic education. Still, given sufficient time, it seems highly likely that the Napolas would ultimately have become instrumental in helping to consolidate a new, National Socialist caste structure—a class system of stratification based no longer on the twin pillars of bourgeois society, Besitz und Bildung (property and education), but on the uncompromising—and fatally exclusive—core values of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft : ‘racial purity’ and the ‘will to achieve’ (rassische Reinheit und Leistungsfähigkeit ). In this context, the Napolas also possess a wider significance for the future of education in the Third Reich more generally, since they formed the prototype for a planned network of non-elite boarding schools which were to be established throughout the Greater German Reich, the Deutsche Heimschulen; at Hitler’s specific request, these also operated under August Heißmeyer’s aegis (in his capacity as Inspekteur der Deutschen Heimschulen). Although such plans could not be fully carried out during the war, it was intended that a far higher proportion of German children should attend these boarding schools after the ‘final victory’.57

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

Anon (1940b). For more on the history of the NPEA in general, see Roche (2021). Roche (2013, p. 181). Although there also existed four Napolas for girls, my analysis here will concentrate on the boys’ schools, which formed the overwhelming majority of the schools in the Napola system. Frontarbeiter, Anon (1942). An implicit comparison with KdF practice is made in Anon (1940b). (emphasis original): “Holiday trips aren’t an unaffordable luxury for the workers of the fist any more either. Higher education can be attained just as easily by the son of a labourer as the professor’s lad.” On the KdF more generally, see Baranowski (2004). Anon (1936), Anon (1939a), Anon (1939b). One might contrast the state of affairs at the Adolf-Hitler-Schools, which were far readier to admit pupils who were the sons of high-ranking Nazis, even if their personal achievements left something to be desired—for more on this, see Feller and Feller (2001). Anon (1940a), Nees (1936). Walberg (1936). Cf. the various prospectuses and entrance requirements distributed by the schools, many of which can be found in Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde (BArch), R 3903/2249. For more on this nexus of ideas in general, see e.g. Bajohr and Wildt (2009), Buggeln and Wildt (2014), Fritzsche (2008), Steber and Gotto (2014). See, for example, Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg (StAL), F 455/8, speech by Reinhold Gräter, manuscript p. 5. For an overview and some initial reflections on this theme, see Frei (2018). In the pages which follow, I will use the terms “bürgerlich”, “middle-class” and “bourgeois” more or less interchangeably, following the lead of German Bürgertumsforscher. For example, Hans P., former pupil of NPEA Rügen, private correspondence, 4 December 2009; Dietrich Schulz, former pupil of NPEA Rügen, private correspondence, 17 November 2009. BArch, R 5/3362, Bernhard Rust, ‘Non scholae sed vitae discimus!’, speech from 22 April 1941. For more on the close relationship between the Napolas and the cadet schools, and on Haupt’s background, see Roche (2013, pp. 182–194). See BArch, R 2/19991, ‘Erläuterungen zu dem Muster eines Kassenanschlages für eine Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt’. The amounts set for each class might shift from year to year, but the principle of “gestaffelte Beiträge” remained the same.

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16. See in particular BArch, R 3003/24494. 17. On local initiatives organised by individual Napolas, see Roche (2021, p. 27, n. 83). 18. BArch, NS 45/35, ‘Vom Wesen der Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten’; see BArch, R 5/5280, letter dated 11 April 1942. 19. StAL, E 202 Bü 1747, letter from the acting Anstaltsleiter, Dr. Eichberger, dated 15 June 1939. 20. Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, 11125 Nr. 21351, letter from Heißmeyer dated 30 April 1936. 21. See Fritzsche (2008, p. 98). 22. BArch, R 187/270b, Bl. 104. ‘Merkblatt für die Aufnahme in Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten’. 23. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, I. HA Rep. 151 Nr. 1093, Bl. 193, Anmeldung für den Staatshaushalt 1935, 30 October 1934. 24. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, BEA 49, letter dated 4 February 1939; StAL, E 202 Bü 1747, letters dated 26 January 1939 and 31 January 1939; Der Jungmann. Feldpostbericht der NPEA Oranienstein, 9. Kriegsnummer, 86. 25. On the predominance of such militaristic terminology throughout all spheres of life in the Third Reich, see Fritzsche (2008, p. 55). 26. BArch, R 43-II/956b, Report from Heißmeyer to Lammers dated 22 October 1940, Bl. 62–63. 27. See Anon (1939c). 28. Anon (1937a). 29. Brenner (1937, pp. 10–11). 30. Ueberhorst (1942, pp. 80–81). 31. Anon. (1937b, pp. 53–54). 32. Anon (1937a). 33. Jansen (1935), Fraude (1935). 34. Cf. Roche (2021, pp. 172–174), for an extended discussion of this theme. 35. Anon. (1937b). 36. For the purposes of this essay, I follow Thomas Nipperdey (and others) in considering the Kleinbürgertum or the Mittelstand as essentially bürgerlich—cf. Nipperdey (1987, especially pp. 145–146). 37. Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, MA 125/13, Statistische Monatshefte November 1940. Bearbeitet vom SS-Erfassungsamt, p. 14: Die Jungmannen der Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten und Pimpfe der Adolf Hitler-Schulen nach dem Beruf des Vaters. 38. See Rosenbaum (2014, p. 177). 39. For similar comments on the failed social engineering effected by the RAD, see Stephenson (2008, especially p. 102).

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40. On this point, see Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Abteilung Magdeburg, Rep. C 28 II, Nr. 2361, ‘Erfahrungsbericht, zusammengestellt von Hundertschaftsführer Brenner, Betr: Jungmannen-Auslese’, April 1944, especially Bl. 133. 41. Zogelmann (1936). 42. See Rosenbaum (2014, pp. 282–286), on the quintessentially bürgerlich nature of many of these activities. 43. See, for example, Kocka (1987, especially p. 43), Nipperdey (1987), Hettling and Hoffmann (2000). 44. On the dangers of such an approach, see Fischer (1991). 45. See Wehler (1987, especially p. 244). 46. Kocka (1993, p. 6), Rosenbaum (1982), Budde (1994, p. 213). 47. Skroblin (1941). 48. On the connections between the bündisch youth movement and the bourgeoisie, see, for example, Mommsen (2003). 49. Kershaw (2014, p. 33). 50. On the difficulties of elucidating pupils’ postwar fates in general, see Roche (2021, pp. 397–398). 51. Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Abteilung Merseburg, C 23 Nr. 1 and 2. 52. Steber and Gotto (2014, p. 18). 53. See Frei (2005, pp. 107–128), also Bajohr and Wildt (2009, p. 9). 54. Hachtmann (2014, p. 200). 55. Baranowski (2004, pp. 2–12). 56. For more on those aspects of Nazism which appealed particularly to citizens’ desires for self-fulfillment, see Föllmer (2013, especially p. 9, p. 111, p. 128). 57. See Klare (2003).

Bibliography Anon. 1936. Auslese der Jugend. Der Angriff , 28 October. Anon. 1937a. Arbeit ist kein Kinderspiel. Das Schwarze Korps, 17 June. Anon. 1937b. Betriebsappell Oranienstein - Die Kumpels als Gäste unserer Anstalt! Der Jungmann. Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt Oranienstein/Lahn 3 (5): 53–54. Anon. 1939a. Jetzt wieder Neuaufnahmen. Die Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten. Für Kinder unbemittelter Eltern Ausbildung auf Staatskosten - Erziehung zum Gemeinschaftsgedanken. Völkischer Beobachter (Wien), 7 February. Anon. 1939b. Insgesamt 21 nationalpolitische Erziehungs-Anstalten im Reich. Heißmeyer über den Erziehungsplan. Niedersächsische Tageszeitung, 7 February.

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Anon. 1939c. Die „Obersekunda“ im Bergwerk. Aus einer Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalt. Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 June. Anon. 1940a. Deutsche Menschen aus deutschem Geist. Vom Wirken der Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten. Kattowizer Zeitung, 5 August. Anon. 1940b. Der Führer: „Uns schwebt ein Staat vor, in dem die Geburt gar nichts ist und Leistung und Können alles!“. Völkischer Beobachter (Wien), 25/26 December. Anon. 1942. Wir besuchen die Napola. Arbeitersöhne studieren! Der leistungsstarken Jugend stehen alle beruflichen Aufstiegmöglichkeiten offen. Frontarbeiter, 28 March. Bajohr, Frank, and Michael Wildt, eds. 2009. Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Baranowski, Shelley. 2004. Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brenner, Otto. 1937. Oraniensteiner Jungmannen im Arbeitseinsatz 1937. Der Jungmann. Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt Oranienstein/Lahn 3 (5): 6– 15. Budde, Gunilla-Friederike. 1994. Auf dem Weg ins Bürgerleben: Kindheit und Erziehung in deutschen und englischen Bürgerfamilien 1840−1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Buggeln, Marc, and Michael Wildt, eds. 2014. Arbeit im Nationalsozialismus. München: De Gruyter/Oldenbourg. Feller, Barbara, and Wolfgang Feller. 2001. Die Adolf-Hitler-Schulen. Pädagogische Provinz versus ideologische Zuchtanstalt. Weinheim. Fischer, Conan. 1991. Workers, the Middle Classes, and the Rise of National Socialism. German History 9 (3): 357–373. Föllmer, Moritz. 2013. Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraude. 1935. Dinslaken. Der Jungmann. Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt Oranienstein/Lahn 1 (1): 54–56. Frei, Norbert. 2005. 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen. München: C.H. Beck. Frei, Norbert, ed. 2018. Wie bürgerlich war der Nationalsozialismus? Göttingen: Wallstein. Fritzsche, Peter. 2008. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hachtmann, Rüdiger. 2014. Social Spaces of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft in the Making: Functional Elites and Club Networking. In Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, 200–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hettling, Manfred, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. 2000. Zur Historisierung bürgerlicher Werte. In Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel. Innenansichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, 7–21. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Jansen. 1935. Vom 21.10. bis 31.10.1935 wurden neun Jungmannen von Oranienstein mit zehn Jungarbeitern aus dem Dinslakener Industriegebiet ausgetauscht. Der Jungmann. Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt Oranienstein/Lahn 1 (1): 50–3. Kershaw, Ian. 2014. Volksgemeinschaft: Potential and Limitations of the Concept. In Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, 29–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klare, Anke. 2003. Die Deutschen Heimschulen 1941–1945. Zur Gleichschaltung und Verstaatlichung kirchlicher, privater und stiftischer Internatsschulen im Nationalsozialismus. Jahrbuch für Historischen Bildungsforschung 9: 37–58. Kocka, Jürgen. 1987. Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit als Probleme der deutschen Geschichte vom späten 18. zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert. In Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka, 21–63. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kocka, Jürgen. 1993. The European Pattern and the German Case. In Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell, 3–39. Oxford: Berg. Mommsen, Hans. 2003. Generationenkonflikt und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik. In Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Reulecke, 115–126. München: Oldenbourg. Nees, A. 1936. Schloss Oranienstein. Erst Kloster, Prachtschloß, Kadettenanstalt, zweimal von Franzosen verwüstet. Seit zwei Jahren: Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt. Deutsche Jugend von Sumatra bis Südslawien, von Amerika bis zum deutschen Osten im alten Oranierschloß - Ein neuer Schultyp hat sich bewährt. „Neueste Zeitung“ Illustrierte Tageszeitung, Frankfurt a. M., 27 March. Nipperdey, Thomas. 1987. „Bürgerlich“ als Kultur. In Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka, 143–148. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Roche, Helen. 2013. Sparta’s German Children: The Ideal of Ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, 1818–1920, and in National Socialist Elite Schools (the Napolas), 1933–1945. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Roche, Helen. 2021. The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenbaum, Heidi. 1982. Formen der Familie. Untersuchungen zum Zusammenhang von Familienverhältnissen, Sozialstruktur und sozialem Wandel in der deutschen Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Rosenbaum, Heidi. 2014. „Und trotzdem war’s ’ne schöne Zeit“. Kinderalltag im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Skroblin, Gustav. 1941. Vom Sinn der Gemeinschaftserziehung in den Nationalpolitischen Erziehungsanstalten. Frauen-Warte (6). Steber, Martina, and Bernhard Gotto, eds. 2014. Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stephenson, Jill. 2008. Inclusion: Building the National Community in Propaganda and Practice. In Nazi Germany, ed. Jane Caplan, 99–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ueberhorst, Horst. 1942. Bergwerkseinsatz 1942. Der Jungmann. Feldpostbericht der NPEA Oranienstein, 8. Kriegsnummer: 80–81. Walberg, K.G. 1936. Die Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt. Reichsjugendpressedienst, 8 September. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1987. Wie „bürgerlich“ war das Deutsche Kaiserreich? In Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka, 243–280. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Zogelmann, Hans. 1936. NPEA. National-Politische Erziehungsanstalt. Der Aufbau, 1 August.

CHAPTER 5

Catholic Boarding Schools and the Re-making of the Spanish Right, 1900–1939 Till Kössler

Boarding schools were vital social institutions of upper- and middle-class Catholics all over the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They existed in a myriad of different forms and played an immense role in educating Catholic children. The schools, however, were not only educational establishments, but also served as social meeting spaces for Catholic society and served as training grounds for future leaders of Catholic organisations and political parties. As the culture wars between liberal and progressive forces and Catholicism intensified in many nations at the end of the nineteenth century, the boarding schools became

T. Kössler (B) Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_5

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not only objects of a bitter struggle over who should control education, but also became focal points of new Catholic campaigns for the re-Christianisation of society.1 The conflicts between Catholicism and secularism were especially marked in Spain. The Church played a prominent role in the fight against liberalism and republicanism around 1900, supported the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923−1930) and strongly opposed the progressive governments of the Second Republic (1931 –1936/39) who tried to curb the public influence of the Church and to secularise the educational system and public life. Faced with republican hostility, most Church officials wholeheartedly welcomed the military uprising of General Franco in July 1936 and supported his dictatorship. Against this background, the following chapter examines the role of the Catholic boarding schools in these political conflicts by analysing both changes in religious training and a wider social life at the schools. How did the culture wars effect education and the life of the students at the schools? When and how did the schools get involved in the political struggles and did school regimes become more politicised and belligerent in the years leading up to the Civil War? By answering these questions, this chapter has two major aims. Firstly, it aims to widen our understanding of Spanish anti-liberalism and its influence on society in the twentieth century. Secondly, it highlights the highly influential global educational model of Catholic schools. The importance of Catholic boarding schools in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth century is undeniable. In the 1930s, two-thirds of all students who received a secondary education attended Catholic schools. Among these, there were different types of students. Many students from wealthier backgrounds were prestigious “interns” who lived in the schools during the whole school year, while others attended the schools as “semiinterns”, leaving the schools at the weekends. Finally, a growing number of day students attended the educational establishments entering in the mornings and leaving in the afternoons.2 Despite their importance, we know surprisingly little about these schools.3 This is partially due to a difficult archival situation. In Spain, it is almost impossible for professional historians to gain access to school archives or the archives of the religious congregations responsible for the schools.4 Furthermore, the lack of historiographical interest also stems from a widespread understanding of these schools as archaic institutions

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without a true history of their own and with little connection to contemporary history. The following chapter challenges this understanding. It argues that Catholic boarding schools change significantly in the twentieth century and that the examination of Catholic boarding schools offers privileged insights into the history of middle-class Spaniards and the social and cultural dimensions of Catholic and right-wing politics. While research on schools often settles on analysing school manifestos and pedagogical writings, this chapter tries to include the perspectives of students and their parents as well as an analysis of everyday life at the schools and changes over time. It is only through such a broad approach the influence and contradictions of Catholic boarding school education can be determined. This chapter draws from a wide variety of sources. Prominent among them are Catholic educational journals, school newspapers and yearbooks. While all these sources paint an idealised picture and omit problematic aspects of school life, they nevertheless provide invaluable insights into school life and some of its contradictions. To a limited extent, this chapter also draws on autobiographies.5 Catholic boarding schools in Spain changed dynamically, albeit contradictorily. The schools were heavily involved in the campaigns to reChristianise Spain and introduced significant changes in their school and educational regimes to support these campaigns. They moreover became important laboratories for a new social order that placed new demands on students, offering them limited freedoms and possibilities to participate in the schools. In the following, I will first discuss the plurality of Catholic boarding school education around 1900 before turning to reform forces within the Church that tried to modernise and centralise Catholic boarding school education. Finally, I will discuss the different effects of school reform and will dwell especially on some major contradictions.

Plurality and Unity: Boarding Schools Around 1900 Contrary to a widely held belief, Catholic boarding schools around 1900 were far from uniform.6 First of all, the schools were run by different religious congregations that ruled the schools independently from the Church hierarchy as private enterprises. To counter the secularisation of education since the early modern period and especially after the French Revolution, the Catholic Church encouraged religious orders to focus on

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education. New congregations established themselves with their primary mission being the dissemination of Catholic education and the running of Christian schools. As a result, a wide variety of different Catholic educational initiatives unfolded during the nineteenth century, creating a very diverse educational market. While Catholicism served as an ideological umbrella and a central reference point, the Church authorities did not interfere directly with the schools, their curricula or government. The schools, for example, could hire teachers as they saw fit. Secondly, the different congregations and schools catered to different social groups and educational ambitions. As suppliers in a commercial educational market, they competed with one another as they attempted to attract parents who were willing to pay the often substantial school fees. In the 1930s, it had become common practice for the schools to publish advertisements in Catholic newspapers to attract parents to consider these schools for their children.7 Market forces also led the schools to specialise their educational offers. Some congregations such as the Jesuits and Marianists specialised in educating children from well-off and socially influential families in palace-like buildings, while the Salesians of Don Bosco catered to middle and lower-middle-class parents who wished to provide their children a sound vocational or commercial training. Others, finally, focused on preparing children for the entry exams of the different military academies. Thirdly, different schools represented different ideological outlooks. While some institutions propagated a more lenient disciplinarian regime as a way to attract urban middle-class families with a more liberal leaning, others prided themselves in their disciplinarian and ultra-conservative traditions. Sensing a growing interest among middle-class parents in new pedagogical ideas, some schools even began to adopt—and advertise— new pedagogical methods such as Montessori education.8 Particularly notable was the Catholic school system’s ability to attract both Spanish nationalist families and families who supported regionalist movements in the Basque Country and Catalonia. The boarding school Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo in Lecároz (Navarre), for example, catered to regionalist forces and offered courses in Basque. In contrast, a neighbouring Jesuit school was deeply involved in Spanish nationalism that it celebrated inside and outside the classrooms.9 Overall, the prestige and diversity of Catholic boarding schools even led many liberal parents who were sceptical of the Church to send their children to Catholic schools because of the educational opportunities they offered. The lack of centralisation

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and market forces, therefore, helped create a highly diversified cosmos of Catholic boarding schools during the nineteenth century. After 1900, however, Catholics began to criticise the existing boarding school education. In their view, Catholic education had become too self-absorbed and isolated from the pressing issues of the times, especially the rise of secularism and anti-clericalism. Since the late nineteenth century, repeated attempts by liberal governments to limit the educational influence of the Church had mobilised many Catholics to support the Church and boarding schools. Especially, the so-called Tragic Week (semana trágica) in 1909, during which protesters in Barcelona burned and destroyed religious buildings and attacked monks and nuns, unsettled Catholic pedagogues and initiated passionate reform debates.10 The riots had demonstrated a deep hostility towards the Church in important parts of Spanish society and had exposed the idea that Spain was a deeply religious country as a myth. Educators wanted the schools to play a more active role in the fight against liberalism and socialism and to help in the crusade to re-Christianise Spanish society. Catholic education were expected not only teach Christian manners and a pious spirituality, but also to include the moulding of active, confident fighters for the Christian cause. To achieve these goals, a group of reformers set out to coordinate and modernise education in the boarding schools. They wanted to better coordinate Catholic education through establishing national educational institutions and argued for pedagogical reforms. At first, their proposals were met with strong resistance from the congregations who wanted to protect their educational traditions and independence. Organisational rivalries between the religious communities and their schools also made the establishment of a central association of Catholic boarding schools difficult. However, in 1929 all major congregations agreed to fund and support the Federación de Amigos de Enseñanza (FAE, Federation of Friends of Education). The establishment of the Second Republic in 1931 and its far-reaching anti-clerical legislation further accelerated the drive towards unification.11 The Federation rapidly gained influence as it lobbied the Republican governments and a wider public in favour of Catholic schooling, to organise educational congresses. Its main journal, Atenas, aimed at facilitating the exchange of information and ideas across congregational boundaries.12 Although internal differences persisted, a shared Catholic educational public sphere took shape that served as a reference point for educational reform in individual boarding schools.13

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Authoritarian Modernity: Boarding Schools in the 1920s and 1930s The increasing coordination between schools helped to accelerate changes in education and social life in these schools. The schools slowly left an older monastical school regime behind and began to promote a new kind of active and belligerent religiosity. These changes drastically altered life in boarding schools, and especially the elite schools. They also had some important unintended consequences. To better understand the changes, it is necessary to take a closer look at the boarding schools around 1900. First, it is important to stress their advantages over state schools that made them so appealing to many Spanish families. The public school system consisted of primary schools that catered mostly to the poor and imparted only a rudimentary education and of secondary schools that replicated forms of teaching at universities. Students listened to lectures in large auditoriums without actively engaging with their teachers. The schools did not require attendance. As such, many students only attended the final exams in the summer. The numerous private academies that promised to prepare children for these state exams also had serious shortcomings. They were highly unstable enterprises, often surviving only a few years and depending on single teachers and a constant influx of fees. In contrast to both the public schools and the private academies, the Catholic boarding schools offered institutional stability, moral respectability, and more personalised education in the classroom.14 Catholic schooling proved successful to such a degree that many religious congregations had difficulties satisfying the requests of towns to open new schools in their vicinities. The Society of Mary (Marianists), for example, had to turn down various invitations from middle-class parents in different Spanish cities.15 While many parents did not wholeheartedly embrace the inward-looking religious spirituality, they preferred Catholic schools over their secular alternatives as they offered a solid preparation for bourgeois careers with moral character formation that was unrivalled in turn-of-the-century Spain. Even liberal parents felt compelled to enrol their children in a religious institution.16 During the Restoration monarchy, a symbiotic relationship between bourgeois Spain and Catholic boarding schools developed that was, however, not free of tensions. Monastic and bourgeois educational ideals coexisted in an uneasy relationship. Religious communities tried to model the schools on convents. They isolated the schools as far as possible from

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the outside world and commonly built in the countryside or at least in the outskirts of cities. The lives of the students resembled those of monks and nuns and were characterised by asceticism and discipline. Innumerable religious rituals from morning prayers to evening mass structured daily life. In many schools, students were expected to only move in pairs of two and at the ring of a small bell. Visiting hours for parents and relatives were strictly regulated to one or two hours per week, and students were often expected to remain in school even during the holiday seasons.17 Through constant repetitions of religious rituals, bodily movements and the memorialising of religious texts and songs, the students were encouraged to shed their worldly self and attain a deep spirituality as well as a new Christian personality. In the eyes of the teachers, the best students therefore were those who withdrew the most from worldly affairs and eventually joined the religious orders themselves. The material infrastructure of the schools mirrored this emphasis on spiritual salvation. In most colleges, there was no central heating and warm water. The students slept in large dormitories situated in old, cloister-like buildings. The founders of a Jesuit boarding school in the Northern city of Gijón professed to value a “modest” building more than “ostentatious luxury”.18 The schools, though, were also shaped by the wishes and expectations of the upper- and middle-class families as the main fee-paying customers. The schools not only imparted education to the world of commerce and finance but also placed an emphasis on bourgeois character formation. They taught civic manners and middle-class values such as thrift, deference, politeness and industriousness and introduced the students to bourgeois culture in the form of music, literature and drama. Moreover, school festivities became occasions for bourgeois socialising and representation.19 Overall, the schools reflected the pronounced social hierarchies of Restoration Spain. Students from noble and affluent families occupy the most prestigious positions within the schools. Formal and informal arrangements kept these more prestigious and wealthy “internal” students, who lived full-time at the schools and had to pay higher fees, apart from the less prestigious “semi-internal” and “external” students, who went home either for the weekends or each evening. The students were taught at a very early age to identify with a specific position within a hierarchical social order.20 Despite its success, a new generation of Catholic educators began to criticise this model of Catholic boarding school life. They detected a worrying lack of religious commitment among the students. Reports

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suggested that most students stopped associating themselves with the Church and its causes on the day they graduated. Secularisation, or so it seemed, even affected the core group of younger Catholics who for their whole childhood had been under the close supervision of the Church.21 Boarding school education no longer seemed adequate to guarantee and safeguard a Christian Spain. How to correct these shortcomings became a major question of Spanish Catholicism.22 Faced with this grim analysis, Catholic educators pushed through various reform measures that would help to mould a new generation of committed Christians ready to lead the fight for a new Catholic Spain. Reformers re-imagined boarding schools as social laboratories of new “apostolic” elite who would not only display a deep spirituality, but also a crusading fighting spirit. Fighting infidels would supplement the traditional inward-looking spirituality, and the isolated monastic lifestyle would give way to an active engagement with the world outside the school walls. The school´s new mission was to “educate volunteers to fight the good cause”, to “conquer the fatherland for Jesus Christ” and to “redeem a lost society”.23 As a result, boarding school life and education changed significantly. First, the schools introduced several changes to strengthen the religious resolve of their students. Religious education became more “apostolic”, less focused on a rejection of the world and more oriented towards proselytising and missionary work in society. Children were thus taught how to confront agnostics and defend Catholic beliefs in hostile public settings. The schools engaged students in charitable and missionary work in working-class neighbourhoods and staged debates simulating confrontations with liberals and heretics in real life. Moreover, they urged the students to participate in new religious associations that began to shape social life in the boarding schools. In the 1920s, so-called Marian congregations flourished. They originally aimed at bringing elite students together for spiritual exercises, but changed their focus to spearhead a new Christian character formation among all of the students centred on a fervent religious lifestyle.24 In the Jesuit college of San José, which was forced to translocate from Valladolid to Portugal after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Republican Spain in the early 1930s, every member of the congregation pledged to actively “contribute to the renaissance (resurgimiento) of Christian life in Spain and (to become) a useful member of Catholic Action”.25 Missionary societies also became popular as they raised awareness for converting infidels outside of

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Europe.26 Moreover, academically gifted students were expected to join so-called study circles that tried to promote a more scholarly religiosity. Members met for academic discussion on religion each week and had to prepare essays on questions of faith and Catholic dogma.27 The quest for a new outward-looking and militant religiosity perhaps found its purest expression in the Catholic boy-scout movement. After some initial hesitation, the schools embraced the movement that— inspired by the global success of Baden Powell’s model—promoted an adventurous lifestyle based on Christian values. The boy scouts very quickly became popular among students. The movement exemplified many of the new Catholic educational ideals: Self-reliant, outwardlooking and physically robust. The scouts also represented self-discipline and loyalty to the Church. Because of these virtues, the schools were willing to allow the movement a far greater leeway than former students’ associations.28 Although tempered by a Christian vocabulary of modesty and charity, the success of the boy scouts illustrates a growing combativeness of Catholic education. A military vocabulary of fighting and battalions, enemies and victory began to permeate the schools, which started to portray themselves not only as educational institutions but also as training grounds for Christian soldiers. The school journal of the elite Madrid Nuestra Señora del Pilar, for example, urged its readers: “Forward! Students of El Pilar, young Catholics, take up the shield and wield the sword in the defense of your godly leader”.29 Overall, school life became more partisan and more politicised in the 1920s and early 1930s. The different political parties and movements on the political Right discovered the schools as recruiting grounds and—after 1931—spaces of opposition against the new Republic. The schools supported this development, often encouraging students to join political youth organisations during the summer vacation period.30 The anti-clerical legislation of the first Republican government fortified this political involvement. The Republican laws that tried to curb private education jolted many grass-root Catholics into action. Large rallies protested against state intervention, and Catholic parents formed lobby groups in defence of the schools. The conflicts fostered an atmosphere of belligerence and fear. It is not surprising, then, that most schools welcomed the military uprising and pledged allegiance to the nationalist generals led by Franco. The murder of countless Catholic teachers and school administrators by left-wing militias in the Republican zone reinforced the support that

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found its key expression in the large number of students volunteering to fight against the Republic in right-wing militias and the rebel army.31 A Catholic student from Galicia reported back to his Jesuit college, for example, that he and many of his comrades had immediately joined armed militias—often under the banner of the Fascist party—after the start of the Civil War. Another student reported on the large number of fellow students in Galicia wearing the blue-shirts of the Fascist party.32

Contradictions of Catholic Boarding School Education By 1936, the Catholic boarding schools had become crucibles of the Spanish Right and important agents in the fight against the democratic Republic. They encouraged a belligerent religiosity and tried to prepare their students for an all-out fight against liberalism, socialism and progressive reforms. The shared experience of the politically heated and proselytising atmosphere of the schools deeply influenced a new generation of Catholics who rose to prominence during and after the Civil War and occupied leading political and public positions in the Franco dictatorship. However, it would be misleading to portray the schools in their entirety as politically mobilised and religiously radicalised institutions. The endeavours to mould belligerent Christians were contradictory. On the one hand, they paradoxically placed a new emphasis on modernity as well as freedom and choice as elements of boarding school life. On the other hand, the religious mobilisation encountered clear limits as different groups of students responded differently to the new calls to transform themselves. To start with, the protagonists of a new Catholic education quickly became convinced that a more militant and active religiosity could only be achieved by giving the students more freedom to express their views and more liberties to pursue their interests. In a critical evaluation of contemporary Catholic schooling, they condemned harsh disciplinary measures and an education consisting of rote learning and formalised rituals. Instead, they wanted the schools to be more welcoming and appealing to students. Schools should ideally engage with the modern, urbanised world and emanate a spirit of freedom and spiritual equality. It is worthwhile to look at some changes more in-depth. First, the schools improved their facilites. They not only introduced heating and individual bedrooms to ensure that the pupils’ stay at the schools was

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more comfortable, but also they also built sports facilities such as tennis courts and swimming pools. The elite institutions in particular began to resemble grand hotels more than religious convents. Idealised visions of British public schools served as a blueprint for the design of the schools premises that often comprised lavish gardens. Following the regenerationist movements of the early twentieth century, the schools also abandoned the older religious contempt for physical matters. A new concern for health, sports and exercises replaced an older emphasis on rigorous disciplining of bodily movements. The boarding schools witnessed a veritable sports craze in the 1920s as students were allowed to establish soccer and other sports associations and organise sports tournaments.33 The renovation of buildings and premises served a propagandistic function as well. By the 1930s, advertisements highlighted the comforts and pleasures of school life and lured parents with images of bucolic school settings and state-of-the art sports facilities.34 Importantly, the outward changes were part of a broader transformation of life in the schools. While the boarding schools previously had tried to isolate the students as far as possible from outside influences, they now established various venues for contact and exchange. To bring students into “unfiltered contact with reality” became a major goal of Catholic education.35 Most schools introduced study trips to cultural sights, commercial enterprises and factories into their curriculum and organised excursions to the seaside or the mountains in the summer months. Around 1900, children had experienced their entry into the boarding schools as a “step into another world” marked by rituals of initiation such as the shaving of hair and taking in their meals in silence. In the 1930s, however many students—especially in urban areas—did not experience the same transformation of their personal lives when entering boarding schools. They were allowed to leave the school premises more frequently, and the schools expanded visiting hours as the schools slowly cast off the old convent model of living and learning. The decision of many families to enrol their children as “day-students” instead of fulltime “internals” accelerated these changes. A Madrid teenager enrolled at Nuestra Señora del Pilar lived a very different life from an older generation of Catholic students as he hurried to school in the mornings, took lunch at home and spent the early evenings meeting up with friends or searching shops for the newest photo equipment, his true passion.36 Generally, the more pronounced political and militant outlook of the schools did not correspond with a more disciplinarian education. On the

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contrary, Catholic education adopted a rhetoric of participation, freedom, and equality. The well-known Jesuit Ángel Ayala, for example, argued in his 1931 book “Our Schools” (Nuestros Colegios ) that the suppression of children’s urge to actively engage with their environment, dull educational routines and harsh discipline would curtail the development of a harmonious and strong Christian personality. Therefore, he urged the schools to adopt a “regime of advancing liberty”.37 In addition, the director of Colegio Bonanova in Barcelona proclaimed in a speech to students that he shared their desire for a school that “would not curb our shared desire for expansion and freedom”. Even a Catholic reformatory for wayward youth pledged to introduce a “regime of extensive liberties” within its walls.38 Moreover, religious education was encouraged to accept the individuality of each student. The Jesuit school San José declared a “cult of the individual child” to be at the basis of its education.39 In 1937, during the Civil War, a group of former students visited the elite Jesuit school of San José in Valladolid. These observations provided an impression to what extent the schools had changed since 1900. In comparison to their own school experiences some decades earlier, the visitors noticed “more joy, more comfort, but less outward coercion, more freedom (…) an education directed more to the individual student, a more personal education”. In the end, they admitted to feeling envy at the new generation of students.40 To be clear, the Catholic reformers did not want to introduce democracy in their schools or to weaken the authority of ecclesiastical authorities. Nevertheless, while for present-day observers the new freedoms the schools actually granted students seem limited, they represented a major break with established school norms. Moreover, while they seem to have been more pronounced in the elite boarding schools, they nevertheless were part of a new and influential model of Catholic education. The reformers felt that only by giving students more of a voice in school affairs and introducing a more egalitarian spirit a new, active, and committed religiosity could be achieved. Their actions were indeed quite successful. They did mould an important group of students into committed Catholics. Out of this group of students, the Church and the Franco regime would fill many important positions. In practice, however, the different reform measures had limits and contradictory effects. First of all, social backgrounds continued to influence social hierarchies within the schools as the attempts to create an

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equal community of the faithful clashed with traditional norms of a hierarchical distance between teachers and students. Moreover, while students were encouraged to freely discuss questions of faith and voice their opinion on school matters, a fundamental questioning of the Catholic faith and the school regimes were off-limits. Teachers were instructed to point out and correct “erroneous interpretations”.41 Religiously mobilising the students also had clear limits. Many students enjoyed the modern amenities of the schools, but shied away from the challenging, and increasingly intellectual demands of religious and political activism reflected in their hesitation to sign up for extra-curricular religious activism. For example, the Madrid branch of the youth organisation Juventud Antoniano, which primarily organised students from Catholic schools, complained at the height of political mobilization in Spain in February 1936 of the “lack of commitment und half-heartedness” of the majority of members.42 School journals and school yearbooks give the impression that sporting clubs were far more popular than religious study groups and missionary associations. As religious education became more intellectual and demanding—to be a good Catholic it was no longer sufficient to just follow the established rituals and memorise religious texts—many students were not willing or not able to commit themselves to a life of religious activism and only paid lip-service to the demands put upon them. The new emphasis on freedom paradoxically also opened up possibilities to escape these religious demands. Autobiographies describe how some students, who were at first enthusiastic about the new religiosity at the schools, despaired after a while and withdrew from religious life.43 While most tried to keep up appearances, they slowly exited the orbit of the Church and the Catholic movement. The reforms, therefore, unintentionally helped to create a gap within the student body. Moreover, the important goal of providing a solid education for a bourgeois career also limited the emphasis on militant Christianity. Many, if not most, parents sought a modern, yet morally sound, education for their children. They appreciated the comfortable, state-of-the-art facilities and limited educational innovations, but did not choose the schools for their religious fervour. Moreover, even in the heated atmosphere of the 1930s, many parents and students selected a Catholic boarding school primarily for career reasons and social distinction, and regarded religious and political fervour rather lukewarmly. Many schools tried to combine career training with religious character formation. In 1935, for example, the Madrid school Colegio Nuestra Señora del Pilar organised spiritual

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exercises that stretched over several days and included both career advice and an immersion in religious spirituality. However, the need to prepare their students for the state exams at the end of each school year set limits to the religious inculcation.44 A last point: The religious and political renovation of the boarding schools contributed to a generation of Catholics willing to fight for, and support, the dictatorship of Franco. Ultimately, however, the new rhetoric of freedom and participation also developed a dynamic that led at least some Catholics to adopt a critical stance towards authoritarian politics after 1939. Most of the protagonists of reform Catholicism in the 1950s and 1960s who criticised the dictatorship had received their education in boarding schools.

Conclusion The Catholic boarding schools of the early twentieth century were not the immobile, culturally, and mentally conservative institutions that many contemporary observers and later-day historians have portrayed. On the contrary, they were highly dynamic organisations that successfully reconciled different and often contradictory demands. While as private enterprises they were eager to attract Spanish families and modernised their education accordingly, they also became focal points of a religious revival and Catholic mobilisation against secularism, liberalism, and socialism. These two developments changed boarding school life drastically, albeit in contradictory ways. While the schools shed their appearance as monasteries and became more open and modern institutions, they also intensified and politicised religious training. A new belligerent, crusading atmosphere characterised most schools by the early 1930s and paved the way for the rapid support of the military coup d’état of July 1936. The introduction of modern education and a renovation of school life did not run counter to the radicalisation of religion and politics in the schools, rather this was part of it. A closer inspection has, however, also revealed the limits of the religious and political revival. While it offered students incentives to join in the effort to mould a new Christian man, the heightened demands on individual religiosity also estranged larger parts of the student body from the new religiosity. Even at the height of the political crisis in pre-Civil War Spain, most students primarily attended boarding schools to advance

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their professional careers and gain social respectability. It is no coincidence that after the victory of the Francoist armies, the political pressure on the schools eased and the schools relaxed their religious demands. We still, however, know very little about the history of the schools under the dictatorship and their transformation under the new democracy after 1975.

Notes 1. Clark (2003); Conway and Buchanan (1996). 2. Viñao Frago (2003, pp. 191–196); Lannon (1987, p. 78). 3. Bush (1975); Curtis (2000); Grew/Harrigan (1985); Langdon (1978); Padberg (1969); Wolff (1980). A notable exception for the Spanish case offers: Ostolaza Esnal (2000). 4. There are, however, some books written by Catholic historians who had access to school archives: Barbadillo (1998); Lull Martí (1997); Revuelta González (1998). See also: García Iglesias (1994–1996). 5. For a fuller account on childhood and politics in early twentieth century Spain see Kössler (2013). See also Kössler (2009). 6. Yetano (1988). 7. For a collection of different advertisements see Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36 (Madrid, 1935). 8. Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Loreto, In Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36 (Madrid, 1935). 9. Ostolaza Esnal (2000, pp. 256–257). 10. Ullman (1968); de la Cueva and Montero (2007). 11. For a lucid new account of the educational policy during the Second Republic see Quiroga (2019). 12. Viñao Frago (2003, pp. 101–110). 13. See for example, the different reports in Atenas as well as the Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36 (Madrid 1935). 14. For a contemporary critique of state schooling: Cabrera (1924). 15. Colegio del Pilar (1982, pp. 22–23). 16. Only in the 1920s did secular reform schools like the Instuto-Escuela, founded in 1918, begin to compete with Catholic institutions: Palacios (1988). 17. Revuelta González (1998, pp. 531–532, pp. 545–547); P.M. Quera, S. J., La estela de una institución centenaria, pp. 81–90 (quoted in: Yetano (1988, pp. 318–325). 18. Mato Díaz (1993–94), p. 255. See also Yetano (1988, pp. 83–84). 19. The highly popular novel Pequeñeces (Coloma, 1891) by Luis Coloma gives a good, albeit fictional, account of these bourgeois elements of the boarding schools in the late nineteenth century.

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20. The poet Rafael Alberti describes the social hierarchies within the schools very vividly: Alberti (1980), p. 37. 21. See for example, Salaverria (2003, pp. 9–10); El primer Congreso Nacional de Educación Católica, Revista Calasancia 2 (1924). 22. Montero (1993); Montero (2008); Montero. (1986). For the breadth of the debates on a local level see, for example, Primera Asamblea de Acción Católica en la Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, El Universo, 10.11.1912. 23. El Colegio de San José de Valladolid en Curía (Portugal), In Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36 (Madrid 1935), pp. 43–45; Lo nuevo que encuentro en Curía: Renovación Escolar, Nuevos Jovenes 6, 15.2.1935; ¿Serán estos?, Nuevos Jovenes 27, 31.5.1936. See also: Fernández Martín, Historia, p. 222. 24. Carta del Alumno Fernando Marzo a Eugenio Zurbitu, El Salvador 136, April 1930; Lull Martí (1997, pp. 536–537). 25. Congregación Mariana de San Luís Gonzaga, Nuevos Jovenes 7, 28.2.1935; Proclamation, Nuevos Jovenes 9, 31.3.1935. 26. Recuerdos del Año Escolar, Memoria del curso de 1926–1927, Colegio de Nuestra Señora del Recuerdo (Madrid 1927), p. 31. 27. Círculos de Estudios, Juventud 27, September 1930; Sergarte (1935, pp. 72–77). 28. Hispánicus (1935, pp. 22–27); La promesa de los „Scouts-Hispanos”, El Pilar 59, June 1935. 29. Un Pensamiento Cristiano, El Pilar 59, June 1935. 30. Frutos del Colegio, Nuevos Jovenes 4, 15.1.1935; La Juventud y las escuelas católicas, La Flecha 43, December 1935. 31. De última hora, Nuevos Jovenes 30, 15.8.1936. 32. España en pie! Nuevos Jovenes 30, 15.8.1936. Additionally, see the anecdotal reports in: Noticias de nuestros colegiales y sus familias, Nuevos Jovenes 31, 15.9.1936. 33. Juan Ferrer Pi, 6 año, Vida escolar, El Salvador 35, November 1921; Deportes: Cómo juegan los nuestros, El Pilar 1, January 1923. 34. See for example: Colegio de la Asunción „Santa Isabel” Madrid, in: Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36 (Madrid, 1935). 35. Martínez de la Nava (1935, pp. 81–87); Lull Martí (1997, pp. 298–313). 36. A good description of the old school life offers Yetano (1988, pp. 315– 318). For the 1930s see: Labor Literaria de 6. Año, El Pilar 59, June 1935. 37. Ángel Ayala, Nuestros Colegios (Madrid: Huelves, 1931, p. 17, p. 38, pp. 46–49). 38. Una Institución Religiosa Insustituible en España, Los Hijos del Pueblo, 26.11.1931.

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39. Antonio González Quevedo, La educación motival de la voluntad, Atenas 57 , January 1936; Lull Martí (1997, p. 92). 40. Qué dicen los Antiguos, Nuevos Jovenes 34, 1.1.1937. 41. El Celador Mayor Sobre Círculos de Estudios, Hogar Antoniano 1, June 1932. 42. Manuel Vigil y Vazquez, Selección, Hogar Antoniano 43, February 1936. 43. Alberti, Arboleda, p. 32–33. 44. Alfonso Guijarro, 6 año, Impresiones de los Ejercicios Espirituales, El Pilar 59, June 1935.

Bibliography Alberti, Rafael. 1980. La arboleda Perdida. Barcelona: Club Bruguera. Ayala, Ángel. 1931. Nuestros Colegios. Madrid: Huelves. Barbadillo, Manuel. 1998. El Colegio Marianista de Cádiz. Fundación (1888– 1892) y primeros años (1892–1898). Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas. Bush, John W. 1975. Education and Social Status: The Jesuit College in the Early Third Republic. French Historical Studies 9: 125–140. Cabrera, Blas. 1924. La reforma de la segunda enseñanza. Revista De Pedagogía 3: 180–186. Clark, Christopher. 2003. The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars. In Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, 11–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colegio del Pilar. 1982. 75 años (1907–1982). Abiertos a la Sociedad. Madrid: Colegio el Pilar. Coloma Roldán, Luis. 1891. Pequeñeces. Bilbao: Editorial El Mensajero. Conway, Martin, and Tom C. Buchanan, eds. 1996. Political Catholicism in Europe, 1918–1965. Minneapolis: Oxford University Press. Curtis, Sarah A. 2000. Educating the Faithful. Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. de la Cueva, Julio, and Feliciano Montero, eds. 2007. La secularización conflictiva. España (1898–1931). Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva. Fernández Martín, Luis. 1981. Historia del Colegio San José de Valladolid, 1881– 1981. Valladolid: El Colegio, imp. García Iglesias, Luis. 1994–96. Renovación de los colegios de jesuitas en la España contemporánea. XX Siglos 5–7 (19): 104–113; (21): 93–105; (24): 63–77; (28): 19–30; (29): 93–106. Grew, Raymond, and Patrick J. Harrigan. 1985. The Catholic Contribution to Universal Schooling in France, 1850–1906. Journal of Modern History 57: 211–247.

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González, Revuelta, and Manuel. 1998. Los colegios de jesuitas y su tradición educativa (1868–1906). Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas. Hispánicus. 1935. Los Exploradores o “Boy-Scouts” en un colegio católico. In Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36, ed. Federación de Amigos de la Enseñanza, 22–27. Exclusiva de Venta: Madrid. Kössler, Till. 2009. Towards a New Understanding of the Child. Catholic Mobilization and Modern Pedagogy in Spain (1900–36). Contemporary European History 18 (1): 1–23. Kössler, Till. 2013. Kinder der Demokratie. Religiöse Erziehung und urbane Moderne in Spanien, 1890–1939. München: Oldenbourg. Langdon, John W. 1978. The Jesuits and French Education: A Comparative Study of Two Schools 1952–1913. History of Education Quarterly 18: 49–60. Lannon, Frances. 1987. Privilege, Persecution, and Prophecy. The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mato Díaz, Ángel and Terrón Bañuelos, Aida. 1993–94. Un ejemplo de espacio escolar cerrado: El Colegio de “La Inmaculada” de Gijón. Historia de la Educación 12–13: 245–275. Martí, Lull, and Enrique. 1997. Jesuitas y pedagogía: El Colegio San José en la Valencia de los años veinte. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas. Martínez de la Nava, A. 1935. Las Excursiones Escolares. In Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36, ed. Federación de Amigos de la Enseñanza, 81–7. Exclusiva de Venta: Madrid. Montero, Feliciano. 1993. El movimiento católico en España. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Montero, Feliciano, ed. 2008. La Acción Católica en la II. República. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones. Montero, Felicano. 1986. La “cuestión escolar” en los Congresos Católicos (1889–1902). Iglesia y Educación en España Vol. 2, ed. Buenaventura Delgado Criado, 155–66. Palma de Mallorca: Ediciones SM. Ostolaza Esnal, Maitane. 2000. Entre religión y modernidad. Los colegios de las Congregaciones Religiosas en la construcción de la sociedad guipuzcoana contemporánea, 1876–1931. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. Padberg, John W. 1969. Colleges in Controversy. The Jesuit School in France from Revival to Suppression, 1815–1880. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Palacios, Luis. 1988. Instituto-Escuela: Historia de una renovación educativa, Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Quiroga, Alejandro. 2019. Forging democratic citizens: Mass nationalization on a local level in the Spanish Second Republic (1931–6). European Review of History 26: 505–532. Salaverria, José María. 2003. Domingo Lázaro (1877–1935): Un educador entre dos grandes crisis de España. Madrid: PPC.

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Sergarte. 1935. Los Circulos de Estudios en un colegio. In Anuario de educación y enseñanza católica en España 1935/36, ed. Federación de Amigos de la Enseñanza, 72–7. Exclusiva de Venta: Madrid. Ullman, Joan Connelly. 1968. The Tragic Week. A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912. Cambridge/Mass: Harvard University Press. Viñao Frago, Antonio. 2003. Escuela para todos. Educación y modernidad en la España del siglo XX . Madrid: Marcial Pons. Wolff, Ricard J. 1980. Catholicism, Fascism and Italian Education from the Riforma Gentile to the Carta Della Scuola 1922–1939. History of Education Quarterly 20: 3–26. Yetano, Ana. 1988. La enseñanza religiosa en la España de la restauración. Barcelona: Anthropos.

PART II

Marginalised

CHAPTER 6

Prisoners of Education: Chiricahua Apaches, Schooling, and the Lived Experience of Settler Colonial Inclusion Janne Lahti

“In April 1887, when I had been at Fort Marion [Florida] for less than a year, Captain Richard H. Pratt, Superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, paid us a visit.” These are the words of the Chiricahua Apache Jason Betzinez, a former boarding school student reminiscing his life in the 1950s as an old man. Looking for candidates for his school in Pennsylvania, Pratt, an officer in the US Army, had come to recruit among the Chiricahua Apaches, held as prisoners of war by the US federal government. His efforts “had no effect on me nor on the other prisoners. No one volunteered,” Betzinez noted. This, in turn, had little effect on Pratt. He had the Chiricahua youngsters lined up and took sixty-two of them to his school. “I well remember that when Captain Pratt came to

J. Lahti (B) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_6

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me he stopped, looked me up and down, and smiled. Then he seized my hand, held it up to show that I volunteered. I only scowled. I didn’t want to go at all.” But go he did. Betzinez’s personal feelings “made no difference to Captain Pratt.” In fact, the sentiments of the whole Chiricahua community made little difference in this schooling decision. These Apaches were subjects of the settler colonial state, caught in a schooling system imposed on them.1 After decades of armed conflict, the federal government forcedly removed all Chiricahua Apaches from their homelands in Arizona and New Mexico to Florida in 1886. Their imprisonment lasted until 1913, first in Florida, then in Alabama, and from 1894 onwards in Oklahoma.2 In 1886 and 1887, the government took most of the Chiricahua youngsters and children from their parents and sent them to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. There these prisoners of war became students—prisoners of education—cut off from their own kin for years and subject to consistent and methodological assimilation. Twice displaced, first from his homelands in the Southwest and then from his family incarcerated in Florida, Betzinez ended up spending a full decade at Carlisle. Education at Carlisle was formulated to bring the Chiricahuas to the settler society on the terms of that settler society. The students would cross cultural and racial lines in a system where racial categories were built on a fundamental exclusion between perceived Apache “savagery” and white civilization. In fact, Carlisle promoted inclusion as a whitening process. On one level, this crossing to membership in the settler society was a performance the Chiricahua students needed to master. They had to adhere to certain inclusionary practices, to eat, dress, talk, and behave likes whites. Yet, it went deeper. The students were renamed with white Christian names, and Nah-delthy became Jason Betzinez. This sort of inclusion also meant altering the Chiricahua relationship to the land, on how they understood it and approached land. The school made them view land as something to work on, to master and alter it as farmers. Yet, as the Chiricahua students were made to approach settler normativity, they still also remained partially excluded as prisoners of war and as such racialized subjects—not citizens—of the settler regime, subject to government control in the school and in the reservation. In short, they were not free during or after the schooling. Settler colonialism is typically viewed as a historical process focusing on the capture of land and replacement of populations, as a zero-sum

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structure of elimination. This chapter does not so much treat settler colonialism as an overarching and distant meta-structure, but as something impacting and shaping individual life-choices and experiences. In short, it tracks settler colonialism as lived experience. In many ways, the inclusion at the boarding schools followed the settler colonial logic of Indigenous elimination as elaborated by Patrick Wolfe: they were set to remake the students as clones of whites by eliminating the Native in them.3 In a sense, schooling was the next step and continuation of the US conquest, physical violence, and reservation incarceration against the Chiricahua people that had been ongoing in the Southwest borderlands since the US-Mexican War of 1846–48.4 While the Chiricahuas had contested this settler colonial elimination at every step, the settlers took their lands and made them their own. Up to this day, no Chiricahua reservation exists in Arizona, while some Chiricahuas live with the Mescalero Apaches in their New Mexico reservation. Many also remain in Oklahoma.5 This chapter discusses the tensions of inclusion and exclusion in Chiricahua experiences of education. It particularly relies upon Betzinez’s personal writings, which are read critically here, with an eye for personal experiences and subjective views, while acknowledging that they were written by a colonial subject decades after the fact, stemmed from a memory of an old man, and partially filtered through a white editor (Wilbur Sturtevant Nye, an army officer and author, in the book). It follows the journey of Jason Betzinez from the independent Chiricahua community to imprisonment and to new kind of independence after 1913. It tracks Betzinez from Arizona to Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, examining how as he moved across the continent he moved between educational systems that worked in isolation from each other. Particular forms of communal priorities and demands of armed conflict shaped Chiricahua education in their own independent communities in the Southwest, while different worldviews and practices applied in Carlisle. But both systems targeted social inclusion to a particular community and culture through the development of specific skills and acquisition of knowledge and values. Thus, education as such was nothing new for the Chiricahuas upon entering Carlisle. However, at Carlisle, youngsters like Betzinez encountered a regime that disavowed Chiricahua education; treated it as something to be stamped out. Carlisle functioned both as a form of incarceration and pathway for cultural erasure and renewal. While it proposed the inclusion of the Chiricahua students into the

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settler society, its dynamic derived from their excluded status as Native Americans and as prisoners of war. It is this transformation and juxtaposition, and its outcomes, that this chapter highlights. It seems that Chiricahua understandings of the self and relationship to the land open a window to the tensions of inclusionary and exclusionary practices. As Rebecca Swartz has remarked in reference to the British Empire, education of Indigenous people displayed “particular ideas about the use of colonial space” in which Indigenous students “needed to be educated into the correct relationship to land.”6 What this typically meant in settler colonies was an emphasis on agriculture and on building an individual relationship to land through labour. This applied for the British Empire in South Africa and Australia, as Swartz has investigated. It held equally for the US West.7 For free Chiricahuas in pre-1886 education was about understanding the land, of surviving and maintaining their independence by adapting to it in the face of Mexican invasion and US settler colonial conquest. It was an intimate relationship that drew from past generations and of learning from the land. In settler colonialism, as taught at Carlisle, land was also central to life experiences and sense of self, but the land was something to be used and mastered, and to work on the land was uplifted as moral good, the foundation of self. Students like Betzinez had to learn to navigate their way in this settler colonial schooling setting. They had to adjust, compromise, and survive. Betzinez’s experience shows how these students would bend, but not break in the face of colonialism. They would instead carve their own way as marginalized colonial subjects and proud Apaches, studying and working on the intersections of exclusion and inclusion.

Borderlands Schooling “I was now old enough to learn to be a warrior,” Jason Betzinez noted. It was 1882 and his time had come to join Geronimo and other Chiricahua fighters on a raid in Sonora. To be recognized as full adult member of his community a Chiricahua youth was expected to go as an apprentice “on several raids with an experienced man.” Usually this meant joining a small raiding party that included relatives or fighters otherwise familiar to the youngster. Before these trial raids, the Chiricahua youths had already undergone intense training. This education matrix mixed an academic component—knowledge of history, geography, flora, fauna, and

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religion—with a vocational element of practical skills, such as marksmanship, wrestling, running, and bow and arrow manufacturing. “As a result of this system our warriors,” Betzinez asserted, “were extremely capable and resourceful. They had been fully trained and tested.”8 Jason Betzinez was born sometime in the early to mid-1860s near Monticello, New Mexico, to band of the Warm Springs Apaches, a cell of the larger Chiricahua community. Sharing a similar culture and language, and an interconnected living space, but no overarching political system, the Chiricahuas consisted of webs of families and bands.9 In the 1880s they lived, as attested by Betzinez’s narration, a life of near constant violence as the Mexicans and the Americans actively tried to take over Chiricahua lands and squash their independence.10 At a time when young white boys were made to sit still in frequently cramped school quarters, their Apache peers were schooled in the outdoors. The Apache regimen was a community-driven, disciplined, and methodically planned and executed system designed to integrate the next generation into the culture and the community and to outdo competing groups. At its core was a specific relationship to the land. History was in places, places carried meaning. Youth learned of what had happened to their people beside that creek, down that canyon, or up that mountain. Places were charged with stories, of which lessons were to be drawn and connections built between peoples and between peoples and the environment.11 Thus the land, through its stories, became the centre of learning. One lived together with the land, learned to locate water underground, knew what plants were edible, where to find shelter from the weather and the enemy, and how to advance in the midst of mountains, canyons, and sandy plains. Chiricahua schooling came with plenty of applied practice. The “curricula” had a heavy emphasis on physical endurance and martial skills meant to serve communal purposes, and they characterized the group culture. Betzinez noted how as child he “practiced constantly” and “studied wildlife.” Like a typical Chiricahua boy, he was taught to track and hunt game, and to shoot a bow as soon as he was strong enough to do it, meaning well before his tenth birthday. Betzinez also remembered how he practised “war games,” simulating battle scenarios, and learned to ride.12 Hide-and-seek, tag, foot races, tug-of-war, and wrestling were part of the repertoire too. Educating the mind as well as the body, the character of youngsters like Betzinez was under constant evaluation. In practice,

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there existed few or no alternatives to this sort of education for Chiricahua boys.13 At worst, failure meant a youngster had to leave his kin and community, to relocate to other Apache groups or with the Hispanic multi-ethnic villages dotting the borderlands. Education was a question of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, education worked as the unifying glue in the Chiricahua society. In 1875, the federal government concentrated the Chiricahuas, together with Western Apaches and Yavapais, on a reservation in central Arizona at San Carlos and Fort Apache. Most Chiricahuas refused to live in this strange place. In 1882, Betzinez’ family also left San Carlos for life in the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico.14 Life there offered fleeting glimpses of freedom, albeit marred by fear and violence. After his initial raid with Geronimo, Betzinez gained more combat experience against the Mexicans, but soon he had enough of war. When the US Army invaded the Sierra Madre in 1883 and negotiated a truce with the intent of taking the Chiricahuas back to San Carlos, Betzinez and his family surrendered.15 This ended his fighting days. When Geronimo’s Chiricahuas finally surrendered to the US Army on 4 September 1886, General Nelson Miles promised amnesty of past doings and of being reunited with their families in Florida as all Chiricahuas, including those like Betzinez living at San Carlos, were sent there as prisoners of war.16

Settler Colonial Schooling Jason Betzinez’s journey from Florida to Carlisle began by rail and then took to the seas. For people used to living in the mountains of the Southwest, the ride in itself was wild and terrifying. “Of course this was the first ocean voyage for any of us, but not pleasant for everyone,” Betzinez remarked.17 After docking at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chiricahuas travelled by train from Jersey City through Pennsylvania, until reaching Carlisle on April 30. The 36 Chiricahua boys and 26 girls brought the school attendance total to 613 students. During Betzinez’s time at Carlisle the average number of students climbed closer to 800.18 (Fig. 6.1). Betzinez was part of the third shipment of Chiricahuas, the first one taken from their families only about a month after reaching Florida in 1886. These were unquestionably forced removals, as historian Paul Conrad attests. The first group was surrounded by soldiers as they played on the parade ground and placed on a departing train. Others also went

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Fig. 6.1 Chiricahua Apaches as they arrived to Carlisle from Fort Marion, Florida, April 30, 1887. Jason Betzinez is probably seated in the lower front, third from the right (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

against their will, kicking and screaming.19 Their arrival at Carlisle proved a rude awakening. Following a group photograph, the boys and girls were separated, each given a haircut and a bath. Then “a bell rang” and Betzinez and his fellow Apaches looked astounded how the other students formed in ranks and marched to dinner.20 His new life in the crowded barracks would be tightly structured and ordered around a rigid set of rules. Biological notions of race gained more prominence in the late-1800s, and there existed a general belief that Native Americans would die out when being replaced by a presumably superior white race. Still, many civilian humanitarians and government officials also believed it was possible for Native Americans to “catch up” with white civilization. In this vision, an idealized version of a generic middle-class white culture functioned as a measurement and standard towards which American Indians

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were initially found lacking. But with white tutelage and guidance, it was thought that Indians could be taught to become more like whites and that this would save them from disappearing. Their culture may die out, but individuals might survive if they made a symbolic racial crossing from native “savagery” to white civilization. This understanding of a racial dichotomy and the promise of individual inclusion was already visible in President US Grant’s “Peace Policy” in the early 1870s and it gained more momentum with the Dawes Act of 1887, which called for individual allotment of reservation lands.21 White humanitarians thought that childhood presented the optimal time for making interventions into Indigenous people’s lives.22 This line of thinking manifested in the birth of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, and other such federal Indian schools, which by the early 1900s numbered over 300 institutions in the United States. When Betzinez arrived at Carlisle his age was recorded as nineteen in his student card, but according to his own memoirs he was already in his mid-twenties. Regardless of which estimate was more correct, he was no longer a child. Proof of this was also his fighter training in the Chiricahua community. Carlisle was the favourite project of US Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who became the school’s first superintendent. Pratt was eager to successfully reform these nationally famous Apache fighters.23 He felt there was only one way to do it. As noted by Jacqueline Fear-Segal, “Pratt’s aspiration for all Indians was that they should abandon their tribal communities and integrate into mainstream white society.”24 His goal was to “prepare Native youth for assimilation and American citizenship” by removing Indigenous children and youngsters as far away as possible from their cultures, families, and communities. Furthermore, he designed the campus and curriculum at Carlisle to strip the students of all aspects of their existing cultures by imposing on them the language, religion, behaviour, and skills of mainstream white society. He also insisted that in Carlisle the inclusion of the Indians could be made to happen within a single generation.25 One modern scholar calls Pratt “a radical integrationist who demanded academic achievement, occupational mobility, and social equality for his students.”26 It is into this system that Betzinez was recruited against his will, and which changed him for good. Betzinez and the other Chiricahua students were fully cut off from their families and communities and constantly uncertain of their safety and wellbeing, as many Chiricahuas suffered from despair in incarceration and perished from diseases. Upon being interviewed, James Kaywaykla,

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also a Chiricahua student at Carlisle, remembered the “terror of separation” from the families and “the uncertainty of what was to be done with us.”27 Homesickness, as Brenda Child writes, proved “the most common malady experienced by children in boarding schools.” Education, Child continues, “required a commitment of years, and children were burdened by their separation from family and loved ones before they were developmentally mature.”28 Many Chiricahuas students would spend years away from their families, whose pleas for the return of their offspring went unanswered. News from the school did reach the Chiricahuas in Alabama and later Oklahoma via school reports, newspapers, and student letters.29 Many students also died at the school, from diseases, malnutrition, and mistreatment.30 It was no wonder that for Kaywaykla Carlisle represented a “new menace” put upon his people by the white colonizers, following the wars in the Southwest and imprisonment to Florida.31 A government report from 1880 provides an illustrative window into how Carlisle went about transforming its Indigenous students in practice, and how it relied on exclusionary rhetoric to describe them upon arrival. The report states how the Native students “were brought to the barracks filthy, vermin covered, and dressed in their native garb. When they were assigned to their sleeping quarters they lay down on the veranda, on their bellies, and glared out between the palings of the railing like wild beasts between the bars of their cages.”32 The first order of business involved physical purification, “to clean them thoroughly and to dress them in their new attire. Baths are compulsory thrice a week. The vermin have been suppressed, all the more easily because the boys have allowed their hair to be cut in the fashion of white people.” In the end, the report stated: “Everything except swallowing, walking, and sleeping had to be taught; the care of person, clothing, furniture, the usages of the table, the carriage of the body, civility, all those things which white children usually learn from their childhood by mere imitation, had to be painfully inculcated and strenuously insisted on.”33 It was in the context of this comprehensive and oppressive educational regime that looked upon its Apache students with racial contempt, where Bezinez made himself into a success story. In his memoirs, Betzinez stressed how he refused to dwell on homesickness. His writings hint at personal horror and difficulties only between the lines while narrating the rules and routine of the place. “We soon learned that the school was run on military lines. There were rules to be observed as well as a schedule,” he noted. He recounted the daily rhythm as such: “Our rising bell in the

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morning was at six o’clock, breakfast at six-thirty, cleaning up quarters and other work at eight, school at nine, dinner at twelve, supper at six, study period from eight to ten.”34 The day was firmly regimented, with little personal choice or free time involved. And days were replicates of each other. Discipline was also always enforced. If the pupils knew any English they were prohibited from speaking their own Indigenous language. During the evening, study periods students were forbidden to visit “between rooms, sing Indian songs, or make noise.” Tobacco and swearing were also not allowed. Yet, Betzinez wrote that he took to “this regulated life quite naturally.” The initial reluctance to go to Carlisle was soon gone, he attests, declaring that he had made his mind “from the outset” to “obey the rules and try to please the warmhearted man [Pratt] who had brought us there.” He felt “determined to take full advantage of this opportunity to make something of myself, to lift myself to a more useful life than the old pitiful existence to which I had been born.”35 Or this is at least how Betzinez later recounted his early days at Carlisle. No hesitation, no horror. Reality was probably not so straightforward at first (Fig. 6.2). In his memoirs, Betzinez depicted Carlisle as a monumental step in his life. It was where he moved beyond his Apache education and remade himself, lifted himself above the average Chiricahuas in civilized pursuits. What Carlisle was selling Betzinez appeared to buy wholesale, or this is how his memoirs make it appear. Yet, he also made Carlisle suit his personal needs. While proud of his days fighting the US and of his earlier training as a fighter, he subsequently saw war as no good. Indeed, struggling as a racial enemy in a hostile settler society, Betzinez felt that Carlisle saved him from poverty, ignorance, social problems, and probably early death in incarceration. Instead of seeing it as brainwashing into the settler society, he saw schooling at Carlisle as a way to combat US settler colonialism and its damaging social ills so visible among his Chiricahua peers who were forced to live in captivity in Alabama and Oklahoma. Betzinez saw Carlisle as an opportunity to determine his own destiny, to integrate into the white society in his own way and only to a certain extent. In this process, Betzinez stressed his personal relationship to Pratt. Upon choosing him for Carlisle in April 1887, Captain Pratt “must have seen something in my face, sensed some future possibility in me, that I didn’t know was there.” The two apparently developed a close, patriarchal bond, as one school official called Betzinez as “one of Pratt’s Apache boys” in a private letter.36

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Fig. 6.2 Some of the same Chiricahua students as in the previous picture, now in a “civilized wardrobe” from 1891. Jason Betzinez is probably back row centre (Photo by John N. Choate. Cumberland County Historical Society, CCHS_PA-CH2-064b: https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/ima ges/twenty-three-apache-students-version-2-1891)

Besides Pratt, teachers held a key role at Carlisle. Most of the teachers were unmarried white women for whom teaching was a way to escape the strict gender norms of the era and to gain personal independence and authority away from home.37 It was their task to make the students receptive to the inclusionary practices of new behavioural and mental regimes. They carried out and advocating schooling, painting it as a benevolent act, while at the same time being instructed not to trust the children. Their duties were carried out around the clock, every day of the year.38 They simultaneously stigmatized Native mothers as unloving and incompetent and Native families and living environments as filthy, degenerate, and backward. At Carlisle, teachers also carried the power to rename their students. They assigned an Anglo first name, while the surname contained approximations of the child’s “Apache name.” However, often these “Apache names” were names given by outsiders already, and even if not so, contained clear Spanish and sometimes Anglo influences. Jason Betzinez

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was born with the name Nah-delthy, meaning “going to run,” but upon entering Carlisle he went by the name “Batsinas,” which was given by an old family friend at the reservation in Arizona. His teacher at Carlisle changed it to “Betzinez” and gave him, like the other Chiricahuas, a new Anglo first name. Betzinez believed that Jason was a random choice, but the name “didn’t mean anything to me at that time so I accepted the name.”39 By determining name, teachers in a sense recreated the youth. The teachers were also disciplinarians. Coercion and stern punishment were used routinely. While Betzinez admired Pratt, he also noted that “students who obeyed him” were treated with kindness, while “a cell in the guard house was kept ready” for those who caused trouble or criticized the school.40 Students were expected to self-report any transgressions to the rules they had personally committed. This was done publicly as the others stood watching standing in line.41 While acknowledging the strict rules, Betzinez stressed other things, arguing that his teachers enabled him to broaden his horizon, to develop understandings and skills that were foundational to his whitening identity. While Carlisle immersed Apache children in white cultural traits and appearance, one of its main tensions remained that education there was tailored according to the perceived capacities of different races. Reading and writing were important for future Native citizenship, even for prisoners of war such as Betzinez, but they served a higher good of work and manual skills. These in turn promoted a particular relationship to the land. Globally in Indigenous education the emphasis remained firmly on industrial pursuits during the 1800s, and Carlisle also reflected this broader thinking and debates prevalent in the US as well as in the British Empire.42 The schooling also followed white gender lines, and Indigenous boys were employed as manual workers and field hands and girls as domestics. Crucially, work was seen as moral and economic good, it was the quintessential tool in the remaking of the students. And it centred land, the understanding and relationship to land. Occupational instruction typically began early and farm employment for boys began in the spring and ended in the autumn, coinciding with the agrarian cycle. While there existed practical reasons for this, like shortage of funding and space at campus, there were strong moral notions on the value of work at play when some students spent little time in the classroom and were sent to outings in “country homes” as soon as they mastered enough English to follow simple instructions.

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Betzinez was sent to work during his first year, and in later years he eagerly re-enrolled and found various types of employment—mostly farm work, but also carpentry, plumbing, and general construction— on the school ground, in nearby communities, and even out of state in New Jersey. In his memoirs, Betzinez devotes most space to work when describing his time at Carlisle, even stating how his work hindered his education. Work preoccupied his time more than his studies with work deemed the pathway to new life, a marker of inclusion. He recounts how he worked at the blacksmiths in the afternoons already during his first school years, and that in April 1888 he was sent out to a farm before he know how to speak English. He entered the household of a Quaker family, the Cooper’s at Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Betzinez described the Cooper’s as “warm-hearted people” who helped “me to improve myself.” This was “my first experience working on farm in Pennsylvania, worked on farm for the man who has wide experience farming that I have had a chance of learning to be a farmer of future.” Betzinez stayed with the Coopers until 1890, becoming, in his own words, “practically an adopted member of the family.” He also worked for other families in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey area, learning the operations of dairy farm as well as raising corn and barley, along with some carpentry, plumbing, and general construction.43 All this prepared him for a specific role in the settler society as a worker, albeit with a varied practical skill reservoir.

Crossing the Racial Line In 1914, “I moved into my own house at last.” Betzinez had become a homeowner and a landowner, having his own allotment. He was no longer a prisoner of war. He had been discharged from the US Army and settled on his own eight acres on Cache Creek, north of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. In many ways, it was a culmination of his educational inclusion to white society. His answer in his student record on whether he had attended any school after Carlisle is revealing: “Never attended any school since I left Carlisle, but I am trying to learn all I can and used what I learned at school the best I know how.” While his house was “a frame cottage with only four rooms and no inside conveniences…it was wonderful to me who, at age fifty-four, never had a home.” Betzinez felt he was now part of the American society, something bigger than the Chiricahua community he had been born into. His sense of belonging in the intersections of white and Chiricahua communities shows in the ways he

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stressed how his neighbours included both Indians and white men, whom all proved very friendly and “always ready to lend a helping hand.”44 While the length of stay at Carlisle was typically five years for the Chiricahua students,45 Betzinez stayed for ten.46 At least from his memoirs there is a sense that he was in no hurry to leave, but when he did, he saw it as a promotion to independence, a trusted responsibility offered by Pratt. Departure from Carlisle signalled personal growth and inclusion to settler society, becoming an individual, and more than an Apache. Thus, in his memoirs Betzinez represented his departure from school as a symbolic rebirth. Still, his first departure in 1897 was only for a short distance as he sought employment at the Steelton Mill of the Pennsylvania Steel Company. There he gained self-confidence and worked as a common labourer and as a blacksmith in a multi-ethnic work environment, teeming with Germans, Swedes, Italians, and others. He also became a member of the First Presbyterian Church at Steelton, embracing the teachings of the God to which he had been already exposed at Carlisle. In many ways, when given the opportunity detached from Carlisle tutelage, Betzinez expressed through his actions how he embraced the material and the spiritual culture he was subject to at Carlisle (Fig. 6.3). In 1900, Betzinez was induced to re-join the Chiricahuas in Oklahoma and provided government employment as a scout in the US Army.47 He had very mixed feelings of going, noting that Oklahoma was new ground for him. He saw Pennsylvania as home and all his friends were there. Although the Chiricahuas had been in Oklahoma since 1894, Betzinez had, according to his memoirs, “never been there.” Clearly alienated from his own kin, he also felt bitter of having to live with the other Apaches and do similar tasks, while his prisoner of war status had been already revoked. Or at least the latter is how Betzinez argued in his memoirs.48 Whatever the case, he wanted to stress his detachment from his Chiricahua kin. Furthermore, one can deduct from his writings that he began to think of himself as a sort of saviour of the Chiricahuas, but found the task frustrating. He deemed the Chiricahuas now as “pitiable” and “most helpless and hopeless of all the Indians.” He criticized his Apache peers for rejecting civilization, for not valuing the gospel of work and Christianity. Betzinez saw this an indication of their ignorance and uncivilized character.49 Betzinez also made a clear distinction between his old life and the present in more personal manner. He described his youth in the nineteenth-century Southwest borderlands as “those primitive days.” He

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Fig. 6.3 Jason Betzinez, circa 1900. Studio portrait taken in Pennsylvania prior to Jason’s departure to Oklahoma (Photo by John N. Choate. Cumberland County Historical Society, CCHS_PA-CH2-078f: https://carlisleindian.dic kinson.edu/images/jason-betzinez-c1900)

noted how back then none of the Apaches: “had not yet reached the same degree of civilization as the white man.”50 But in 1900 some had, and Betzinez saw himself in the forefront of this group. Accordingly, Betzinez also erased his Chiricahua education, stressing that before Carlisle: “I had never been to any school, didn’t know a word of English.”51 Clearly, in this thinking, schooling was something that only the whites had and it was intimately connected with the English language. The years of vigorous education Betzinez had in his own community as a youngster did not qualify.

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As the federal government ended the incarceration of the Chiricahuas in 1913 and the Mission of the Reformed Church in America closed, some 80 Chiricahuas who were more open to the Christian religion and Euro-American forms of agriculture chose to remain near Fort Sill.52 One of them was Jason Betzinez. He conformed to the ideals of the yeoman farmer, and his personal thinking reflected the primacy of agriculture as a cultural pursuit and moral good. If fighting abilities had made a man in traditional Chiricahua education, the outcome of Carlisle was the farmer ideal, which Betzinez accepted. He was proud of his own piece of land, and the fact that he owned several heads of cattle and a few horses. In reality, Betzinez, as in Carlisle, had several occupations, among them blacksmith and artisan, but he held farming as the highest measurement. One indicator of this is how he already wrote that upon return from the Sierra Madre to San Carlos in 1883, he and his people “would have to work hard and earn a living” through farming, which offered “a really worthwhile future.”53 In a sense, he projected his admiration of farming onto his earlier life. In his thinking, farming could have saved the Chiricahuas decades ago, and now it finally had, at least for him personally.

Conclusion When Capt. Pratt arrived at Fort Sill for the last time in 1918, several of his “faithful former students,” as Betzinez dubs them, rushed to meet him at the train station “as if he were our own father.” “Indians stood there with the tears rolling down their cheeks, overcome with happiness,” Betzinez noted. The devoted Betzinez eagerly invited Pratt to visit his farm, to see what he had accomplished and how far he had come from their first meeting in Florida. As Pratt stopped by the farm the next day, he congratulated Betzinez on his accomplishment. Yet, Pratt also reminded him in a direct fashion that something essential was still missing; a wife.54 Apparently Pratt’s push stirred Betzinez into action, as he married a year later. His spouse was a white missionary teacher, Anna Heersman from the Dutch Reformed Church. Betzinez’ journey to whiteness seemed complete. Betzinez can be seen as a kind of ideal product of the inclusion ideal machinated at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He was an assimilated Indian embracing white visions of religion, work, and land ownership. But this did not entail wholly abandoning his Apache identity. Marrying

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outside his own ethnic group and emphasizing his proximity to white neighbours, he still lived close to other Chiricahuas until his death in 1960. Betzinez remained a Chiricahua. The kind of inclusion Carlisle offered was built on a premise that excluded these Apache students from their own heritage and cultures. The warriors of yesterday would become the farmers of tomorrow. Trained as a warrior since childhood, Betzinez was expected to give up all he had learned. But he did not. Schooling, like wars of military aggression, functioned as a tool in the repertoire of the settler colonists, but unlike outright violence, it promised a future and was directed towards renewal and partial inclusion to the white settler society. Betzinez confronted, applied, and adjusted these settler colonial mechanisms and carved his own path. For him Carlisle was a tool for remaking his own life, a site of passage bridging, not erasing, cultures. Confronted with settler colonial schooling, Betzinez used Carlisle as best suited his own motivations and needs.

Notes 1. Betzinez (1987, p. 149); University of Oklahoma Libraries [UOL], Norman, Oklahoma, Western History Collections [WHC] Jason Betzinez Collection [JBC], Jason Betzinez, ‘My People: A Story of the Apaches,’ p. 140. The manuscript My People dates from 1942 and it was prepared by Jason Betzinez, apparently without editorial help. In comparison to the published memoirs, this manuscript contains scarce details on life at Carlisle, although the general attitude towards education and white civilization remains much the same in both works. 2. For overviews of the Chiricahua experience as prisoners of war, see Stockel (2004); Turcheneske, Jr. (1997). 3. On settler colonialism and the logic of elimination, see Wolfe (2006). 4. On US conquest of the Southwest borderlands, see Greenberg (2012); DeLay (2008). 5. Recent works on US-Chiricahua wars include Lahti (2017); Sweeney (2010); Hutton (2016). 6. Swartz (2019, p. 74). 7. The scholarship on Indigenous education under the US regime is extensive. See, for example, Adams (2020); Fear-Segal (2007); Child (1998); in a comparative perspective, Woolford (2015); Coleman (2007). 8. Betzinez (1987, pp. 82–83); on Betzinez’ narration of the events of his first raids, see pp. 85–88; UOL, WHC, JBC, Betzinez, ‘My People,’ pp. 15–16. My discussion of Apache education is based on anthropological and ethnological sources: Opler (1941); Ball (1980); Basso (1996).

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9. On Chiricahua social structure, see Cole (1988); Opler (1941). 10. UOL, WHC, JBC, Betzinez, ‘My People.’. 11. Opler (1942). While it discusses Western Apaches, Basso (1996) offers an eye-opening work on the Apache connection and relationship with specific places and on the power and meaning of those places for the Apache identity. See also Record (2008). 12. Betzinez (1987, p. 30). 13. Opler and Hoijer (1940, pp. 618–619). 14. Betzinez argues that his group was forced to leave the reservation by Geronimo’s men. Betzinez (1987, pp. 56–76). 15. Betzinez (1987, pp. 93–101, pp. 116–122). 16. See the government correspondence surrounding the surrender and removal in ‘General Miles and the Surrender of Geronimo,’ Senate Ex. Doc. No. 117, 49th Cong., 2d sess., Serial 2449. 17. Betzinez (1987, pp. 151–152). 18. UOL, WHC, JBC, Betzinez, ‘My People,’ p. 140; Daily Morning Reports (1884–1887), pp. 70–1, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/lists/dailymorning-reports-1884-1887 (accessed August 24, 2021). 19. Conrad (2021, p. 272). 20. Betzinez (1987, pp. 152–153). 21. The literature here is voluminous. See, for example, Hoxie (1984), Genetin-Pilawa (2012). 22. See, for instance, Cahill (2011); Jacobs (2009). On similar thinking in the British Empire, see also Swartz (2019, p. 2). 23. Jason Betzinez, Student Information Card, https://carlisleindian.dickin son.edu/student_files/jason-betzinez-student-information-card (accessed August 19, 2021); Betzinez (1987, p. 149); Eittreim (2019, p. 226). 24. Fear-Segal (2007, p. 159). 25. Fear-Segal and Rose (2016, p. 1); Pratt (1964). 26. Lear (2015, p. 166). 27. Ball (1970, p. 199). 28. Child (1998, p. 43). 29. Conrad (2021, pp. 267–268). On the correspondence surrounding Chiricahua pleas to return their children, see “Correspondence Regarding the Return of Apache Students,” https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/ all/files/docs-documents/NARA_RG75_91_b1242_39345.pdf (accessed August 26, 2021). 30. Vitale (2020); UOL, WHC, JBC, Betzinez,”My People,” p. 99, mentions sickness in the school, but does not elaborate on deaths, although Betzinez often discusses death in war and reservations. 31. Ball (1970, p. 199). 32. Ball (1970, p. 199).

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33. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, The Indian School at Carlisle Barracks (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880, p. 3). 34. Betzinez (1987, p. 153). 35. Betzinez (1987, p. 153). 36. Betzinez (1987, p. 149); Betzinez Student File, p. 7, https://carlislei ndian.dickinson.edu/student_files/jason-betzinez-bet-zin-ez-student-file (accessed August 1, 2021). 37. Cahill (2011); Jacobs (2009). 38. On teachers at Carlisle, see Eittreim (2019, esp. Chapter 2 and pp. 221– 223). 39. Betzinez (1987, p. 154); Delgadillo (2013, p. 19). 40. Betzinez (1987, p. 150). 41. Betzinez (1987, p. 153). 42. See Swartz (2019, p. 2, p. 8). 43. Betzinez (1987, pp. 156–159); UOL, WHC, JBC, Betzinez, ‘My People,’ p. 141. On Betzinez’ work detail history at Carlisle, see Betzinez Student File, p. 2; Delgadillo (2013, p. 20). He worked for Edward Cooper, in Newton, Pennsylvania, May 3, 1888–June 11, 1888, and April 2, 1889– March 14, 1890; for Charles Reeder of Newton, May 26–September 9, 1892; H. Fulmer of Pennington, New Jersey, April 1–September 14, 1893; Charles Reeder, March 31–September 15, 1894; and D. Palmer, Edgewood, Pennsylvania, March 20–September 14, 1895. 44. Betzinez (1987, p. 201); Betzinez Student File, p. 3, p. 5. 45. Delgadillo (2013, p. xiv). 46. Betzinez Student File, p. 4. 47. Betzinez Student Information Card. 48. Betzinez (1987, p. 162, p. 164, pp. 175–82). 49. Betzinez (1987, pp. 160–161); UOL, WHC, JBC, Betzinez, ‘My People,’ p. 107. 50. Betzinez (1987, p. 27). 51. Betzinez (1987, p. 149). 52. On the mission activities, see Anderson (2019). 53. Betzinez (1987, p. 125); Betzinez Student File, p. 5. 54. Betzinez (1987, pp. 202–203).

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Bibliography Adams, David Wallace. 2020. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, 2nd ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Anderson, Douglas Firth. 2019. ‘Are You White or Dutch?’: Hendrina Hospers and Living among Apaches. Northwestern Review 4 (1): 1–43. Ball, Eve. 1970. In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ball, Eve, and with Nora Henn and Lynda Sanchez. 1980. Indeh: An Apache Odyssey. Provo: Brigham Young University Press. Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Basso, Keith H., ed., rom the notes of Grenville Goodwin. 1971. Western Apache Raiding and Warfare. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Betzinez, Jason, and with Wilbur Sturtevant Nye. 1959. Reprint 1987 . I Fought with Geronimo Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cahill, Cathleen D. 2011. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Child, Brenda J. 1998. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900– 1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cole, D.C. 1988. Chiricahua Apache, 1846–1876: From War to Reservation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Coleman, Michael C. 2007. American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling: A Comparative Study. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Conrad, Paul. 2021. The Apache Disapora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. DeLay, Brian. 2008. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Delgadillo, Alice, ed. 2013. From Fort Marion to Fort Sill: A Documentary History of the Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War, 1886–1913. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Eittreim, Elisabeth M. 2019. Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and US Imperial Education, 1879–1918. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Fear-Segal, Jacqueline. 2007. White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, and Susan D. Rose, eds. 2016. Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Genetin-Pilawa, C. Joseph. 2012. Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Greenberg, Amy S. 2012. Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. New York: Knopf. Hoxie, Frederick. 1984. The Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hutton, Paul Andrew. 2016. The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History. New York: Crown. Jacobs, Margaret D. 2009. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lahti, Janne. 2017. Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Lear, Bernadette A. 2015. Libraries and Reading Culture at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918. Book History 18: 167–196. Opler, Morris E. Opler. 1941, reprint 1996. An Apache Life-Way: The Economic, Social & Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Opler, Morris E., and Harry Hoijer. 1940. The Raid and War-path Language of the Chiricahua Apache. American Anthropologist 42: 617–634. Opler, Morris E. 1942, reprint 1994. Myths and Tales of the Chiricahua Apache Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1964, reprint 2003. Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904, ed. Robert M. Utley Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Record, Ian W. 2008. Big Sycamore Stands Alone: The Western Apaches, Aravaipa, and the Struggle for Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Stockel, H. Henrietta. 2004. Shame and Endurance: The Untold Story of the Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Swartz, Rebecca. 2019. Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880. London: Palgrave. Sweeney, Edwin R. 2010. From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Turcheneske, John Anthony, and Jr. 1997. The Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War: Fort Sill 1894–1914. Niwot: University Press of Colorado. Vitale, I.V., and Frank. 2020. Counting Carlisle’s Casualties Defining Student Death at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918. American Indian Quarterly 44 (4): 383–414. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Woolford, Andrew. 2015. This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 7

Recasting Poor Children: Basel Mission Boarding Schools in Colonial Malabar Divya Kannan

Boarding schools occupied only a small fraction of the institutional and educational landscape of nineteenth and early twentieth-century India. Despite their numerically low presence, these boarding schools, established by the British colonial administration, reformist associations, and various European Christian missionary groups, have transitioned into some of India’s foremost educational institutions today.1 Their histories are a relevant entry point to explore further the complex entanglements between various groups in ‘contact zones’, marked by conflicting notions of caste, race, gender, religion, and pedagogy.2 In short, these schools were experiments in refashioning childhood identities and reimagining conceptions of self and community to a considerable extent. By itself, the term ‘boarding school’ conjures images of isolated and walled institutions with highly monitored routines and disciplinary

D. Kannan (B) Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR, India e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_7

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regimes instituted to produce ‘useful’ and ‘efficient’ pupils. Largely based on the social background of pupils and the patronage extended by those invested in its management, three kinds of boarding schools emerged in colonial India. One group of boarding schools catered to the children of wealthy princely families, whom the colonial officialdom aimed to train in the codes of conduct and habits befitting their social status. These pupils, housed in picturesque regions, far away from their families, and instructed in a curriculum akin to elite English public schools, occupied varying roles in the imperial military hierarchy. The British believed that such an education focused on young Indian princes’ physical training, literary, and administrative abilities would soften any proclivity to dissent or rebel against their imperial masters and potential allies.3 A second group was the military-style boarding schools established for the children of British soldiers stationed in India known as Lawrence Asylums. They consisted mainly of children whose parents were of European ancestry and these boarding schools aimed to raise the children in the hill-stations, away from the ‘harmful’ effects of the tropical climates.4 The third group consisted of boarding schools predominantly established and managed by various European Christian missionary organisations—Catholic and Protestant—targeting children of the middle classes as well as those from the poorest castes as part of their broader evangelical and charitable agendas.5 These institutions, managed by voluntary donations and partial government aid, gathered destitute, runaway, sickly, abandoned, orphaned Indian, and mixed-race children. With evangelical missionaries keen on initiating regular contact with the local populace, these schools became a catchment area for future Christians or Christianised Indians, disciplined and trained in a new faith, and accompanying material and moral culture. Though the colonial administration in the provinces held certain disagreements with the running of such mission institutions and their aggressive religious posturing, the two groups often worked in tandem to advance imperialist projects of ‘child rescue’ and child welfare in the colony.6 These adult groups argued for the resocialisation and re-education of various poor children into the shifting moral and labour regimes by making them ‘employable’ as domestic servants in European households, apprentices in industrial trades, wage labourers in public works, and other subordinate services.7 In this chapter, I aim to explore the workings of the boarding schools run by the Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society (hereafter, BM) in nineteenth-century Malabar, comprising the northern districts of

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present-day Kerala in South India.8 This missionary organisation occupied a peculiar position in this coastal region as a ‘foreign’ mission, which was a part of directly British-controlled Madras Presidency. Managed and headed by a Home Committee filled with members of the social, academic, and business elite in Basel, a major commercial town in Switzerland. Its lay missionaries mostly belonged, however, to peasantartisan communities in the adjacent region of Wurttemberg in south-west Germany.9 Akin to the educational work undertaken by several British missionary societies in the burgeoning foreign evangelical movement, the Basel missionaries also set up boarding institutions for local boys and girls upon arrival in colonial Malabar from the 1830s onwards. I draw upon the BM archive to understand how their educational enterprise influenced adult–child encounters in colonial Malabar, particularly involving poor children. I ask, in what ways did boarding schools shape childhood norms and community formation? How did the politics of caste and race inflect these changes? We must, however, situate missionary knowledge production within the wider political and material contexts of colonialism, race, gender, and other local dynamics such as caste in which they mostly emerged and circulated across imperial lands.10 European missionaries were chiefly motivated to live and work in the colonies for proselytisation campaigns and portrayed their encounters with the local populace largely through the prism of an oppositional difference which added to the corpus of Orientalist tropes of India as backward, superstitious, and uncivilised.11 In India, their writings often echoed the biases inherent in racialised imperial rule led by European trading companies and the subsequent hegemonic colonial state that infantilised Indian adults and represented colonised children as ‘perverse, miniature adults’.12 Yet, in recent decades, historians have also ‘excavated’13 missionary archives to explore an array of details on the everyday lives of colonised populations in a way that official government archives do not reveal. The possibility of viewing missionary archives as ‘contact zones’ that resulted in the translation and circulation of religious concepts has also been raised.14 For historians of colonial education and childhood, the missionary records, therefore, offer a unique entry point to understand the close and often, fraught relationship between adults and children in colonial contexts even as the imbalances of age, race, and gender prevail. Mostly, they tell us more about the construction of ‘childhood’ as a norm and ideal than children themselves.

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A Pedagogical Regime The socio-economic origins, educational background, and Pietist orientations of BM workers influenced how they operated in the colonial mission field. Having experienced drastic changes before and during industrialisation in rural Wurttemberg, Pietist adherents formed independent village congregations supervised by an elect group of elders and pastors.15 Education and care of children, the poor, and the needy were viewed as communal responsibilities and hence, levels of scrutiny were considerably stringent. Young people’s socialisation in the villages was centred around bible-reading groups and related activities subject to strict codes of moral conduct. It did not merely suffice for adherents in Malabar to declare their faith in Christian tenets as expounded by the BM. They were expected to demonstrate their commitment in the pursuit of occupations anchored to the villages.16 This was not without its ambiguities and conflicts during this period, as Malabar remained in the throes of agrarian feudalism based on an oppressive caste hierarchy.17 Barring a handful of upper-caste Nair converts, most BM churches mainly comprised low caste Tiyyars involved in agricultural activities and palmyra climbing, Mukkuvar fisher people and agrestic slave Cherumar labourers with no ownership over land and related assets. They often faced prolonged caste boycotts, violent assaults, and loss of employment upon conversion, making the position of missionaries shaky in the local milieu. Several converts also relied on the BM for work opportunities or charitable donations of rice, clothes, and sometimes, meagre money. The poverty of their small congregations led missionary workers to frequently cast aspersions on their adherents’ sincerity to the new faith, especially during episodes of famine distress and disease that swept across Malabar throughout the nineteenth century. Without the means to an independent livelihood as Christians or freedom from debt, it was evident that the plans to raise ‘authentic’ and self-sustaining congregations would fail in the long run. To alleviate the difficult living conditions of their converts and improve funds for the community’s charitable and educational institutions, the BM resorted to generating small-scale employment, some of which would eventually expand into flourishing large-scale industries by the turn of the century.18 Work, therefore, became a litmus test of congregants, across ages, in proving their reliability as converts and potential adherents. In this broader scheme of things, the boarding

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schools became important sources of supply of skilled labour as adolescent boys and girls were trained in weaving, gardening, carpentry, and spinning, all directly related to the BM’s industrial work. These establishments at Thalassery, Chomabala, Chirakkal, Kozhikode, and Paraperi, occupied a prime place in the BM’s educational apparatus for various reasons.19 Though interchangeably called ‘boarding institutions/schools’ and ‘orphanages’ during the course of their existence20 many pupils were not actually ‘orphans’ in the true sense but belonged to destitute Christian families or were runaways from places in and around the mission stations. The BM persuaded, albeit with some coercion, poor Christians of the congregations to hand over their children for a period to be educated in the orphanages. Sometimes, poor Christian widows, homeless, or deserted women lived in the mission compound, and their children joined boarding institutions.21 On several occasions, the government authorities send destitute children or ‘famine orphans’ to the BM’s institutions/orphanages for temporary care.22 In the BM boarding schools of colonial Malabar, children became sites of ideological contestation for missionaries and other adults in the colony, including poor, low caste groups. Although poor children’s voices and self-representations remain largely invisible in missionary writings, young peoples’ agentic actions in these emotionally and ideologically charged environments emerge in complex and ambivalent forms. In her work on Danish missionaries in the Tamil regions of Tranquebar, Karen Vallgårda demonstrates that poor colonised children engaged with various adults by negotiating relations of power and difference in the boarding schools and these encounters simultaneously influenced the construction of discourses on childhood in Europe.23 Despite their inferior social status and age, poor low caste and mixedrace pupils employed several strategies to assert themselves and navigate their difficult life subject to long hours of labour, harsh punishment, and regular supervision in the BM schools. Amid the ambivalence of missionary attitudes towards various communities premised on caste and race, the mission boarding schools’ temporal and spatial scales determined children’s ‘emotional frontiers’.24 Foremost, the BM attempted rigorously to shape their schools into becoming the nucleus of what they envisaged for the future of Protestant Christianity in Malabar, that is, the formation of ‘model’ Christian communities. In 1838, the BM committee at Mangalore invited the Tubingen trained theologist Hermann Gundert, to undertake evangelical activities

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in Malabar.25 The following year, he set out for Nettur towards the north with his wife, Julie, and a few Tamil catechists from Tirunelveli. Soon, they shifted to the adjacent town of Thalassery and began gathering poor children into the small emergent boarding schools run within their house compound. The town reflected the diversity of the Indian Ocean pathways as Malabar was home to Portuguese traders, Dutch merchants, Mappila Muslims, Tamils, Telugus, Roman Catholics, Syrian Christians, and the several caste-based Malayalam speaking communities. English military regiments were also stationed in considerable numbers in the towns, a cause of greater concern for the BM due to the soldiers’ unwillingness to adhere to church norms of moral conduct.26 Hermann and Julie settled in the house donated by the British judge, Thomas Strange, and soon after, realised the difficulty of convincing local caste and religious groups to send their children for primary literacy instruction.27 Limited resources, inadequate language skills, no proper schoolbooks, and the general opposition from all quarters, especially the Roman Catholics, Nairs, and Muslims erected great hurdles for the BM to gain traction. After a few heated skirmishes with poor parents whom the missionaries tried to coerce into sending their children, Gundert decided it would be best to gather children over whom no parent or adult next of kin had immediate claims. Gundert also strongly believed that evangelical work was a pointless pursuit if missionaries did not master the language of the people in Malabar among whom they lived and spent a substantial part of his life acquiring fluency in Malayalam and Tamil, and producing translations, compilations, and original texts for the people.28 In the initial years, he hired young Tiyyar men, willing to work as mission schoolteachers and did not rush to see them baptised. Under Julie’s supervision, the Girl’s Boarding Institution or MadchenInstitut took shape first. ‘Three Portuguese orphan girls from Madras and another girl Martha (father’s name unknown), have joined the school’, wrote Gundert in his diary in July 1839, recording their hand over by the English Chaplain Lugard residing in Kannur.29 Three weeks later, the Postmaster brought a few Tamil girls from Coimbatore and subsequently Brennen, the British harbour master of Thalassery, requested the missionary couple to take charge of his illegitimate daughter with a local Tiyya woman. When handing over his nine-year-old daughter, Flora, he also provided a considerable sum for the school’s overall upkeep. Additionally, the school received donations from supporters in Switzerland and Germany collected through the women’s mission church

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network. Significantly, a generous donation also came from Büchelen, the property manager of the Basel Mission in Switzerland, amounting to 254 rupees in November 1839. By the end of the year, eight girls lived in the mission household, sleeping on mats on the floor in a big room and undertaking domestic chores with the servants of the missionary couple. In the absence of local Malayalam speaking children in the school, the Gunderts interacted closely with mixed-race and Christian pupils, often born out of the liaisons of travelling English soldiers, officers, or other Europeans with low caste women. In actuality, the small boarding school was not entirely isolated from the village. During the day, girls from other parts of the town and various workers assisting the missionary family entered the space. Julie adopted a practical method of getting to know these girls and their mothers better. She introduced lacemaking, crotchet, and knitting classes as a way of engaging in personal conversations, a skill that was familiar to middleclass European women at the time. Gradually, she turned her attention to discussing scriptural lessons and tracts with them, hoping to yield converts amid school pupils.30 Often, missionary records disparagingly remark that the ‘native’ prefers material comforts for ‘free’; a prejudicial notion driven by a condescending outlook that the poor in Europe and the colonised elsewhere disliked hard work while portraying evangelicals as ‘saviours’. Yet, the same writings also reveal how these boarding schools would have suffered without the substantial amount of labour undertaken by the pupils.31 The sale of sewn articles made by the girls brought in a small but regular income invested in school infrastructure. Boys and girls also spent long hours fulfilling domestic chores such as cleaning, washing, gardening, cooking, and tending to younger children in the school compound. Overseen by the ‘Hausvater’ or ‘Hausmutter’ who reported to the European missionaries, boarding school education was essentially not a free pursuit but drew extensively on poor children’s unacknowledged and unpaid labour, justified as a matter of pedagogical and character training. A few months after the Girls’ Institution secured decent monetary support, boys were admitted into a separate school at Thalassery. Barring a few, the earliest group of boys were mostly Malayalam speaking Nasranis or Syrian Christians from the adjacent princely state of Kochi. Ranging between the ages of eight and fourteen years, the Nasrani boys brought to Gundert were sons of rice-merchants, some runaways, and orphans.32 Gundert grew fond of the young Nasrani boy named Mattu Pedro, a

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keen participant in the Bible study classes. The fourteen-year-old began to express what the Basel Mission workers highly valued: an awakening or realisation of one’s inherent sinfulness leading to a spiritual rebirth of sorts. Children were not considered immune to such experiences of intense emotions about their wrong-doings in Pietist communities. Furthermore, Gundert argued that children in Malabar could also undergo a deep religious transformation with proper instruction and a close reading of the Bible. Mattu surprised the older man with ‘eyes full of tears, and real anguish of the heart expressed in his face’.33 In that brief moment, Gundert no longer characterises Mattu in the light of his ‘heathenism’ as the disobedient, dirty, and unruly child, a common stereotype in evangelical propaganda. Instead, Mattu’s bodily gestures and words validate his expressions of self-doubt and calls for repentance, a goal that the BM was keen to highlight in its reports to home supporters amid slow conversions in Malabar. While the adult missionary Gundert’s voice mediates the record of Mattu’s acceptance into the BM’s fold, the latter’s willingness to engage in religious dialogue is significant. Mattu does not present himself as tabula rasa waiting to be worked upon by the foreign missionary. He deliberates on his actions and expresses his faith in a language familiar to him. At the same time, this encounter could have also presented an opportunity for Mattu to reorient himself in a new location.

Everyday Spaces of Contestation In everyday boarding school life in the mission compound, children’s access to certain spaces was predetermined as per meticulously planned timetables. But the contiguous dwellings which surrounded the schools imparted a fluidity that the BM did not favourably view. Apart from those living with the children, other teachers and workers frequently entered the mission compound. In Chirakkal, the girls’ institution was adjacent to the BM’s poor home for widows, deserted, and destitute women, some of whom were mothers of the pupils. The women in the poor home were seen with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion. Some were considered too weak because of starvation or disease. Others were perceived as ‘corrupt’ influences due to their poverty, lack of education, or past sexual liaisons.34 But the presence of some mothers adjacent to their children in the schools also meant that the BM could not separate poor families for long as they desired.

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The Basel Mission watched the children’s movements inside and outside the classroom for any such signs of religious revival. Drawing upon strict notions of control and discipline as exercised mostly by fathers and pastors in Pietist congregations in southern Germany, the missionaries emphasised that the ‘will of a child’ had to be broken for a meaningful transformation to occur.35 This ‘will’ referred to any gesture or speech by children indicating insubordination, defiance, stubbornness, immoral actions, or outright refusal to adhere to adult authority. In the boarding schools, the missionaries and teachers assumed the role of quasiparents and reserved for themselves the right to reward and punish their pupils. But this did not go unchallenged. Unable to bear the punishment inflicted on them, several poor children sought their families’ intervention to leave the institutions. Some found the laborious tasks far from the promise of respectable schooling. Since many were already over fourteen years of age upon entering the schools, the lessons lasted well beyond the German elementary schools. Divided into two lower and two higher classes, morning classes for girls and boys included apportioned hours for Bible history, church and world history, geography, arithmetic, singing, and elementary English. They were taught handiwork during the afternoon hours and assigned various tasks necessary for the school’s upkeep, taught either by a missionary worker or a local craftsman. In 1849, the report of the Thalassery boys’ orphanage claimed that although the children complained about the manual training, they enjoyed it after some time.36 What constituted this ‘enjoyment’ is subject to speculation. Still, this reference reveals how conscious and uncomfortable poor children from lower caste backgrounds were about their subordinated status in the schools based on their caste association with manual labour. They were also desirous of the instruction provided to upper-caste children in the day schools run by the BM and government. Other private schools mostly prepared pupils for examinations to qualify for various white-collar jobs. Bound by specific timetables and wary of the authority wielded by the missionary workers, poor children asserted their dissent in different ways. Sometimes, poor parents also intervened to make their disagreements known. In 1849, when the girls boarding school at Thalassery was shifted to Chirakkal, the Gunderts admitted a Roman Catholic girl, Meena. She had been to the BM’s Kannur school but had run away before turning up at Chirakkal. Though considered a ‘serious’ girl in matters of scriptural learning and accepted into the church soon afterwards, Meena soon

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returned to her mother, as she had found her a husband after several futile attempts. The BM wrote Meena off as a ‘problem-child’, upset at the mother’s insistence on withdrawing her from the school.37 Not only had their intentions of keeping this Christian girl for a few more years been thwarted, but also a poor native mother had upheld her authority as a parent. She was unwilling to let the missionaries substitute her parental control and risk social ridicule if marriage was delayed. In opposing the missionaries, perhaps, Meena’s mother had prioritised respectability fulfilled by marriage over institutionalised learning.38 She was not alone in making such decisions for her child. “Abraham, from whom we had hope for something better at one time, wanted to find his own master. He wanted to be relieved of the obedience and the work assigned to him”, stated missionary Christian Irion in his half-yearly report of the Thalassery Boy’s institution in 1850.39 Unable to withstand the strict punishment inflicted on him and the compulsion to undertake chores, Abraham had complained to his father about his teachers. Despite lengthy discussions between the adults, the son and father did not relent, and eventually, the BM agreed to let him shift to the Kannur school. The same year, another pupil, Zechariah, was requested back to Kozhikode by his mother, Sarah. A third, Michael from Chombala did not adjust to the school’s environment and was advised to return home. The inclusion of manual labour as part of everyday schooling, albeit marked by religious motives for the missionaries, did little to allay the anxieties of poor families who wanted their children to move away from traditional occupations that accorded them little respect in local society. Most pupils were already involved in agricultural activities during holidays to assist their families and sometimes, withdrawn from the school rolls by their parents to contribute to household responsibilities. Even as the BM focused on overturning the prevalent casteist assumptions that manual labour was ‘dirty’ and ‘polluting’ and far inferior to so-called intellectual work, the insistence on manual labour in the boarding schools as productive and an act of piety exacerbated certain tensions. Although overt caste-related habits, bodily markers, and practices were strongly discouraged, the pupils’ low caste background loomed large in reproducing existing social inequalities within the arena of modern schooling. Upon their arrival on the coast, several European missionaries had condemned the system of physical punishment by teachers in indigenous schools as antiquated and unbecoming of a civilised pedagogy. Yet,

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the BM came to be associated with a stringent disciplinary regime in the boarding schools premised on the same. Any instance of indiscipline displayed by pupils such as lying, stealing, abusive language, disobedience, and refusal to work, was met with a range of punishment. Often, the missionaries and schoolteachers did not hesitate to use the cane, perceived as essential to undo the ‘stubbornness’ and ‘insubordination’, supposedly innate in children and supposedly doubly so in the lower castes. Wilhelm Hasenwandel reported on the practice of caning frequently employed in the Thalaserry girls’ boarding school and justified such measures as necessary. He suggested to readers that the pupils concurred with him as well. And recorded the punishment meted out to a few pupils for their disorderly conduct as follows. One girl, who was punished now and then, would afterwards try in different ways to reconcile and draw a kind word from me, either by bringing flowers or by some other means. Another girl was severely punished for telling lies, she came afterwards, asked my pardon, and said the punishment had been necessary as she had really been on the point of becoming a bad girl.40

This reference to the so-called acceptance of punishment by the girls as essential to their character-formation and removal of sinful nature pointed to the schools’ rather oppressive regime based on Pietistic notions which privileged authoritative adults, especially males. The growing discourse of sentimentalisation of childhood in Europe did not strike a path-changing chord in the BM institutions until much later as they remained steeped in the paternalistic ideologies that justified corporal punishment inflicted on poor children as necessary ‘for their own good’, and utilising children’s separation from their families to their advantage. Runaway pupils were written off as ‘bad’ influences, harming the entire spirit of the institutions, and used as a warning to other boarders to guard against the same. Such was the case of a young boy, Muttoren, who locked horns with Irion at the Thalasherry Boy’s Boarding School. In February 1845, Irion reported that Muttoren wrote him a letter containing a few Christian phrases and pressed urgently for baptism and threatened to abandon the institution otherwise. The boy’s ‘mischievous hypocrisy’, as Irion put it, went on for a short time and his demands grudgingly accepted,

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I told him that I baptised him out of pity. Not that he deserved it, but he would never be able to get it, in case he should, on his own initiative […]. I gave him a hearty welcome, showed him the love and mercy of Jesus, and let him go. The next morning, Muttoren was not to be found and he had made his way out without listening to anything better at all.41

We do not know what exactly transpired between Muttoren and Irion but the young boy was far from the docile and obedient pupil expected in the BM system. Instead, it seemed that Muttoren was aware of the consequences of his actions and weighed upon them as he sought baptism. If staying longer in the institution where his actions, even trivial ones, could lead to harsh punishment amid long hours of physical labour, a departure was more likely than it was to Irion’s liking. The intermittent acts of running away and their refusal to submit to the BM’s regulations point to how poor, colonised children responded to schooling agendas imposed on them and the limits of missionary influence in varying material and discursive contexts.42 This is illustrated further through the brief story of Job Thruwen, a young Tiyya boy, admitted in the same Thalassery boys’ school in February 1848, a few years after Muttoren had left. Job’s birth name was Poken, and the BM accepted the nine-year-old along with his sick mother in the mission’s poorhouse. ‘He was a quiet boy and happy in school’, remembered Irion, and baptised with a Christian name, and continued learning until his confirmation in May 1854. Afterwards, adolescent Job was appointed in the adjacent BM’s weaving factory as an apprentice to a master artisan, where he is said to have willingly undertaken the work assigned to him. But soon, complaints emerged, and Job found his work hours too long and became ‘grumpy’.43 In December 1856, he quarrelled with another apprentice and ran away. Irion recollected that Job’s weariness grew, and instead of ‘begging others for forgiveness, for he was obviously wrong’,44 he chose to escape. A few weeks later, Job was found in Kannur and brought to the mission compound for reconciliation. Not long after that afterwards, a dog bit him and resulted in a fatal infection. After battling pain for a few days, the young man passed away in 1857. Irion’s brief account ends with a reference to Job on his death-bed Irion derives satisfaction in the observation that during the young man’s last days, Job apparently wished to seek forgiveness for his defiant actions.45 He is said to have written letters

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to Irion, requesting to see him and beg for forgiveness to die peacefully. ‘Well, is not it wonderful?’ wrote the missionary, and continued, this poor youth runs out of the Mission, and while he goes astray, he is overcome by death, but in such a way that he still has time to repent; and when he finds himself, the Lord takes him away, and he is still saved after all!46

Irion’s correspondence does not reveal Job’s side of the story as the narration was meant for an European audience fed consistently on a diet of imperial evangelical philanthropy. Instead, the larger moral message is couched in the trope of a death-bed narrative of triumph and salvation, a spiritual victory over degraded human instincts.47 Irion uses the incident to claim to readers that Job’s transformation came about due to the mission’s great influence through the spread of gospel knowledge, pedagogical, and moral training, and the guidance of able missionaries in the lives of poor Indian children. Yet, as is obvious from the tone of disgruntlement in Irion’s words, Job’s actions also showed that young people defying Mission regulations was, perhaps, a frequent occurrence than missionaries were willing to admit. By choosing to leave unsatisfactory work conditions, Job, like Muttoren, was challenging adult authority while deliberating upon his life choices and circumstances. We can read Job’s navigation through the BM establishments and interactions with missionaries in these interstices of colonial encounters. He was neither a hero nor a victim entirely.48 One could say he sort to exercise his free will in a resilient manner though he met an unfortunate early demise. Despite the message of Christian universalism, conversion, and Christianisation in colonial Malabar were not considered synonymous to a process of Europeanisation, which, the missionaries felt, was beyond the reach of the ‘heathen’ convert. Any trace of ‘Europeanisation’ in the ‘native’ was scorned upon as a desperate attempt to imitate their ‘white’ superiors. As Jean and John Comaroff demonstrate, converts were socialised into new modes of consumption, speech, and spatial practices, educating the ‘heathens’ to enjoy the fruits of evangelical progress but not bring them at par with their colonial masters.49 For instance, he ‘scarecrow’ boy, mentioned below, having forgotten his native tongue, was the antithesis of the notion of a ‘good’ child that dominated evangelical missionary discourses.

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In 1872, missionary Wilhelm Schmolk, in-charge of one of the BM boys’ boarding school, reported on the difficult case in harsh terms. Afflicted with epileptic fits, a boy was tended more to by the school supervisor and becoming more ‘uncontrollable and undisciplined’ over time. Schmolk betrayed his disdain for this excessive concern showered on the boy by other staff and children and reported, ‘In January, he was sent to Palghaut for change of air’. He noted, […] we had the impression that he rather liked the return of his fits; he grew overbearing, was not content with his food and clothes, would always idle about and insulted his comrades. When he one day got a sound beating for this bad behaviour, his epileptic fits ceased and never returned. A few weeks afterwards he ran away with another discontented boy, first to Palghaut where he had some relatives, and from thence to Cochin. The clergyman there put him in an English School, and several months afterwards sent him back to his (European) father in Calcutta. On his way there, he paid us a visit looking like a scarecrow in his European clothes, pretending to have forgotten his native tongue and to know only English!50

Schmolk did not hide his contempt for the young runaway whose change in appearance and conduct unsettled missionary claims to universal Christian love and brotherhood. In spite of the imposition of corporal punishment, the boy refused to succumb and escaped the school. In avoiding seeking ways to address the growing discontent among the boys, Schmolk heaped scorn and ridicule on the young boy in the annual report, a familiar trope in European articulations of colonial lands and its people. Ideally, the BM wished for their converts to escape caste stigma which persisted, but this was not easily possible. Hence, positioned within strict prohibitions on inter-caste marriage, commensality, and lack of equal access to schools, roads, and other public sites, the BM attempted to actively refashion their mostly young converts identities within their walled spaces. In several cases, girl pupils faced persistent pressures from their families during their school life and left school to marry. The missionaries attempted to convince families to let the girls stay on for a longer period as in the case of Meena, but they let them go in the wake of mounting complaints. In some instances, when girls completed their studies and reached the ages of sixteen years or above, they were encouraged to marry graduates of the boys’ schools, and usually missionaries arranged such matches. According to local marriage customs, the

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BM also paid a small dowry on behalf of the girls.51 Several male graduates were employed as mission catechists, colporteurs, industrial workers, and teachers and their wives expected them to become loyal help in the village congregations. It was hoped that they would act as moral guardians in poorer congregations and lead by example as they had been taught in the boarding schools. Directly or indirectly, they were to be the representatives of the BM and as monogamous Christian couples, their ways of living, raising pious and literate children, and committing to labour to earn their bread were all constituents of a ‘practical Christianity’ amid local populations.52 However, young couples’ actions continued to be monitored by the circle of European missionaries with the help of church elders, who found them to be severely wanting in several traits over the years. Often, charges of adultery, gambling, and alcoholism were brought to the church’s notice, resulting in heated confrontations with the accused and expulsions.53 Organisational changes occurred across the BM stations in South India and West Africa during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. After an inspection carried out by the Basel Home Committee members in 1879–1880, the BM’s boarding schools in Malabar underwent considerable policy shifts. The financial cuts affected them badly, and in 1880, the local mission Committee decided that it was more desirable for poor Christian children to be raised in their families than taking them into the boarding institutions. Henceforth, the schools would only admit actual ‘orphans’ to reduce lodging, food, and clothing costs.54 In 1882, the Thalassery school closed down and boys shifted to Paraperi where the focus was heavily on agricultural education and run on a simple footing. As a result, pupils began to spend a considerable amount of time cultivating small plots of land, vegetable gardens, palm-trees, and so forth. For over two decades, the BM schools had produced considerable number of literates many of whom had entered their well-known large weaving and tile industrial workforce or established their own industrial units and competed in the market, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Some others found employment as schoolmasters, lower administrative officers, and others went as far as Bombay and beyond. By the opening years of the twentieth century, the Chombala and Kozhikode Girls’ schools had also undertaken teacher-training programmes, and experienced decent success when graduates began to pass the examinations exams set by the Malabar government for prospective schoolmistresses. These changes, particularly in female education

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and work, had a considerable impact on the region’s educational landscape. Although the number of conversions rapidly dwindled, the schools retained an important place in local imagination as heralding new forms of schooling during the twentieth century. For the poor pupils attending these institutions, however, the formative experience of segregated and residential learning was far more complex.

Conclusion Often presented as characters in the background, waiting to be moulded and recast, poor colonised children assume a character of their own in these missionary encounters. Their opinions, emotional behaviours, and acts of resistance and dissent do not neatly fit into the binary hitherto adopted in dominant Western scholarship about certain poor children as either entirely voiceless victims or heroic characters in adult-controlled hierarchies. As poor children employed various strategies to counter and influence decision-making and pedagogical processes, the boundaries BM’s sphere of influence also shifted in colonial Kerala. The schools not only imparted their functional literacy skills but also provoked new articulations of self and faith, and moulding childhood through negotiation and contestation. While we peruse missionary archives for evidence about wider institutional practices in the colonies, we are confronted with fragments of children’s agentic actions in shaping their own lives no matter how limited these voices are in the paper trails. These encounters also highlight the deep ambiguities that governed colonial missionary enterprises. Even as European evangelicals argued for poor children to be freed from bonded labour and argued for the democratisation of schooling practices, they viewed pupils’ bodies as best suited for physical labour in line with dominant ideologies prevalent at home and abroad. Yet, acts such as running away and refusal to submit to the BM’s regulations point to how poor children responded to schooling agendas that sought to ‘include them by exclusion’. They challenged the burden of subordinate labour placed on them by ‘speaking’ back to authority or by simply speaking up.

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Notes 1. The archival research at Mission 21, Basel was funded by the Max Weber Stiftung Transnational Research Group on Poverty and Education during my doctoral research. I thank Ajinkya Lele for his help with translations from German to English. Errors, if any, are entirely my own. Some of the well-known boarding institutions include the Loreto Convent, Darjeeling (estd.1846) Lawrence School Lovedale, Nilgiris (1858), Bishop Cotton School, Shimla (1859), Mayo College, Ajmer (1875), and Doon School, Dehradun (1935). 2. Becker (2015). 3. Sen (2005). 4. Kochhar (2021). 5. Kent (2005); Vallgårda (2014); Soni (2020). 6. Sen (2005); Kannan (2021). 7. Soni (2020); Nair (2019). 8. The Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society was founded in 1815. 9. Wurttemberg is a region in south-west Germany. The strand of Pietism which emerged in Wurttemberg in the eighteenth century was affected by distinct developments. Two of the most prominent philosophers of Wurttemberg Pietism were Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782). See Jenkins (1984, p. 427). 10. Porter (1985); Bickers and Seton (1996). 11. Said (1978); Cohn (1996). 12. Sen (2005). 13. Foucault (1979). 14. Israel and Frenz (2020). 15. Pietism is a movement with many strands that emerged in the late seventeenth century German Empire within both Reformed and Lutheran Protestantism. While it had its origins in urban centres such as Bremen, Frankfurt, and Leipzig, amongst others, it also gained influence in the rural areas of Wurttemberg and Pomerania. Shantz notes that ‘the Pietists introduced a new paradigm to German Protestantism, one that included personal renewal and new birth, conventicle gatherings for Bible study and mutual encouragement, an emphasis of practical Christianity, social activism and millennialism’. See Shantz (2015); Olson and Winn (2015); Lindberg (2005, p. 8). 16. Although Pietism was a radical movement for its times, calling for reforms in the Church and state administration, it did not seek to overturn social hierarchy and an order of statuses. 17. Kurup (1978); Prakash (1984). 18. Raghavaih (1990).

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19. I am avoiding the German spellings of these places although the archives mention them. Instead, I am using the English spelling of these places which is closer to the native Malayalam usage. 20. Shetty (2008). 21. Sebastian (2015, p. 182). 22. Mission compounds refer to walled settlements erected by the BM in the hilly parts of their mission stations. They were walled to mark them separately from non-Christians, and comprised a church, boarding institutions, and residences of the missionaries and native catechists, the printing-press, and a small book-bindery. Mrinalini Sebastian argues that the architecture of the ‘mission compound’ on raised land was intentional to indicate the lack of caste divisions and the elevated status of Christian residents. See Sebastian (2015). 23. Vallgårda (2014). 24. I draw upon the conceptual framework of ‘emotional frontiers’ as argued by Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen. According to them, an ‘emotional frontier’ is a boundary between different emotional formations, see Vallgårda et al. (2015) 25. Hermann Gundert (1814–1893) was not an ordained minister of the Basel Mission but offered his services to them in south India, nonetheless. He composed some of the earliest Malayalam school-books and compiled the popular Anglo-Malayalam dictionary and is most known for his extensive literary works in the same language. 26. Frenz (1991, p. 100). 27. Allgemeine Missions Zeitschrift (1875, p. 448). 28. Frenz (1983a, p. 109). 29. Diary entry on 1 July 1839, in Frenz (1983b, p. 66). 30. Frenz (1983b, p. 67). 31. Koonar (2014). 32. The term ‘Nazarani’ or ‘Nazrani’ was used to refer to Nestorians and St. Thomas Christians from eastern Turkey to India. 33. Frenz (1991, pp. 101–102). 34. Evangelisches Missions Magazin (1856, 140–141). 35. Gawthrop (2006, p. 158). 36. Jahres Bericht, Basler Mission, (1849, p. 55). 37. Magazin für die Neueste Geschichte der Protestantischen Missions und Bibelgesellschaften (1852, p. 139–140). 38. Kent (2004). 39. Magazin für die neueste Geschichte der evangelischen Missions- und Bibelgesellschaften (1851, pp. 178–179). 40. Original in English. Anon (1876, p. 42). 41. Irion (1864 trans., pp. 114-115). 42. Vallgårda (2011).

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Irion (1864, p. 114). Ibid. Pomfret (2015). Irion (1864, pp. 114-115). Pomfret (2015). Gleason (2016). Comaroff and Comaroff (1991). Anon (1873, pp. 27–28). Frenz (1991, p. 97). Frohmeyer (1893, p. 500). Ibid. Anon (1879, p. 43).

Bibliography Anon. 1873. The Thirty-Third Report of the Basel German Evangelical Mission Society for 1872. Mangalore: Basel Mission Press. Anon. 1876. The Thirty-Sixth Report of the BGEMS in South-Western India for 1875. Mangalore: Basel Mission Press. Anon. 1879. The Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the BGEMS in South-Western India for 1878. Mangalore: Basel Mission Press. Becker, Judith. 2015. Introduction: European Missions in Contact Zones. Transformation Through Interaction in a (Post-)Colonial World. In European Missions in Contact Zones. Transformation Through Interaction in a (Post-) Colonial World, ed. Judith Becker. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bickers, Robert A. and Seton, Rosemary, eds. 1996. Missionary encounters: sources and issues. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Illinois, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Frenz, Albrecht, ed. 1983a. Hermann Gundert: Schriften und Berichte. Stuttgart: F.Steinkopf. Frenz, Albrecht, ed. 1983b. Hermann Gundert: Tagebuch aus Malabar, 1837– 1859. Stuttgart: F. Steinkopf. Frenz, Albrecht, ed. 1991. Hermann Gundert: Quellen zu seinem Leben und Werk. Ulm: Verlag-Gesellschaft. Frohmeyer, J. 1893. Report of the Third Decennial Missionary Conference, held at Bombay, 1892–93, vol. II. Bombay: American Mission Press.

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Gawthrop, Richard. 2006. Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gleason, Mona. 2016. Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education. History of Education 45 (4): 446–459. Irion, Christian. 1864. Malabar und die Missionsstation Thalassery Basel: Verlag des Missionshauses. Israel, Hephzibah, and Matthias Frenz. 2020. Translation traces in the archive: Unfixing documents, destabilising evidence. The Translator 25 (4): 335–348. Jenkins, Paul. 1984. Villagers as Missionaries’: Württemberg Pietism as a 19th Century Missionary Movement. Missiology: An International Review 8: 425−432. Kannan, Divya. 2021. “Children’s Work for Children”: Caste, Childhood, and Missionary Philanthropy in Colonial India. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 14: 234–253. Kent, Eliza. 2004. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kent, Eliza. 2005. “Books and bodices: material culture and protestant missions in colonial South India”. In Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions, ed. James Griffith Palgrave Macmillan, New York: 67−87. Kochhar, Rajesh. 2021. English Education in India, 1715–1835: Half-Caste, Missionary, and Secular Stages. New Delhi: Routledge. Koonar, Catherine. 2014. Using Child Labor to Save Souls: The Basel Mission in Colonial Ghana, 1855–1900. Atlantic Studies 11: 536–554. Kurup, K.K.N. 1978. Agrarian Tensions and British Policy in Malabar. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 39: 855–860. Lindberg, Carter, ed. 2005. The Pietist Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Nair, Janaki. 2019. Seeing like the Missionary: An Iconography of Education in Mysore, 1840–1920. Studies in History 35 (2): 178–217. Olson, Roger E., Christian T. Collins, and Winn. 2015. Reclaiming Pietism: Retrieving an Evangelical Tradition. Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Pomfret, David M. 2015. “Closer to God”: Child Death in Historical Perspective. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8: 353–377. Porter, Andrew. 1985. ‘Commerce and Christianity’: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan. Historical Journal 28: 597–621. Prakash, B.A. 1984. Changes in Agrarian Structure and Land Tenures in Kerala: A Historical Review. State and Society 5: 1–13. Raghavaih, Jaiprakash. 1990. Faith and industrial reformation: Basel mission in Malabar and South Canara. Delhi: Gyan Publishing House. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Sebastian, Mrinalini. 2015. The Scholar-Missionaries of the Basel Mission in South-West India: Language, Identity, and Knowledge in Flux. In Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, ed. Heather Sharkey, 176–202. New York: Syracuse University Press. Sen, Satadru. 2005. Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 1850– 1945. London: Anthem Press. Shantz, Douglas. ed. 2015. A Companion to German Pietism, 1660–1800. Leiden: Brill. Shetty, Parinitha. 2008. Missionary Pedagogy and Christianisation of the Heathens: The Educational Institutions introduced by the Basel Mission in Mangalore. Indian Economic and Social History Review 45: 501–551. Soni. 2020. Learning to Labour: “Native” Orphans in Colonial India, 1840s– 1920s. International Review of Social History 65: 15–42. Stanley, Brian, ed. 2001. Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co & Curzon Press. Vallgårda, Karen. 2011. Adam’s escape: Children and the discordant nature of colonial conversions. Childhood 18: 298–315. Vallgårda, Karen. 2014. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vallgårda, Karen, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen. 2015. Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood. In Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History, ed. Stephanie Olsen, 12–34. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 8

Soviet Boarding Schools and the Social Marginalisation of the Urban Poor, 1958–1991 Mirjam Galley

In 1969–70, the Riga special boarding school for difficult teenagers kept the Latvian authorities busy. Following an inspection, the Latvian Prosecution office confronted the Ministry of Education, charging the school with “gross violations of the rule of law”. According to the report, teenagers were being held there beyond the designated legal age and time limits. In addition to issues with the sanitary situation and poor educational work, the report listed escapes and violence among the teenagers. However, at the centre of the Prosecution’s report were beatings by members of staff. In September and November, a warden had beaten a child with a rubber hose; in April, a physics teacher had beaten a boy— the same teacher had been reported for violence against children twice

M. Galley (B) transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_8

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before. In May, an educator hit a child in the face and broke his nose— the same educator had beaten a pupil in the year before and broken his skull with a pair of scissors. The school’s administration had not reacted to any of these cases of abuse. A year later, the school was inspected again. Despite pointing out numerous issues like severe overcrowding, poor maintenance and ventilation, as well as excessively long school hours for the children, the administration’s work was reviewed positively. The report did not even mention the violence committed by staff members the year before. These documents raise many questions about the management of Soviet residential childcare institutions. Why were cases of violence against children not reported or noticed by the authorities earlier? Why were the problems at the boarding school not fixed? Why do the documents paint such divergent pictures of the same institution? Were these normal conditions in residential childcare? And how would such an upbringing impact a child’s life?1 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian residential childcare network sparked interest from national and international media for its scandalous living and learning conditions as well as cases of abuse and neglect. As a system, this so-called sirotprom is designed to channel generation after generation of children from socially marginalised families through state institutions, depriving them of a real chance to succeed in their later lives, leaving them alienated, excluded from broader society, and badly prepared for life—because it is in the interest of local administration to keep this system going. Additionally, the sirotprom has been notorious as a recruiting ground for the criminal underground.2 This network of residential childcare institutions has its roots in the Soviet Union. When Nikita Khrushchev took over the Soviet leadership after Stalin’s death in 1953, he had to find new legitimacy and keep control of the Union without resorting to Stalinist wide-scale repression and terror campaigns. At the same time, he had to lift the country out of economic and social crisis caused by political neglect under Stalin and the destruction caused by the Second World War. Khrushchev aimed for nothing less than rebuilding the country and building communism by the 1980s. To achieve this goal, he introduced reforms aimed at raising living standards while at the same time strengthening official and societal bodies charged with monitoring the population’s behaviour. These

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measures were to ensure public order according to official norms. Residential childcare institutions were part of the Soviet leadership’s public order policies against deviance from state-sanctioned behaviour.3 Khrushchev’s administration redesigned the Soviet residential childcare system as part of the 1958 education reform. He framed this reform as an effort to raise the next generation as the ‘builders of communism’. The reform entailed setting up a network of boarding schools to bring up those children whose parents would not or could not take care of them, as well as children with disabilities.4 These boarding schools were supposed to replace the existing residential childcare network mostly comprised of children’s homes. This, however, was never fully achieved, so that children’s homes, boarding schools, and reform colonies for delinquent youths coexisted as distinct institutions in the same system of childcare. As children were transferred relatively frequently between these different institutions, it is useful to study them as one network due to the close connections and the structural similarities between them. These institutions ended up targeting children from socially marginal and poor families disproportionately, with wide-ranging social and political consequences, as the following will show.5 This chapter will first discuss why children from mostly socially marginalised families came into care, then show how these children were further isolated in care and thus excluded from Soviet mainstream society. Then it will explore the conditions in care and how residential institutions prepared children for life after care.

Families, Poverty, and Social Problems: Children’s Ways into Care Children could end up in a residential institution in two ways: either their parents sent them there, or the state took them. Many parents, especially single parents, sent their children to boarding schools because their long work hours or commutes did not allow them to be home in the evening to take care of their children.6 Others entered their children into such schools because of poverty, poor health, or a diagnosed disability. The state institutionalised children who did not have any living relatives to take care of them or who were neglected by their parents, as well as juvenile offenders. As official data shows, the largest group among children in care were not orphans but children with living parents, many of whom were so-called social orphans.7

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To police such ‘problem families’, the Soviet leadership set up a network of state and societal organisations which monitored and sanctioned people’s behaviour at the workplace and on the street, even in people’s homes. This network had the responsibility to help children in need, but also to define and impose standards of behaviour, to police what was to be considered as deviant.8 The Soviet residential childcare network reflected the leadership’s effort to raise children from the margins of society close to socialist values. A large portion of children in residential care was thus a direct reflection of widespread social problems in Soviet society. However, social issues were not publicly addressed in the USSR until Mikhail Gorbachev lifted media censorship in 1986. Until then, issues like poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, or child neglect were either described as “remnants of the past” and thus (increasingly unsuccessfully) connected to pre-revolutionary times. Or they were attributed to individual families, often using awkward formulations like “families in which bad conditions for raising children prevail”.9 Mark Field has called this strategy “personalization of causality”.10 Families who lived in poverty were framed as mnogodetnyi i maloobespechennyi, meaning with many children and little means, which in fact meant that they had more children than they could afford to house and feed. Because these terms were only ever used in combination, the poverty aspect was relativised and blamed on the family.11 An even more common term for families who struggled to care for their children was neblagopoluchnyi, a blanket term for dysfunctional families which carried the connotations of alcoholism, poverty, child neglect, and domestic violence.12 Social problems were thus turned into individual shortcomings instead of structural issues, and people afflicted by poverty were either pathologised or criminalised in official discourse.13 In this way, institutions such as children’s homes, boarding schools, and reform colonies enabled the Soviet leadership to keep widespread social problems out of public discourse by sending children into care or by threatening parents with the loss of custody. This ‘othering’ of people who did not conform to the Soviet norm led to their marginalisation, and consequently to a criminalisation of poverty.14 This development becomes apparent in interviews with former boarding school pupils and staff, namely the marginalisation of these children and the social stigma attached to them.15 A former boarding

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schooler remembered the strong presence of children from dysfunctional families: “everyone had problems like that. There weren’t any normal children, to my recollection”. A former teacher described the typical parents of institutionalised children as “these socially poor, these families, where there’s no father or where the parents drink”.16 Once children were on their way into the institutional system, they were classified by age, behaviour, and health—the generic idea behind these criteria was productivity. This was most prevalent with regard to children with disabilities. Unsuccessful children from all schools were regularly assessed by so-called medico-pedagogical commissions—their diagnosis could lead to placement in an institution for children with disabilities.17 The categories of ‘intellectual disabilities’ used to classify children had little medical merit and were rather tailored to the needs of the state: They either offered a gradual categorisation of the ‘degree’ of disability or related directly to the expected extent of adaptation into society and the workforce, directly connected to their future productivity.18 In the different institutions, they would get the education necessary to the job they were expected to be able to perform later. The lower the expectations were for a child, the less education it was likely to receive.19 Such a classification based on (future) productivity bore the risk of branding people as ‘useless’, as indeed (for instance) a document by the Council of Ministers mentioned boarding schools for “disabled children without prospects” (neperspektivnykh detei-invalidov).20

Social Isolation in Care Soviet residential childcare thus mainly housed children from the margins of society. However, instead of reintegrating these children into Soviet society, these institutions contributed to their further marginalisation. The authorities relied on just about keeping the institutions working and only intervened in individual institutions in specific situations: especially atrocious mistreatment or neglect, whenever an institution wasted state funds, or when the boundary between the institutions and the outside world was in danger.21 The idea that a boundary between the inside and outside of residential institution is necessary for it to function is part of Erving Goffman’s concept of the total institution. A total institution, according to his theory, needs a boundary with the outside world to keep control over the ‘inmates’.22 This was one reason for the Soviet authorities to keep

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this boundary up and their boarding schools isolated. This isolation had the additional ‘advantage’ of keeping these children—symptoms of social problems—out of public awareness. A breakdown of the boundary with the outside world created a problem visible to the local population: deviant youth would roam the streets because they had run away or because there were not enough places in institutions. The isolation, however, was also problematic because the children were supposed to be integrated into society later on, and because the institutions needed support from the outside world to keep them afloat, due to the lack of state funding. The authorities had introduced a system of support called shefstvo by local factories, farms, and activists to help with basic maintenance and provision as well as with ensuring the children’s education and social development—by sending over material goods, by organising visits or outings, and by tutoring individual children. However, as this shefstvo was generally voluntary, most institutions struggled with shortages and social isolation.23 This tension between openness and closedness permeated the residential childcare system across the decades. Already in the late 1950s, education minister Afanasenko emphasised that boarding schools were not closed but closely connected to life.24 At the same time, education manuals and the press warned of the social isolation of children in care.25 A 1960 newspaper article described preschool children terrified by the sight of buses, amazed by people wearing anything but white lab coats; and a little girl who did not recognise herself on a photo because she had never seen her own face.26 Official reports about children’s home inspections described children laughing and pointing at the inspector, seemingly overwhelmed by the experience of seeing new people.27 More explicitly, a history teacher from Malta boarding school in Latvia explained that the children were “isolated from the influence of the adult population” to invalidate the accusation that his teaching lacked “atheist propaganda”.28 There are several hints that this isolation was not accidental. The authorities reacted strongly and anxiously to children running away from institutions, claiming that such ‘runaways’ would be likely to commit crimes on the street. And more than that, the authorities turned the unsupervised presence of children on the street itself into an offence under the term “vagrancy” (brodiazhnichestvo). Often such runaways were sent to reform colonies even if they had not committed any crimes, showing that the Soviet state went to great lengths to prevent minors from leaving their institution without permission.29

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This drive for isolation was strongest in colonies for delinquent teenagers and boarding schools for children with disabilities. For instance, a local Communist Party organisation appealed to the Russian Ministry of the Interior to close a colony, arguing that the colony was too close to an important railway, where people (including foreigners) might see it.30 Relating to children with a “significant intellectual disability”, a 1961 document from the Soviet Council of Ministers stated these should be institutionalised so that they would not endanger the upbringing of “healthy children”.31

Living Conditions and Children’s Experiences in Care The isolation of Soviet boarding schools, children’s homes, and reform colonies enabled the Soviet leadership to run these institutions at a low priority. The Soviet state monitored residential childcare by inspecting the institutions on a regular basis. The inspection reports show strong variations in living and learning conditions between individual institutions, which suggests that the system was unstable. In addition, they show little overall development, which suggests that the authorities did not do much to address that instability. This points to residential childcare being a means of keeping the ‘youth problem’ in check and out of sight whilst not prioritising it.32 The inspections thus seem to be a means of containment and minimal intervention rather than of increasing the quality of care. This institutionalised neglect of (and by) the child welfare system had serious consequences for children in care, as official reports across the decades suggest. The first large-scale investigation after the 1958 boarding school reform showed that children in residential institutions lagged behind in physical development in comparison to their peers in general schools.33 Statistics from the late 1980s show that children in care had more health issues and were disproportionally frequently diagnosed with disabilities.34 In 1990, the Soviet Ministry of Health concluded that “the results of sample investigations of children in boarding facilities show that with regard to physical development they lag behind their contemporaries growing up in families”.35 Everyday life in such institutions was different from life ‘outside’. Time was strictly scheduled, sometimes down to the minute by the so-called rezhim, and life was organised collectively. Although this was efficient and

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ideologically sound, it forced the children to adapt to the “institution way of life”.36 A former boarding school student recalled in an interview that she had struggled to cope with what she referred to as “the barracks life” (kazennaia zhizn), to her, an oppressive form of living. She described the boarding school as a prison, where she slept poorly and felt terrorised by the prescribed uniformity. Although on a material level, the living conditions were better at the boarding school than at her parents’ place, where there was poverty, hunger, and domestic violence, she preferred living “in freedom”, as she put it.37 Apart from such individual impressions, it is difficult to establish how children felt about life in institutions on a larger scale, because official documents reported on how children behaved but not why they did so. However, it is possible to draw some conclusions about children who failed or refused to adapt to life in residential care. Official inspection reports convey diverse signs of unhappiness or psychological distress— such as bed wetting or running away, and in the most extreme cases, suicide.38 Some inspectors also reported worrying accounts of apathy when they observed that “there are still many pupils that aren’t interested in anything, who wander aimlessly around, don’t find anything to do”.39 An inability or refusal to adapt to life in care could result in forms of resistance. In many cases, running away from an institution counted among those—Olga Kucherenko has referred to such escapes as the “most widespread form of protest” among children in care.40 Resistance could also entail more obvious rule-breaking, such as skipping lessons or roaming around town unsupervised to, for instance, fetch alcohol and cigarettes.41 Teenagers in a Leningrad colony even openly staged defiance. One inspector complained that: “during the breaks the students don’t leave the classroom. Many among them sit on the floor in their caps, or lie on the desks, smoking”. In class, they ignored the teachers: “Many of them read books, or do other things: write letters, carve inscriptions into their desks, clean the knives they made in the workshops, sleep, etc.”. They also deliberately destroyed school supplies, bullied teachers and students, and uttered anti-Soviet statements.42 Life in care often turned into an interesting amalgamation of state ideology (collectivism) and survival strategies adopted by the children (such as fraternisation). Residential childcare staff used different strategies to undermine any uncontrolled cooperation, such as appointing ‘commanders’ among the children who were supposed to help them with

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controlling their peers and implementing order in the institution. They gave these group leaders the power to punish in exchange for privileges.43 On the one hand, such a system is ideologically founded in socialist ‘selfadministration’. On the other hand, it is particularly prone to power abuse and violence and led to hazing and bullying practices similar to a phenomenon called dedovshchina, commonly practised in the Soviet armed forces, the Red Army. It consisted of older recruits bullying and terrorising younger ones as a way of initiating them to the barracks and establishing control.44 Unsurprisingly, such cases were particularly harsh in colonies for delinquent children. In 1960, for instance, the Latvian procurator reported from a colony in C¯esis that new arrivals would regularly be attacked within their first days at the institution: From January through April of that year, nine people were taken to hospital with head injuries and broken jaws. The prosecutor explained that taking the perpetrators out of the colony did not help, as others would take their place, which suggests that this violence was part of the social structure or culture of the colony. The distribution of work productivity in that colony provides further proof for such a ‘commander’ system: whereas the colony had a total productivity of 90%, some students only fulfilled 35–55% of their quotas. This hints at a system of privileges: the administration allowed for the commanders to work less as long as they made the others work—no matter how.45 In other types of institutions, such as general children’s homes or boarding schools, such structures were also common, although the level of violence tended to be lower. For instance, a report from Bauska children’s home in Latvia mentioned that older children had been beating and intimidating younger ones.46 Although the existence of these cases of violence was known, the institution staff did nothing to prevent it from happening again. A year later, another inspection conveyed a similar impression: older teenagers were stealing the younger children’s food and would beat them if they complained.47 Such an abusive rule by the elders was commonly tolerated (if not encouraged) in residential childcare and bred power structures which transcended different total institutions , such as army barracks or prisons. These impressions from residential childcare strongly suggest that growing up in care bore more similarities to criminal subculture or life in the army than to a childhood outside residential care.48

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Preparing Children in Care for a Life in Society To make up for the contrast between life in residential institutions and in society, children in boarding schools, children’s homes, and reform colonies across the Soviet Union were taught how to take care of themselves in everyday life. A 1959 report about Moscow children’s homes related that children should learn how to speak properly, learn how to go shopping and visit places like the post office, pharmacy, library, public transport; and get to know workplaces and nature. They should learn household skills, like doing laundry or cooking.49 Many institutions, however, did not deliver on these promises. A report from Tisk¯adi boarding school (Latvia) criticised the children’s personal hygiene and table manners. Apparently, they did not know how to dress properly or how to take care of their belongings.50 In addition to these lessons in life preparation, children in residential care received work education. Unsurprisingly, the outcomes were equally diverse: some institutions had an impressive range of workshops and training opportunities to choose from, such as shoemaking, weaving, bookmaking, cooking, moulding, photo/film, painting/plastering, gardening, farming, or nursing.51 More commonly, however, institutions offered wood and/or metal work for boys, and sewing for girls.52 Many homes and schools were situated in the countryside, where boarding school pupils worked on nearby collective and state farms as part of lessons or during the summer break.53 This agricultural branch of work education was the most common (and often only) attempt to match work education to the local labour market. When it was time to leave residential childcare, the state—sometimes through the institution—was supposed to support the graduates financially or materially and help them to find a job and a place to live. As interviews suggest, this did not always happen: some boarding school graduates did not recall any such support. “No, that was it, they just released us and that was it”, one of them concluded.54 Another explained that she only had one set of clothes back then, forcing her to miss her evening classes whenever she had to do laundry—many former boarding schoolers tried to catch up on their schooling (many boarding schools did not offer schooling beyond year eight) in addition to their jobs.55 People also remembered the culture shock they experienced, moving from an environment in which they had been in a controlled collective to suddenly find themselves alone. Former boarding schoolers complain about feeling

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badly prepared, ignorant, abandoned, stigmatised, and inferior when they left the institution. They described this experience as a culture shock, not knowing what to do and how to cope on their own.56 On a general level, it is difficult to establish how care leavers fared in the Soviet Union due to a lack of data. The available material suggests that care leavers had a more difficult start in life than their peers and often went through a period of hardship, catching up on education or training, and sometimes of conflict with law enforcement.57 Scattered data suggests that almost all care leavers either went straight to work without specialised training, went back to school, or moved on to the nearest vocational school (tekhnikum). A report from 1967 criticised that “there are serious issues (nedostatki) with the determination (opredelenie) of children’s home graduates’ further life course”.58 During a 1989 campaign against juvenile delinquency, the authorities conveyed the impression that many care leavers had nowhere to go: in connection with the fact that the question of guardianship is not being decided in advance, no place to live is found, and the graduates often either go back to their parents who have lost custody of them, or, not having a place to stay, lead an antisocial (antiobshchestvennyi) way of life, commit crimes.59

Starting a life of their own was especially challenging for underage offenders leaving colonies and care leavers from institutions for children with disabilities. In the case of institutions for delinquent youths, the first hurdle was to get out at all. Although there were mechanisms in place for releasing young offenders as soon as they had proven themselves ‘reformed’, agencies stalled bureaucratic procedures so that many minors ended up away from their families much longer than necessary.60 Institutions for juvenile offenders were supposed to take care of the leavers’ future placement in a job or school, or at the very least to inform the “youth commission”.61 However, both the colonies and the commissions in charge often showed themselves reluctant to step in, or as the inspector about Atlianskaia colony wrote in their report: “in general, there is nothing known about the fate of most inmates released from the colony”.62 These ‘delinquents’ were rarely what one could call ‘hardened criminals’, they often ended up there for minor offences, like petty theft, flunking school, running from another institution, ‘hooliganising’, begging, misbehaving, or generally being perceived as a nuisance by their

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school or local authorities. Sometimes, child neglect or poverty were the only ‘crimes’ committed.63 It is almost impossible to establish how children who graduated from the numerous special schools for children with disabilities and special needs fared because they left few traces in official documents. Publications by ‘defectologists’ (a Soviet branch of science dealing with disability; a blend of medicine, psychology, pedagogy, and other disciplines) give some indication on these young people’s later lives, albeit from a strictly medicalised perspective. Defectology studies from 1970 showed that most graduates from schools for children with special needs had jobs but only about half of them worked in the trade for which they had been trained at their boarding school.64 A similar study showed that only 165 from the sample of 220 people had finished the full curriculum; most of the others had reached the age of 18 before graduating and had to leave school.65 With regard to family life, defectologist V.F. Shalimov showed that in his sample of former special boarding schoolers, 56 of 82 lived with a partner. Among those, about two-thirds were with either other people from special schools or people with diagnosed disabilities or mental illnesses; which hints at the social marginalisation of these groups of people.66 These findings suggest that many residential childcare institutions failed at integrating the children in their care into society and at preparing them for an independent life in society. Former children in care’s social standing and people’s reaction to them did not help in this process. In interviews, former children’s home and boarding school pupils complained about having been treated like ‘black sheep’ by people from outside: “Sometimes there were […] people shouting: Boarding schoolers, boarding schoolers, incubator kids! Well and then there was this kind of mistrust, this … yes you can probably say mistrust and a readiness to blame everything on boarding school kids. Everything, everything bad that happened – it was the boarding school children that did it”.67 Another former child in care remembers this sense of alienation also from her university years, as people could still identify her as an “institution child” because of her lack of money and possessions. She recalled feeling like an “ugly duckling”.68

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Conclusions After the system of residential childcare institutions had been reformed in 1958, it was supposed to bring up the ‘builders of communism’. Although the Soviet leadership did not seem to realise this objective, they still found ways to make the wide network of boarding schools, children’s homes, and reform colonies useful from a leadership perspective: to isolate the socially marginal youth and make as many of them as possible into compliant workers for the state, whilst spending only a minimum of resources. The Council of Ministers emphasised in the mid-1980s that children coming into homes and boarding schools for children without parental care were “as a rule socially and pedagogically neglected, had large gaps in their knowledge, and negative behaviour and habits”, and that most of them suffered from chronic illnesses and “injuries of the psyche and the nervous system”.69 This bears witness to the complex interplay between the social background of many children in care, the poor care and education in residential institutions, and the stigmatisation of children in care. Although the context of these boarding schools as well as the educational ideology according to which they are designed were distinctly socialist, many elements about these institutions’ setup, usage, and population will sound eerily familiar to scholars of boarding schools in other historical and geographical contexts. In addition to general structural similarities of total institutions , it seems like many principles of socialist education, such as a focus on collectivism, labour, and a strict regimentation of time for maximum efficiency and the basic principles of how to organise a residential childcare institution such as a boarding school overlap considerably. This opens up plenty of opportunity for comparison. As has been shown, the social structures in residential childcare bore strong similarities with other types of institutions isolated from society, such as the army or prison, and with criminal culture. Because in many cases the lives of care leavers thus far had been more similar to that of soldiers, prisoners, or gang members than to a ‘normal’ late Soviet childhood, children in care went through a difficult process of adaptation after leaving care. This was not only true for children from particularly ‘bad’ institutions, whose emotional scars from neglect or abuse made any kind of life difficult. It was also the case for children from homes and boarding schools which were working as the state had intended. In the end, it was often easier for care leavers to adjust to life in another institution,

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the army, or even prison—which reveals Soviet residential childcare as a complex mechanism of exclusion. It is difficult to assess the long-term emotional impact of institutional care with the present source material. Interviews suggest that many former children in care frame their life story like a tale of struggle and survival and consider that the institutional life with its toughness and punishments has turned them into strong, decent people.70 However, those who had children of their own stated that they would never send their child to a boarding school because the institutional upbringing lacked ‘domestic warmth’. One even goes as far as to suggest that the boarding school was a loveless place, which became blatantly clear when she had her own baby: “And I can say, […] well you know how people say that maternal love begins with the first drop of milk. It was not like that in my case. I felt sorry for that little thing; it was so small, defenceless. Love – none. […] Because we don’t know what love is. Mother and child. That is we did not get enough of it, and so we could not pass it on to our children”.71 Acknowledgements This chapter is based on research I conducted for my PhD thesis at The University of Sheffield (2019). The research was generously funded by the Wolfson Foundation. The thesis has been published as: Galley (2021).

Notes 1. LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1426, ll. 8–30 (1969). It is fair to assume that the divergence between the two inspection reports was connected to their purpose: the first inspection seems to have been a routine one while the second inspection had the purpose of eliciting whether it was possible to fit more teenagers into the boarding school. Thus, the second inspector(s) had an interest in writing a more favorable report to address the lack of places for delinquent teenagers in local schools. See also Galley (2021, pp. 118–119). 2. See for instance Maiofis (2016); Human Rights Watch (1998); the 2013 documentary Mama ya ub’yu tebya by Elena Pogrebizhskaya, see in Russian with English subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu0 3J1svd-c&t=17s, last accessed 30 May 2021; Boy, Ann-Dorit. 2017. ‘Russland entdeckt seine verlassenen Kinder’. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20.9.2017: 6–7. 3. See Dobson (2009); Field (2007); Harris (2012); LaPierre (2012); Smith (2010).

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4. Coumel (2006); Kelly (2006, p. 272); Maiofis (2016). 5. There were also boarding schools with different purposes in the Soviet Union, for instance for elite and/or foreign pupils as well as rural boarding schools which had been set up to provide schooling to rural communities that otherwise had access only to elementary schooling. These institutions will not be discussed in the context of this chapter. 6. Kelly (2006, pp. 260-262); Kaz’min (1958). 7. Social orphans are children neglected or abandoned by their parents. For data about the Soviet boarding school and children’s home population in 1974, see GARF, f. R5446, op. 109, d. 1079, ll. 3–6. According to this data, only 10% of children in care were orphans. 8. See for instance: Dobson (2011); Reid (2011); Zhidova (2012). 9. GARF, f. R5446, op. 109, d. 1079, l. 3. 10. Field (1991, p. 78). 11. Examples of this phrasing in: GARF, f. A2306, op. 76, d. 1471, l. 99 (1967); GARF, f. R5446, op. 109, d. 1079, ll. 4, 5, 14 (1974); GARF f. R5446, op. 145, d. 1258, l. 18 (1983). 12. GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 203, ll. 1–2 (1962); TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 69, d. 181, ll. 2, 22, 43–44, 60 (1966); GARF, f. R9527, op.1, d. 2124, l. 43 (1968). 13. Common labels for ‘bad parents’, such as ‘previous offender’, ‘drunkard/alcoholic’, or ‘mentally ill’, also tend to turn more general social problems into individual shortcomings, or pathologise them: TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 69, d. 181, ll. 175–179; GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 5042, ll. 52–54. 14. See this argument elaborated further in Galley (2021, pp. 27–30). 15. Catriona Kelly has made available the transcripts of interviews conducted for her project about everyday life and childhood in Russia. The life history interviews cited here and coded ‘Oxf/Lev’ were conducted for a project sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust under grant no. F/08736/A ‘Childhood in Russia, 1890–1991: A Social and Cultural History’ (2003–2006). My thanks go to the interviewers, and to the project leader Catriona Kelly, for making this material available to me. The interviews are © The University of Oxford. The coding system consists of a project identifier, place code (St Petersburg (SPb.), Moscow (M.), Perm (P), and Taganrog (T), and villages in Leningrad (2004) and Novgorod (2005) provinces (V)), a date code, a cassette number (PF), and a transcript page (e.g. ‘Oxf/Lev SPb-03 PF8A, p. 38’). The interviewers were Aleksandra Piir (St Petersburg), Yuliya Rybina and Ekaterina Shumilova (Moscow), Svetlana Sirotinina (Perm), Yury Ryzhov and Lyubov’ Terekhova (Taganrog), Oksana Filicheva, Veronika Makarova, and Ekaterina Mel’nikova (village interviews), and the project co-ordinators, Professor Al’bert Baiburin and Professor Vitaly Bezrogov.

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18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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For further information about the project, see www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/ russian/childhood and www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/lifehstory. Oxf/Lev SPb-05 PF69, 9; Oxf/Lev SPb-04 PF65A, 1–2. Zanozina et al. (2008, pp. 141–45). About the commissions: GARF, f. R9563, op. 1, d. 797 (1969). For notes on such sessions, see for instance, LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 762, ll. 1–72 (1961); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 868a (1962); GARF, f. A420, op. 1, d. 241, ll. 77–85, 130–40 (1963); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1130, ll. 11–22, 121–29 (1965); GARF, f. A482, op. 54, d. 3578 (1969–70); GASO, f. R233, op. 7, d. 1014 (1984). See Galley (2021), pp. 76–9. One such classification was initially developed by G.E. Suchaeva, see M.S. Pevzner (1970); another by M.S. Pevzner herself. See: Asafova (1963). See for instance: Zubrilin (1971); Iavkin (1970). GARF, f. 5446, op. 145, d. 1258, ll. 27–32 (1983–85). See Galley (2021) pp. 132–33, 209–10. For examples of abuse by staff members check for instance LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1426, ll. 1–30 (1969); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1912, ll. 118–26 (1980); GARF, f. R5446, op. 148, d. 1449, ll. 6–21 (1987). For examples of wasting state funds in the eyes of the authorities, see for instance GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 6578, ll. 40–45, 73–75 (1960); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1003, ll. 43–46 (1963); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1912, ll. 118–26 (1980). For cases of rape see GASO, f. P233, op. 5, d. 1475, l. 114 (1966); GARF, f. A2306, op. 76, d. 1475, ll. 21–22 (1967). For cases of escapes see for instance GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 6578, ll. 10–15, 115–28 (1960); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1426, ll. 1–6, 8–30 (1969–70). Goffman (1991), pp. 16–17; Davies (1989). Thus, for instance, Tomsk colony had a sewing factory, a theatre, and the local university as shefy, GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 205, ll. 47–61 (1962); and the Kr¯aslava children’s home was supported by pensioners, LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1143, ll. 19–25 (1965). For a general assessment see Kelly (2006, p. 263). Kaz’min (1958, pp. 23–24, pp. 38–39). Gerbeev and Vinogradova (1976, p. 108, pp. 148–149, p. 151). A. Kotovshchikova. 1960. ‘Neobychnye deti’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 29 October, 6. LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 915, ll. 38–40 (1962); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1089, ll. 4–9 (1964). LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 768, ll. 134–39 (1962). Myl’nikova. 1990. ‘Sochastie v sud’be’. In Detskii dom: Uroki proshlogo. Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 154, as quoted in Zanozina and Kolosova (2008), p. 149. LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 915, ll. 10–16 (1961); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1142, ll. 42–50 (1965); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1663, ll. 69–74 (1971); GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9970, ll. 6–8 (1990–91).

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

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GARF, f. A259, op. 42, d. 2718, l. 3 (1959). GARF, f. R5446, op. 95, d. 240, l. 17 (1961). Galley (2021, pp. 115–18, pp. 137–38). GARF, f. A259, op. 42, d. 9623, ll. 167–70 (1961–62). They explained this ‘lag’ by naming provision problems and the poor care that most children had received in their families before entering the institutions, see GARF, f. A259, op. 42, d. 9624, ll. 70–79 (1962). In 1988, a report by the Control Committee on the state of residential childcare claimed that 20.42 percent of the children’s home population and 42.2 percent of children in boarding schools were diagnosed with intellectual disabilities. This tendency was even more developed in institutions for ‘orphans’ or children without parental care: about 44 percent of boarding schoolers and 72 percent in children’s homes had been diagnosed with some sort of developmental delay. It is, however, important to keep in mind frequent reproaches of ‘overdiagnosing’ children in care. GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9970, ll. 1–5, 6–8, 27, 33–54 (1990). Investigations in the RSFSR, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Latvia confirmed this impression, establishing that every second or third child in care had some sort of chronic health condition. GARF, f. R5446, op. 162, d. 843, ll. 33–51 (1990). In some parts of the Union, conditions were worse than that: in Stavropol krai, even 85 percent of institutionalised children had chronic health issues, see GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9969, ll. 58–61 (1990). Kharkhordin (1999, p. 75). For pedagogical explanations of the ‘collective’ see for example: S.I. Stankina. 1965. ‘K voprosu o vospitanii kollektiva i lichnosti vo vspomogatel’noi shkole-internate’, Spetsial’naia shkola 115.3: 37–42. There are several theoretical texts about the so-called rezhim, such as: Sal’nikova (1954); Gerbeev and Vinogradov (1976). Oxf/Lev SPb-05 PF69A, pp. 2–3, 6–8, 13, PF69B, 16. GASO f. 1427, op. 2, d. 142, ll. 5–7, 10–22 (1960); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 768, ll. 140–43, 144–47 (1961); GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 204, ll. 11–12 (1962); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 915, ll. 5–7, 38–40 (1962); GARF, f. A2306, op. 76, d. 1475, l. 27, 33 (1967); GARF f. R9527, op.1, d. 2124, ll. 165–73 (1968); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1357, ll. 22–38 (1968); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1663, ll. 69–74 (1971); GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9970, ll. 1–5 (1990). See account from Kurm¯ale children’s home, Latvian SSR: LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1235, ll. 21–30 (1966). See also similarly from Volgograd oblast’ in Russian SFSR, GARF f. R9527, op.1, d. 2124, ll. 165–73 (1968). Kucherenko (2016, p, 144). LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 915, ll. 9–16 (1961–62); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1235, ll. 1–7 (1966); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1424, ll. 27–34 (1969); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1930, ll. 103–08 (1981).

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42. GARF, f. A385, op. 26, del. 203, ll. 1–13, 88–102 (1962). 43. For examples of this see a publicised case Arkadii Stavitskii, ‘Pobeg’, Literaturnaia Gazeta, July 1974, 12, or archival files GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 6578, ll. 40–45, 48–54, 73–75, 143–56 (1960–61); GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 205, ll. 13–22, 36–39, 63–68 (1962). 44. See Maklak (2005); Bannikov (2004). 45. See reports about other cases like this here. GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 6578, ll. 40–45, 48–54, 73–75 (1960–61). 46. LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1003, ll. 3–5 (1963). 47. LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1089, ll. 1, 2–3 (1964). 48. This was still the case in post-Soviet Russia, see Khlinovskaya Rockhill (2010, p. 223). 49. GARF f. A2306, op. 72, del. 7257 (1959). 50. LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 519, ll. 52–56 (1958). 51. See for instance: LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 467, ll. 26–43 (1958); GARF, f. A385, op. 26, del. 205, ll. 63–68, both sides (1962); GARF, f. A259, op. 45, del. 7538, ll. 146–147 (1967); GASO f. 1427, op. 2, del. 647, ll. 2–4 (1973); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1912, ll. 118–126 (1980); TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 107, del. 293, ll.1–4, 5–6 (1984). 52. See for instance GASO f. 1427, op. 2, del. 115 (1954); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 649, ll. 60–64, 73–84, 85–101 (1961); GARF, f. A420, op. 1, del. 241, ll. 14–22, 26–31, 86–94 (1964); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1142, ll. 11– 19, 105–110 (1966); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1544, ll. 28–40 (1971); GU OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 173, del. 247, ll. 28–33 (1972); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1870, ll. 51–58, 70–81 (1977); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1992, ll. 45–48 (1984). In some institutions, housekeeping (domovodstvo) was offered as an option for girls: GARF f. A2306, op. 72, del. 7257 (1959); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1001, ll. 23–30 (1964); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1665, ll. 80–108 (1973); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1870, ll. 82–94 (1977). 53. See for instance LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 649, ll. 60–64, 85–101 (1961); GARF, f. A420, op. 1, del. 241, ll. 14–22 (1964); GU OGAChO, f. P288, op. 163, del. 177, ll. 191–204 (1967); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1870, ll. 51–58, 70–81 (1977); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1930, ll. 103–08 (1981); LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1992, ll. 33–38, 45–48 (1984). 54. Oxf/Lev SPb-05 PF68A, 21–2. 55. Oxf/Lev SPb-05 PF69B, 18. 56. Oxf/Lev P-05 PF9A, 3; Oxf/Lev SPb-04 PF48B, 45. 57. Galley (2021), pp. 184–89. See also Khlinovskaya Rockhill (2010, p. 190, p. 214, p. 228, p. 242). 58. GARF, f. A2306, op. 72, d. 7257 (1959); GARF, f. A259, op. 45, d. 7538, ll. 123–27, 167–71 (1967); GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9969, ll. 46–51, 58–61 (1990); GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9970, ll. 70–76 (1990– 91).

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59. GARF, f. R9527, op. 1, d. 9970, ll. 6–8 (1990–91). 60. Latvian procuracy files from 1959 to 1963 suggest that the local youth commissions repeatedly ignored or rejected the colonies’ requests to release teenagers. See, for instance, LVA f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 264, ll. 7– 9, 12–14; lie. 637 (1959–60); LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 637, l. 76 (1960); LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 638, ll. 106–7, 112–14 (1960). 61. GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 6578, ll. 129–142 (1960). 62. GU OGAChO, f. R288, op. 173, d. 247, ll. 23–27 (1972). The Latvian procuracy made the same point about Latvian colonies: GARF, f. R8131, op. 32, d. 6578, ll. 73–75 (1960–61); there are similar testimonies about Russian youth commissions: GARF, f. A385, op. 26, d. 204, ll. 1–10 (1962). The institutions’ reluctance to commit to helping their former urchins worried the authorities, as children would ‘work or study nowhere for a considerable time, and in consequence they commit crimes again’. See LVA, f. 700, ap. 5, lie. 1426, ll. 8–30 (1970). 63. A report written with a little more empathy provides a good example. The colony director seems to have found a girl’s situation unfair; and blamed her mother for the conviction. According to him, the girl ‘had found herself educated by a single mother who had not been doing any socially useful labour, traveled around the city with her children and forced them to beg’. LVA, f. 270, ap. 3, lie. 637, ll. 13–14 (1960). 64. Asafova (1963), p. 28; Terent’eva (1970); Vel’gus (1970). 65. Iakovenko (1971), pp.37–9. Documents from the 1980s give a similar impression: in 1984, 609 children graduated from the 34 boarding schools for children with intellectual disabilities in Sverdlovsk oblast’. 62.5 percent went straight to work, two thirds of which started in the trade they were trained in; 33.7 percent got training at a local vocational school (PTU), and 3.8 percent were taken straight out of the workforce. See TsDOOSO, f. 4, op. 107, d. 293, ll.1–4, 5–6 (1984). 66. As explained by Shalimov (1970, pp 27–28). 67. Oxf/Lev SPb-04 PF48, 52–3. This was a common thing, according to Zanozina and Kolosova, Sirotstvo i besprizornost’, 139. 68. Oxf/Lev SPb-04 PF48A, 44. Oxf/Lev SPb-04 PF48B, 52: ‘You see, there we went out, to life, really like ugly ducklings’. 69. GARF, f. R5446, op. 145, d. 1258, ll. 27–32 (1983–85). 70. Oxf/Lev P-05 PF14A, 10; Oxf/Lev SPb-05 PF68A, 25. 71. Oxf/Lev SPb-04 PF48B, 54.

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Bibliography Asafova, A.G. 1963. Katamnezy detei, okonchivshikh 30-iu vspomogatel’nuiu shkolu Moskvy v 1955–1960 uchebnykh godakh. In Spetsial’naia Shkola 108 (4): 70–75. Bannikov, Konstantin. 2004. Regimented Communities in a Civil Society. In The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 1. Online Since 29 September 2005. http://journals.openedition.org/pipss/40 (accessed on 22 June 2018). Coumel, Laurent. 2006. L’appareil du parti et la réforme scolaire de 1958: Un cas d’opposition à Hruscev. Cahiers Du Monde Russe 47 (1): 173–194. Davies, Christie. 1989. Goffman’s Concept of the Total Institution: Criticisms and Revisions. Human Studies 12: 77–95. Dobson, Miriam. 2009. Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dobson, Miriam. 2011. The Post-Stalin Era: De-Stalinization, Daily Life, and Dissent. Kritika 12 (4): 905–924. Field, Deborah. 2007. Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia. New York: Peter Lang. Field, Mark. 1991. Soviet Health Problems and Convergence Hypothesis. In Soviet Social Problems, ed. Anthony Jones, Walter Connor, and David Powell, 78–93. Boulder: Westview Press. Galley, Mirjam. 2021. Building Communism and Policing Deviance in the Soviet Union: Residential Childcare, 1958–1991. London: Routledge. Gerbeev, Iu.V., and A.A. Vinogradova. 1976. Sistema vospitatel’noi raboty v detskom dome: Posobie dlia vospitatelia. Moscow: Ministerstvo Proveshcheniia RSFSR. Goffman, Erving. 1991. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. London: Penguin, 1st ed. 1961. Harris, Steven. 2012. Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin. Washington, DC: John Hopkins University Press. Human Rights Watch ed. 1998. Abandoned by the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages. New York/Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch. Iakovenko, M.I. 1971. Trudoustroistvo vypusknikov vspomogatel’noi shkoly [iz materialov iubileinykh vsesoiuznykh “pedagogicheskikh chtenii” 1970g’. Defektologii 1: 37–39. Iavkin, V. 1970. O rabote v Vsesoiuznogo S‘‘esda nevropatologov i psikhiatrov. Defektologiia 2: 92–96. Kaz’min, N.D., ed. 1958. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie po shkolam-internatam (19–23 aprelia 1957 g.): Stenograficheski otchet. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebnopedagogicheskoe izdatel’stvo Ministerstva Prosveshcheniia RSFSR. Kelly, Catriona. 2006. Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890–1991. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Kharkhordin, Oleg. 1999. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kucherenko, Olga. 2016. Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control Under Stalin. London: Bloomsbury. LaPierre, Brian. 2012. Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia: Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance During the Thaw. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maiofis, Mariia. 2016. Pansiony trudovykh rezervov: formirovanie sistemy shkolinternatov v 1954–1964 godakh. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 142 (2): no pagination. Maklak, Alena. 2005. Dedovshchina on trial: Some Evidence Concerning the Last Soviet Generation of “Sons” and “Grandfathers.” Nationalities Papers 43 (5): 682–699. Pevzner, M.S. 1970. Osnovnye Napravleniia v Izuchenii Oligofrenii. Defektologiia 2: 40–44. Reid, Susan. 2011. Building Utopia in the Back Yard: Housing Administration, Participatory Government and the Cultivation of Socialist Community. In Mastering Russian Spaces: Raum und Raumbewältigung als Probleme der russischen Geschichte, ed. Karl Schlögel, 149–186. München: DeGruyter Oldenbourg. Rockhill, Khlinovskaya, and Elena. 2010. Lost to the State: Family Discontinuity, Social Orphanhood and Residential Care in the Russian Far East. New York: Berghahn. Sal’nikova, G.P. 1954. Rezhim dnia vospitannikov shkol’nogo detskogo doma. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Pedagogicheskikh Nauk RSFSR. Shalimov, V.F. 1970. Katamnesticheskoe izuchenie oligofrenov. Defektologiia 4: 26–32. Smith, Mark. 2010. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Terent’eva. N.A. 1970. Trudovaia i obshchestvennaia deiatel’nost’ vypusnikov Gor’kovskoi shkoly-internata dlia glukhikh. Defektologiia 4: 56–59. Vel’gus. V.M. 1970. Proizvodstvennaia podgotovka I trudovoe ustroistvo glukhikh uchashchikhsia. Defektologiia 6: 54–60. Zanozina, V.N., E.M. Kolosova, et al. 2008. Sirotstvo i besprizornost’ v Rossii: Istoriia i sovremennost’. St. Petersburg. Zhidova, Elena. 2012. Family, Divorce, and Comrades’ Courts: Soviet Family and Public Organizations during the Thaw. In And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Central Europe, ed. H. Carlbäck, Y. Gradskova, and Z. Kravchenko, 47–64. Budapest: Central European University Press. Zubrilin, Iu.K. 1971. Sovmestnaia rabota pedagogov i vrachei v uchrezhdeniiakh dlia gluboko umstvenno otstalykh detei. Defektologiia 2: 30–36.

PART III

People and Networks

CHAPTER 9

Spatiality, Semiotics and the Cultural Shaping of Children: The Boarding School Experience in Colonial India, 1790–1955 Tim Allender

This chapter examines the boarding school in colonial India, 1790–1955. While nominally of European shape and form, its precincts filtered and exemplified the products of empire, where the bodies of boarding house children reflected the broader discourses of empire. The chapter draws on written and visual records, recovered in colonial and Indian archives, located in India and in Europe. The voices are mostly European, yet the Eurasian and Indian experience is also partly detected, reading these same European-derived sources. There were two distinct manifestations of the colonial boarding house experience, each with its own cultural variants: boarding for elites and

T. Allender (B) The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_9

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boarding for orphans. At both levels, they were focal points of transnational flows of culture and practice. The first incarnation is the most recognisable, at least on the surface. This was a boarding house shape and form transferred directly from the metropole. It was based on Anglo-Saxon upper-class schooling there, mostly after 1860 and partly localised in a cultural sense for the children of colonial elites in India. The second incarnation began two generations earlier, around 1790, and entangled the contested colonial space of the ‘orphan’. Here, there was much more colonial dissembling where a pretended ethic of care covered over a mostly barren, anonymous and exploitative domestic space. Children in these boarding houses were disempowered by their poverty and their lack of an intervening parent (though many parents were still living). For these mostly destitute ‘orphans’, the boarding house threshold more closely incarcerated their body, adorning it with emblems that signified its loss of traditional culture and usually converting it to a foreign, monotheistic (Christian) religion. In this secondary category, if the orphan was female, occupation of the boarding house space usually meant servitude in the colonial patronised laundry, adorned with the nomenclature ‘laundry classes’: a phenomenon not unknown in Europe. Additionally, at the macrolevel, rather than a manifestation of Western philanthropy, these ‘orphan’ boarding houses served the changing power agendas of the raj (colonial India) that anonymised its occupants and operationalised racial, class and gender exclusions, especially regarding Eurasians (mostly children of mixed European and Indian lineage).

The Boarding School for Elites, 1840--1955 The shape and form of the boarding school for elites in colonial India principally preserved the gender divide of Europe, a divide already required by Indians (although for different cultural reasons).1 For boys, this boarding experience reflected elite brands of English Public schooling that were later transferred to the white empire. This ethic was known later as the Amateur Ideal. It was most manifest on the cricket and rugby sporting fields in England where qualities of ‘manliness’, entitled leadership and competitive struggle were supposedly taught: providing class credentials for an entrée into Oxbridge and then on to privileged employment in the upper levels of the civil service, the army, the established

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church or in business.2 In colonial India, this ethic was to be found in a transferred form in elite boarding schools such as St Paul’s School (Anglican), relocated to Darjeeling (West Bengal) in 1864 and at St Xavier’s College (Roman Catholic) founded in 1860 in Calcutta. As in other parts of the empire, sport at this level and with this construction, crossed over the Western sectarian divide (Protestant/Roman Catholic) with relative ease.3 And playing rugby or cricket in India’s hot and sticky climate, overcoming the cultural offence for Hindus of touching a leather ball, was part of this cultural and class transferral. Additionally, in places such as Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan (part of colonial India before 1947), these institutions filled their sunken cricket ovals like swimming pools with millions of gallons of precious water each evening to maintain the verdant English playing field aesthetic (and still do today) on which boarders could play. Despite their strong and separate religious foundations, these schools, and others like them, mimicked the privileged routes to adulthood to be found in like schools throughout Europe. And boarding facilities in these institutions allowed a geographically, thinly spread population of relatively affluent boys in India to participate, whose parents were culturally attuned to this brand of education. Yet, even with this strong and largely singular European cultural and class transfer, these institutions also had earlier pasts in India where the local domain intervened and where new exclusions emerged. In fact, the separate and different connections to the subcontinent determined the location and the geographies of their boarding clientele. For example, St Pauls had been originally founded in Calcutta (once occupying the site of the Calcutta Museum) in 1829. This earlier foundation was made possible because its clientele were the sons of East India Company Officials or of wealthy merchants who were mostly Europeans living in the city. However, with such a narrow base, and with possibilities (particularly after the opening of Suez in 1869) for the wealthiest of these children to more speedily travel back to Europe for an education instead, this institution was forced to relocate to the cooler air of the hills of Darjeeling. This was where European diplomats and English colonial administrators of Bengal mostly resided for much of the year, particularly after the shock of the Great Revolt of 1857. The Great Revolt made Indian civil servants wary of travelling out to the mofussil (outlying areas) or living in the summer months on Bengal’s sweltering plains. On the other hand, St Xavier’s was able to remain in its urban domain in the city of Calcutta (like its brother boarding school, St Xavier’s

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in Bombay). This was because Roman Catholics in both these cities had longer-standing histories in India, harkening back to pre-British, Portuguese settlement.4 This earlier history meant Roman Catholic congregations were much more cross-racial and likely to be found in the sprawling urban areas of India. They were viewed with suspicion by most Protestant Britishers: particularly their teachers who were often Jesuits who had a global propensity for undermining the strictures of colonial governance.5 Yet, the more indigenised Roman Catholic religion offered particular preference to Roman Catholic middle-class and wealthy Eurasian boarders instead. Most of these boarders could not participate in the high-end raj areas of governance, precluded by both their race and their religion for most of the nineteenth century. As a result, though still mimicking the forms of the Amateur Ideal on the sporting field (to compete with the Protestants as in other parts of the empire), these boarders were less in number compared to the day-students in these institutions. This elite Roman Catholic boarding space became one where boarder mentality was not so much about creating transplanted products of the British Empire like elite Protestant boarding (though many Eurasians aspired to such recognition particularly in contrast to Indians). Instead, it was about maintaining itself as superintending a distinct cultural grouping: using its educational advantages to further careers in India and aboard as a diaspora, and where this identity still holds connections today in countries such as Canada, Australia and the UK.6 Furthermore, many of these students in Roman Catholic colleges and schools more speedily moved towards a primary focus on university-level examinations as India’s universities grew in stature in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay (founded in 1857 on the initial University of London model). This was in preference to the empire-wide upper Cambridge examinations, which, though still demanding, did not reflect the Indian-focused content that largely became a feature of India’s domestic universities by the beginning of the twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, boarding schools and colleges, particularly those which accommodated mixed-race Eurasians, and eventually wealthy Indians, were turning more inwardly to a focus on Indian-based academic discourse, while maintaining what they saw as the best parts of the imperial footprint. This gave rise to debating societies, lectures on Indian languages, as well as studies into Indian literature (mostly separate from external examinations). Active learning in this sense for

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boarders, who had the out-of-school time to engage in these activities, revitalised the rather staid British ideas of what counted for knowledge in India, and some of these boarders would eventually become a thorn in the side of colonial government as they became adults. Elite government colleges, that had no such religious affiliation, such as Government College University Lahore in Punjab, became places of willing epistemological and linguistic contest, where knowledge based on the learning of ‘oriental’ languages and local vernaculars was openly pursued in defiance of the government-mandated curricula.7 These shifts in mentality regarding what it meant to be an elite boarder in India were profound, though most in India remained excluded, even by the twentieth century. This was even though these boarding schools and college experiences were later valorised by some Indian elites, who became future leaders of an Independent India. By 1914, the junior teachers attached to these boarding schools had become mostly Indian, where there was now more educational intimacy. Boarders were included in discussions by these teachers about the books these teachers were writing on Indian philosophy and cultural life, often in close reference to the towering Indian intellectual leaders of their time, including Rabindranath Tagore.8 By the 1920s, some of these boarding schools and colleges were nurturing future leaders from both staff and student ranks, such as independence leader and ally of Gandhi, Charles F. Andrews,9 teacher at St Stephen’s College in Delhi10 and, later, Jyoti Basu, the Chief Minister of Bengal (1977–2000), who had been a student at St Xavier’s in Calcutta.11 Significantly, however, these boarding cohorts did not represent a clear-cut alignment with nationalist politics that only sold the virtues of a non-colonial Indian life. To this day, some of these former boarders still see their relatively well-funded alma maters (despite their original colonial foundation) as having provided them with a superior education because of their original Christian Western orientation. Somewhat paradoxically, they see their earlier education as a mediation that helped secure a modern secular India and without caste exclusions: carrying on an Indian reformist social agenda and providing the advantage of learning English. As one such former student has recounted about his boarding school experience in the 1950s: Indian schools did not have the infrastructure and the discipline of English medium schools - uniforms and books, and the mix of academic and

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sporting endeavour and [they promoted] the importance of social interaction of boys and girls of different [Indian] religions. Promoting secular India was predominantly [done] by English medium schools. In Indian schools there were still conflicts of caste, despite laws about this, and about traditions and social teachings. English speaking schools made no distinction between Sudras (untouchables) and Brahmins.12

There was also their architecture. Most of these colonial boarding schools for elites—usually attached to the final years of schooling— remained grand affairs to attract the wealthy parent market. Their architecture was often an amalgam of Western-styled stone masonry: sometimes built in basalt and other expensive stones sourced at long distances (and with the higher roofing sections often built by nimble Indian women). Yet, again, even in this sense, a strong accommodation with India was apparent. Particularly in North India, there was a marked intervention of Mughal decoration: large Indian vaulted hallways supported by Mughal shaped arches and, outside, cupolas atop towers that imitated minarets. The daunting effects of such imposing buildings on would-be boarders and their parents were intentional (see, for example, Fig. 9.1 below). And this mixture of architectures partly foreshadowed and was influenced by government buildings such as Lockwood Kipling’s Lahore Museum (1865), the Viceroy’s Lodge in Shimla (1888), the public buildings of Edwin Lutyen’s New Delhi (1931) and much of the civic centre of Bombay. (This architectural amalgam also found its way back to the metropole and other parts of the white empire.)13 Yet, from the early and mid-nineteenth century onwards, the boarding spaces contained within these buildings remained quintessentially European: lines of partitioned beds in dormitories, for example, that generally did not need divisions for caste—the latter which was often the case in poorer missionary boarding institutions of this period.14 Of course, these constructions were only mostly about elite male boarders in India. For females of the same class (if not race), different dynamics were at work, though they were still largely Western predicated. Female boarding at this level was often led by Roman Catholic religious orders. Government rarely funded Indian female education beyond the primary years (itself only accounting for between one and two per cent of the Indian school-age population).15 With strong cultural barriers regarding purdah, particularly in wealthy families, boarding for Indian girls remained rare. Yet, Loreto (a Roman Catholic female teaching order)

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Fig. 9.1 Queen Mary College, Lahore

for example, offered other English semiotics in its main boarding house, and this was to attract better-off Europeans and Eurasians and day-school Indians. The female boarding house terrain was a tricky colonial site to navigate, yet its semiotics and space did much of the work. Accomplishment education (etiquette, needlework, drawing, languages and poetry) reinforced the family class aspirations for these girls, in much the same way as in Europe. And a kind of Western enculturation was also permissible for Indian families, provided this experience avoided any incursions into the Indian religion of their children. This was to make these Indian girls more attractive in the marriage market (better conversationalists for educated partners and more able superintendents of their respective partly Westernised households in India). However, by the twentieth century, the aspiration had partly evolved into pathways towards university-level education in its own right for these females as they became teachers and

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physicians (the latter career path more earlier available to some in India than for any in England at the end of the nineteenth century). Furthermore, the Roman Catholic boarding school for females, through its shape, its food, and its European social ‘form’, was a lynchpin, whereby the resulting relatively high fees it could attract could be then used to partly cross-subsidise Roman Catholic boarding schools for the poor and orphaned (still along European lines) as part of its outreach for the abandoned and the destitute.16 On this score, a glimpse inside Loreto House, Calcutta (Fig. 9.2, an image made for the parent market), gives something of the spatiality and form at dinner, the high point for the display of the accomplished female boarder. This display is at the table and not in the dormitory, with Western crystal, cutlery, white tablecloths and bent-wood chairs. The title is ‘Refectory’ and not ‘Dining Hall’: a colonial etymology that reinforced Western-constructed class exclusivity. And the closeness and order of the array imply discipline on the part of the participants, with many boarding participants already. The crowded table suggests that other aspirants might have to compete for these in-demand boarding positions. Yet, the boarders, themselves, are conveniently absent to show the material opulence to parents and not, perhaps, the aesthetic of the racial inter-mixture of the girls. The only seeming concession to the East being the punkahs above, pulled side to side by punkah wallahs (Indian servants) to provide cooling for Western smocked and linen-dressed boarding school girls. Elite boarding of this kind offered one repertoire of transnational connection and only for the very few, who were usually the sons and daughters of Europeans, wealthy Eurasians and close Indian-colonial collaborators. Additionally, European females in India, as colonial cultural warriors, enforced the Western norms of these boarding houses. Even in India’s overwhelming heat and rainy seasons, they strictly maintained their whale-bone corsets and their European clothes without compromise throughout the colonial period.17 The setting up of elite boarding schools helped enforce this form of cultural incarceration for younger European and some Eurasian females born in India. Furthermore, the boarding house, particularly when configured as a purely non-educational colonial domestic space in India, could also act as a primary protector of Christianity. For example, in 1879, the Church Mission Society (CMS) (low-church Anglican missionaries) opted for this strategy when its funds would not stretch to fully-fledged educational or medical institutions in Eastern India.18 Additionally, Marion

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Fig. 9.2 Loreto House, Calcutta, Refractory (© Loreto Archives, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin)

and Ellen Storrs (originally sent out to India by the Oxbridge-backed Missionary Settlement for University Women to establish a female college in Bombay) had to agree to the lesser brief instead of setting up a hostel in Bombay in 1896 for similar reasons.19 The strategy here was to evangelise the domestic space provided by boarding for the children of converts in outlying regions, so they would be unsullied when attending India’s urban-based, secular colleges and universities.

Boarding Schools for ‘Orphans’, 1790--1880 As outlined in the introduction, there was a second category of boarding experience in colonial India, which predated much of the development of boarding for elites. This much earlier boarding incarnation for the poor was more revealing of the changing colonial meta-powerplays in

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the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century India. Additionally, these boarding house experiences were located at the centre of the ‘orphan’ polemic that touched many more children of mostly Eurasian and Indian descent. Their identity was closely aligned to their institutionalisation as a largely anonymous group of children, disempowered by their lack of living parents or by the poverty of these parents if they were actually still living. In some senses, the corralling of orphans into institutional spaces was not new to India. For example, the Mughal courts (before the arrival of the British) in North India carried out language deprivation experiments with orphans that concerned a kind of anthropology. These experiments (also known in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece) deprived these orphans from their birth of any spoken language, so to discover the essence of ‘true human nature’ without the prompt of any spoken word from others.20 There was also possible social mobility in these pre-British times and probably more so than in Europe. For example, in the late eighteen century, Begum Samru (1753–1836) rose to great power and wealth as the ruler of Sardhana (Northcentral India) despite her Nautch (dancing) girl past and her suspected orphan heritage.21 However, in British times in India after 1788, it was the low status of orphans that built different mentalities around boarding spaces and who might be included and excluded. This disempowering arrangement for participants centred on the military (as any kind of official philanthropy in this early period nearly always usually did). Most particularly, in this period, in India, East India Company control (the delegated British colonial power at the time) was weak and heavily reliant on the army. And, as a result, so-called military asylums were built that mostly excluded all others except the children of European soldiers and officers. These children were the product of liaisons, or even co-habitation, with Indian or Eurasian women. Already sorely tested by the privations and deadly diseases of the subcontinent, soldiers could fund (along with the East India Company subsidisation) the survival of their children by institutionalising them in military boarding institutions for children. Soldier and officer subscriptions payable to these institutions were publicly and unashamedly advertised in the local newspapers under soldier or officer name (thus nearly always indicating their illegitimate children in these institutions), despite the Western turpitude that the very existence of these children signified. Yet, this seemed to be the best solution in a more morally liberal India, at least in a social sense when it concerned European

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males. There was every chance a soldier could be redeployed or killed in battle and the protection of his children was unlikely to be assured by their consequently destitute Indian mothers—already abandoned by their traditional communities for their European-based sexual alliances in the first place. Alternatively, military cantonments (soldier barracks) were where many such soldier children roamed between the ale houses, grog shops, prostitutes and the fetid surrounds of these colonial spaces. (Anna Leonowens, author of The King and I , was the product of one of these cantonments in Bombay later in the century.)22 Military morale seemed to be best protected by the corralling of these children into boarding institutions instead. These sites (military asylums) for military children and their shape and form anticipated the Duke of York’s famous military asylum in Chelsea in England founded thirteen years later in 1801.23 They remained a relatively rare institutionalisation of children in this period, but India quickly adopted them for other purposes. The first was for educational experimentation. The Madras Military Asylum, established in the late 1780s, was where Andrew Bell developed his technology of monitorial schooling— a model immediately attractive to the metropole because of its relative cheapness.24 As these children were the result of sexual alliances with Indian (or Eurasian) women, these boarding houses became mediators of other forms of social control, too, that were designed to actually exclude them from European futures. Up until the 1840s, Company concern was that these Eurasian children might develop expectations that they were entitled to white privilege in India and become dangerously dissatisfied when their meagre material circumstances did not give them access to this privilege in adult life. The concern was met, the Company imagined, by regulating what these boarding children ate—rice and pepper water rather than bread, milk and tea. Education for them was poor or non-existent, being taught a fare, even the East India Company admitted, that was ‘perfectly useless’.25 They were sometimes directed by those of Portuguese descent who were ‘destitute of education and without knowledge of the world’, or those who would accept very low stipends (not much more than that available to Indians) and whose only required credential was their Christian upbringing.26 The aim of these asylums was to assimilate oppression, to condition boarders to a life of servitude in the houses of wealthy Europeans.27 Furthermore, to reinforce the Eurasian racial barrier separate from Europeans (once hardly apparent during the early

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years of the British in India), the girls in these boarding houses were forbidden to marry European soldiers.28 The focus of this form of boarding remained on restricting the child’s future in this way for much of the first half of the nineteenth century; however, it was the status of the father which remained in view. For this reason, while the culture of their military fathers was to be detached from these ‘orphan’ boarding house children, their class was not. As a consequence of this, these ‘orphan’ children were assigned to different asylums according to the rank of their military fathers. In cities like Calcutta, the children of officers enjoyed a commodious boarding house in a relatively grand and airy three-storied building surrounded by English-referenced gardens, while that afforded to those of ordinary soldiers was a much more basic accommodation.29

Mission Boarding After 1813, however, with the reluctant admission by the East India Company of the Christian missions to India, these highly exclusionary army-sponsored boarding house settings were eventually overtaken by another dynamic. Orphans and their housing in boarding house mission buildings became the centre of a fierce cultural battle between Hindus and Christian missionaries. This was as the latter attempted a toe-hold on the subcontinent. These missionaries were unable to entice many children (particularly females) of living Hindu or Muslim parents into mission schools because of the unexpectedly strong cultural and religious resistance of these parents to these schools. In response to this resistance, the newly arriving Protestant missions in particular developed a reliance on ‘famine orphans’ and other destitute children instead.30 These children, as mostly genuine orphans, were disempowered by their poverty and their lack of connection (through a living parent) to the robust Indian cultural spaces that the British usually underestimated as part of their broader colonial ‘civilising’ mission in India. The body of the orphan, or at least its numbers, now became the centrepiece of claims these missionaries could make back to their parent organisations in England, as to their early successes in India. Mrs Wilson’s Church Missionary Society (CMS) girls’ school in Calcutta, founded in 1820, was one such institution, where boarding became a key part. These new boarding arrangements offered food and shelter, yet they still required a degree of initial spatial assimilation, where building spaces became

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important to entice reluctant Indian new comers, still uncomfortable in crossing European-defined thresholds. These buildings needed to mediate the outdoors where cultural territory was neither Indian nor European. When Mrs Wilson [a CMS missionary] first came among them they [Indian children] wd not consent to come into our verandah preferring rather to sit in the mud than enter the house—but now they consent to come miles through the street… and enter the rooms which adjoin the old mission church.31

Eventually, for those Indian girls who did venture across the missionary threshold, their boarding experience was one of commerce to make money for the mission rather than attaining any real level of education. For the CMS in Calcutta for example, their job (apart from the usual domestic chores) morphed into unpacking and getting ready for sale fancy lace work and dresses (sent by mission donors from England in soldered tin containers) to Calcutta’s European elite. This was a rushed process to keep a market edge by beating the larger merchant houses in the city in the delivery of Europe’s latest female fashions.32 It was true the boys in this and other missions probably achieved some education (beyond the mere learning and translating of the catechism) in these settings.33 But for orphan girls who were boarders, this task vested in colonial commerce also signified their strong detachment from their Hindu or Muslim heritage: a detachment these early missions were so keen to achieve. For almost 20 years, their work in these boarding houses produced enough revenue for the mission so it could cover over the fact that it had so little success in reaching the broader Hindu and Muslim communities in the city.

Prototype Female Boarders These forms of social engineering were to change again by the late 1850s in India. By this time, the body of the boarder, as military ‘orphan’, and then as part of mission commerce, gradually emerged in another form, in some highly restrictive boarding settings. This new form personified, instead, the prototype learner, teacher and exemplar of Western cultural knowledge. The change concerned mostly female boarders (though these new settings included both genders), and the focus was once again Eurasians. Additionally, the change was now much more centrally directed

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by the post-1857 colonial state, which was no longer controlled by the East India Company but indirectly from Westminster in London. By the 1850s, the Governor General of India had become anxious about the rising number of Eurasian children in India, many of whom were in a destitute condition, despite the legacy of earlier military asylums and other forms of colonial regulation. By this time, the birth rate of purely European babies was being outstripped by that for Eurasian babies (state calculations did not consider the far more numerous purely Indian births) and the demography caused alarm in official circles in India. This was because an uncontrolled and vagrant Eurasian population might give the lie to British claims to racial superiority, even when children were of mixed Indian/European lineage.34 After the revolt of the Sepoys within the hallowed ranks of the army in 1857, the idea of any further rifts in the fragile veneer of colonial India was unthinkable to the British. To address this state-led anxiety, new boarding houses were set up and known as Lawrence Military Asylums (named after Henry Lawrence—a senior military casualty at the bloody siege of Lucknow as part of the 1857 Great Revolt). And in these asylums, for both Eurasian and European children of the British Army, a new kind of boarding experience emerged. These boarding schools were impressive in terms of the scale of their European-style buildings. Each senior boarder was made responsible for the personal hygiene of the younger boarders, and a uniform for the girls was introduced of English print, pelerines (short capes) and cambric bonnets.35 Though parents were mostly absent, a growing awareness by educational reformers in these new institutions of a supposed positive social conditioning parents could have on a child meant that they could stay in adjacent bungalows for up to two weeks: provided they brought their own food and bedding and were prepared to share with other parents—even when other mothers might be Indian.36 This boarding experience was designed with the ‘domestic hearth’ in mind, still regimented but melded with a quasi-Western domesticity and without a religious or commercial purpose. This boarding house experience also allowed for girls and boys to learn together in the same classrooms for some of the time (history, geometry, arithmetic): cutting across the usual gender divides of Europe, where middle-class girls were only taught a curriculum of accomplishments that signified their refinement and their class as suitable future wives of the wealthy. These co-educational classes in the Lawrence Military Asylums may have been partly because of a shortage of staff in the early years,

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but it set a precedent where many Indian and Eurasian girls qualified as physicians and lawyers two generations later at India’s universities, well ahead of their sisters at the metropole. Additionally, both genders also learnt Urdu—the language of both Hindu and Muslim (usually male) elites.37 There was also a conscious insertion of new forms of pedagogy, away from the out-dated monitorial educational technology of earlier boarding settings in India. This new teaching focused on direct teacher intervention in the classroom with all students. It was also based on the child learner as experimenter of logic and the testing of hypotheses (if not broader problem-solving approaches). These approaches had been deliberately imported from Norwood School in London for the destitute and were based on the ideas of Thomas Tate and Johann Pestalozzi that aimed at building the moral character of the child through education and their capacity to soundly reason.38 Furthermore, this boarding experience offered these children a warmer form of institutional refuge. Most children were Eurasian in these new boarding settings and the enculturation built a kind of racial tribalism that, in the following decades, offered the state a cohort it would heavily favour in terms of funding for their future careers through a highly exclusionary Government Code schooling system, to which only Europeans and Eurasians could belong.39

Building Colonial Capacity By the 1870s, boarding schools had developed several purposes (both for elites and for the poor) and the ethnicity and religion of their boarders broadened somewhat as a consequence. These boarding spaces were responsible in creating new educational dynamics in colonial India, some of which carry on to this day. In central mission compounds, wealthy Europeans, Eurasians and Indians were often afforded ‘boarding’ status to satisfy parents that they were being kept away from low-caste Indians, the latter only being permitted to attend its day-schools.40 This pragmatism also avoided censure from their parent mission bodies at the metropole, which steadfastly aimed to rid India of caste as part of the Christian civilising mission which, in turn, remained internal to the colonial project itself. For boys, there were boarding schools associated with the learning of engineering at Roorkee (North India). And by the 1880s, boarding became a means to attract promising girls into institutions which were able to grow as a consequence over several generations to become significant learning institutions in the twentieth century: not least of all because

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their boarding houses gave them capacity to recruit talented students from across India and who, by their co-habitation as boarders, built strong modernity trajectories away from the strictures of localised Indian traditional cultures. These included Thoburn College which was established at Lucknow (northcentral India). Under the direction of the American Episcopal Mission (and with a distinctively American ecumenical and academic approach when gathering its teaching staff), it eventually crossed over many traditional cultural boundaries to become a centre of female Muslim learning.41 Others included the Tucker Institution in Palamcottah (south India) and Priscilla Winter’s Teaching College in Delhi: the latter recruiting the most able students from across India and which, in just a little over a decade, in 1877, had grown to 840 pupils taught by 53 teachers. All three of these institutions were to rise to the status of women’s colleges by the 1890s. Winter’s Medical College for Women (again with a boarding arm that allowed it to attract and lodge safely the most able of Eurasian women from across India) followed a similar trajectory, but this time to build the status necessary for its students to become physicians, nurses and (Western-trained) midwives well ahead of the rest of India.42 On the Indian side of the ledger boarding was critical for the Bethune School for Indian girls in Calcutta. This school was able to retain a stronger reference to Indian culture, where girls could learn about the renovation of Hinduism, especially as this related to women, promoted by its Brahmo Samaj sponsors.43 This close boarding environment taught them in a cultural sense (and not just intellectually) that child marriage, sati (widow burning) and caste were merely medieval vestiges and were not resonant of the Vedas and of ancient Hinduism. Science and English as a world (not colonial) language were taught and the school’s boarding house meant, by 1929, 50 per cent of its enrolment of 486 girls were from the mofussil and 75% came from traditional Hindu backgrounds.44

Conclusion The boarding experience in colonial India was a site of fierce exclusion of the many. At the same time, its contours of space and its semiotics strongly engaged broader colonial imperatives that entangled race, gender and class in empire in distinctive constellations. For the most part, in the

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late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the racial barrier secured by boarding only admitted those with at least some European lineage. Boarding also later entrenched white privilege in a way that palely imitated the West. For Indians, finally able to participate in some numbers in the early twentieth century, boarding could build political awareness. Yet, this was often with an accompanying distain for India’s non-colonial institutions, viewed by these privileged Indians, instead, mostly as bastions of India’s cultural backwardness. These were different outcomes. However, it was the body of the Eurasian boarder, rather than that of the European or the Indian, that was convulsed the most. This was because the boarding domain emphasised the colonial significance of the Eurasian body and then compelled it to respond to the changing and capricious agendas of the raj. It was true some Eurasian boarders crossed the Western class divide, but unlike Europeans or Indians, both Eurasian genders, male and female, were grouped together under the same state education directives. These directives, it turned out, informed emerging eugenic thought at the metropole around the ‘primacy’ of Anglo-Saxon racial lineage: a lineage that these Eurasians partly shared. Most significantly, boarding built a new kind of ‘otherness’, with strong emotional and cultural rifts that were particularly corrosive in India where the colonial arm already artificially stratified, categorised and anonymised the disempowered. This boarding phenomenology damaged most of those individuals who were temporarily included. Touched in this way on the cusp of empire, their subsequent personal stories slipped from view as they entered an adult world of impoverishment, now destitute and unable to further their earlier boarding cultural shaping.

Notes 1. For the most authoritative explanation of these cultural differences between the European and the Indian domain regarding female consciousness and activism, at least as patriarchies saw them, see Chatterjee (1993, pp. 116–134). 2. Cashman (1995); Mangan (1998). 3. For an analysis of this phenomenon in the Australian context, see Sherington and Horne (2010). 4. St Xavier’s, Calcutta, was originally founded by an order of Irish Jesuits. This establishment went bankrupt in 1844 and the order returned to

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5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

Ireland. They were replaced by an order of Belgium Jesuits in 1860 who carried the institution through to the present day. As in parts of Europe, Jesuit orders were usually mistrusted by the British in their empire domains largely for their counter-establishment work. In India, this work included educating groups of lower caste Indians in outlying areas via Indian languages and equipping these students (many of whom took up boarding residence) to question the tenets of colonial rule and its flagrant favouring of Europeans in India, especially Protestant colonial elites. Andrews and Raj (2021), passim. Allender (2007). Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was an Indian intellectual who won the Nobel Prize for literature. With interests in many areas of human endeavour concerning the arts, he was a leading thinker concerning social reform and a strong opponent of British colonial rule in India. The Reverend Charles F. Andrews was styled a lecturer teaching philosophy joining St Stephen’s College in 1904, Delhi. He interacted with Indian students and staff protesting the racist attitudes of the British raj. He became an ally of M. K. Gandhi and his non-violent resistance strategy against the British, until his return to England in 1935. This college was originally founded by the Anglican ‘Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’ mission in 1860. Jyoti Basu was, in fact, an influential member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from 1951 and eventually served as Chief Minister for an extended period, 1977–2000. He was first educated as a boy at de Dharmatala for five years before moving to St Xavier’s School in 1925. After an English Literature degree from Presidency College, Calcutta, he studied Law in Britain and was strongly influenced by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Interview with a former student in the 1950s of St Xavier’s College, Calcutta (Perth, August 2, 2018). For a broader analysis of how motifs of oriental architecture and other art forms were disseminated throughout the British Empire, see McAleer and Mackenzie (2017). Howell (1922, p. ii, p. 46); Banerjea to Bethune (n. d. [c. 1849]) in Bhattacharya et al. (2001, p. 7); Journal of the National Indian Association. 1871 (November). 11 (OIOC). For the racial percentage breakdowns of females going to school in Maharashtra (Southwest India) in 1919, see Richey, J. A. 1917–1922. Eighth Quinquennial Report. Vol. 1,126, V/24/4432 (OIOC). Annals of Loreto House. Vol. 1–2. Loreto House Archives, Kolkata, India. Cohn (1997, pp. 136–143).

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18. Cadbury Research Centre, Birmingham University, UK (CRC); Church Missionary Society (CMS) records, CI/1/M 22, Minutes. 58th Meeting of the CMS Bengal Missionary Conference. 18–19 November, 1879. 19. Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library (OIOC), MSS Eur F186, Vol. 140, Missionary Settlement for University Women in Bombay, Marion Storrs to De Selincourt, January 10, 1896; Report of Ellen Storrs, May 6, 1896. 20. Miles (2001). 21. Sharma (2009). 22. Morgan (2008). 23. There were, of course, important instances of this kind of institutionalised philanthropy already in England including Christ’s Hospital (later transferred from London to Horsham) and the Foundling Hospital in Brunswick Square, London. See White (1963), pp. 24–26. 24. Bell (1807). 25. OIOC, L/Mil/17/5/2295, Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Working of the Lawrence Military Asylums in India [1871]. Appendix vi, p. 9. 26. In cities such as Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, there were relatively significant populations of part-Portuguese Christians owing to the earlier Portuguese empire in India. Their brand of a kind of indigenised Christianity would be questioned by later missionaries who sought to marginalise them because of this seemingly theologically undisciplined but longer standing brand of Christianity in India. 27. OIOC, L/Mil/17/5/2295, Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Working of the Lawrence Military Asylums in India [1871]. Appendix vi. pp. 8–10. 28. OIOC, L/Mil/17/5/2295, Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Constitution and Working of the Lawrence Military Asylums in India [1871]. Appendix vi. p. 8. 29. For a more detailed description of these Asylums and schools in Calcutta, see Evers (2009). 30. CRC, CMS, CI/1/M8, Revd. J. P. Menge to the Lay Secretary, 28 December, 1841. 31. CRC, CMS CI 1/O 323, Rev Isaac Wilson to Dear Sir Calcutta. December 1823. 32. CRC, CMS CI 1/O 323, M. A. Wilson to British Ladies. 2 September 1831. 33. CRC, CMS CI/O/88/2, Rev. William Deerr to the Secretary. 7 July 1820. 34. OIOC, Government of India Proceedings P/188/75, Minute by the Governor General. 29 October 1860. No. 2.

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35. OIOC, Fourth Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills for the Orphan and Other Children of European Soldiers Serving or Having Served in India. 1853. Sanawar: Institution Press, 6. 36. OIOC, First Report of the Lawrence Asylum in the Indian Hills, 29. 37. Nathan (1904, p 358). 38. Tate (1885) [first edition 1857]); Tröhler (2013); OIOC, Report of the Lawrence Military Asylum (Sanawar). 1859. Sanawar: Lawrence Military Asylum Press. Appendix III, pp. xxxviii. 39. In the late 1880s, the British government in India quietly reclassified a number of educational institutions in the raj under what was known as ‘the Code’. Code schools and colleges could only enrol Europeans and Eurasians under the law and, with this firm racial boundary in place, these institutions were given favourable funding preferment at the expense of Indian scholars. 40. Rhodes House Library (RHL), CLR18, Rev Bray to Tucker. 20 December 1878, p. 460. 41. Nalini (2006). 42. RHL, E32 f. 145, Rev. T. W. Hunter. Three Months in the SPG Mission, Delhi. n. d. 1877; RHL, E27 f. 2067, R. R. Winter. Report for January 1 to August 31, 1872; RHL, E32 f. 287, Tara Chand to (?) May 30, 1877. 43. The Brahmo Samaj was a monotheistic sect of Hinduism led by Indian luminaries such as Ram Mohan Roy. Despite a degree of factionalism, its brand of reforming Hinduism was influential on Bengal intellectual thought and it had a strong influence on the development of the education of Indians (both inside and outside the British colonial ambit). 44. OIOC, Hartog Collection MSS Eur E221/51, Notes and Memoranda on the Growth of Women’s Education in India, August 1928–January 1929.

Bibliography Allender, Tim. 2007. Bad Language in the Raj: The ‘Frightful Encumbrance’ of Gottlieb Leitner, 1865–1888. Paedagogica Historica 43 (3): 383–403. Andrews, Robyn, and Merin Simi Raj, eds. 2021. Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bell, Andrew. 1807. An Analysis of the Experiment in Education, made at Egmore, near Madras. London. Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi, Bara, Joseph, and Yagati, Chinna Rao, eds. 2001. Development of Women’s Education. New Delhi: Kanishka Publishers, Distributors in association with Educational Records Research Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Cashman, Richard. 1995. The Paradise of Sport: A History of Australian Sport. Melbourne: OUP.

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Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohn, Bernard. 1997. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Evers, Maureen. 2009. Four Orphan Schools in Calcutta and the Lawrence Military Asylum, Sanawar. Part 1. The Journal of the Families in British India Society 22: 1–11. Howell, Arthur. 1922. Education in British India. ed. J. A. Richey. Selections from Education Records. Calcutta; Government Printing. Mangan, James A. 1998. The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. London: Routledge. McAleer, John, and John M. Mackenzie, eds. 2017. Exhibiting Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire. Manchester: MUP. Miles, M. 2001. Signs of Development in Deaf South & South-West Asia: Histories, Cultural Identities, Resistance to Imperialism. In Deafness and Development, ed. Alison Callaway, passim. University of Bristol: Centre for Deaf Studies. Morgan, Susan. 2008. Bombay Anna: The Real Story of the Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess. Los Angeles, CA: Berkeley University Press. Nalini, Marthal. 2006. Gender Dynamics of Missionary Work in India and its Impact on Women’s Education: Isabella Thoburn (1840–1901): A Case Study. Journal of International Women’s Studies 7 (4): 273–274. Nathan, Robert. 1904. Progress of Education in India 1897/98. Calcutta: Government Printing. Sharma, Preeti. 2009. Begum Samru: Her Life and Legacy. New Delhi: Vedams eBooks. Sherington, Geoffrey, and Julia Horne. 2010. Empire, State and Public Purpose in the Founding of Universities and Colleges in the Antipodes. History of Education Review 39 (29): 301–322. Tate, Thomas. 1885 [first edition preface dated 1857]. The Philosophy of Education of Education or the Principles and Practice of Teaching. New York: E. L. Kellogg & Co. Tröhler, Daniel. 2013. Pestalozzi and the Educationization of the World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. White, Archie Cecil Thomas. 1963. The Story of Army Education, 1643–1963. London: George Harrap.

CHAPTER 10

Logics of Immersion: Lake Mohonk and the U.S. Colonial Boarding School Oli Charbonneau

Empire surfaces in curious places. Located a two-hour drive north of New York City, the Mohonk Mountain House is a unique blend of Gilded Age opulence and Quaker economy, with turrets and parapets tempered by folksy hunting lodge veneers. Many of the 265 suites within overlook the titular Mohonk Lake, its glacial meltwater surrounded by rocky outcrops and forest. Guests amuse themselves by golfing, boating, swimming, riding horses, attending concerts and public lectures, or simply walking the many trails criss-crossing the 6,400-acre Mohonk Preserve. In the evenings, its 120 illuminated gazebos transform the property, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter, into a “fairyland”. The US Department of the Interior designated the site as a National Historic Landmark in 1986, movies and television series have been filmed there, and locals claim it inspired the setting in Stephen King’s novel The Shining. Visitors pay

O. Charbonneau (B) University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_10

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northwards of $1000 per night to stay at Mohonk, which remains the bastion of north-eastern leisure it was 150 years ago.1 Founded in 1869 by the philanthropist Albert Smiley and his twin brother Alfred, the Mohonk Mountain House (then Lake Mohonk Lodge) served as a nexus for the negotiation of overlapping US national and imperial concerns from the latter decades of the nineteenth century until the First World War. The Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, held between 1895 and 1916, drew in political, economic and cultural leaders from around the world to discuss pressing matters of global governance.2 In 1890–1891, Mohonk hosted two meetings on the so-called Negro Question, where an all-white group of Northerners and Southerners convened to “consider practical measures, educational & religious—for uplifting the Negroes of the South”.3 It was another racialised ‘problem’, however, that most animated Albert Smiley, a devout Quaker who, like many reformers of the era, directed his energies toward redressing the United States’ “century of dishonour” in its settler domains.4 Appointed to the Indian Board of Commissioners in 1879, Smiley had travelled to the Dakotas and, dismayed by the colonially produced living conditions of the Sioux and the disorganisation of frontier reformers, resolved to create a forum where missionaries, educators, politicians, military officers, academics, journalists and businesspeople could coordinate America’s civilising mission.5 The Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian began in 1883, held each autumn against the backdrop of the Shawangunk Mountains. It ran for thirty-three years and welcomed over 8,000 guests, ranging from former presidents to frontier schoolmasters to ‘reformed’ American Indians.6 The founders of the Hampton Institute and the Carlisle Indian School, Samuel Armstrong and Richard Henry Pratt, attended frequently, as did Senator Henry Dawes, an important congressional proxy for the reformers. Influential Protestant women like the ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher also played key roles at Mohonk. In the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War, Smiley and his half-brother Daniel decided that Mohonk “might well perform a duty for other races than the red” and expanded its scope to include the “dependent peoples” of the US overseas colonies (namely the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Hawaii).7 What follows situates Mohonk and its advocacy of immersive education for racialised groups within the United States’ evolving empire. It does so by considering the evolution of the American-run state and

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parochial boarding schools in their enmeshed ‘national’ and ‘colonial’ formats and analysing how the discursive circuitry of the conferences promoted boarding schools as a key iteration of ‘race management’ and progressive reform.8 The essay contends that Smiley and his guests ultimately produced a status quo wherein immersive education, in its attempts to sever and remap a child’s sociolinguistic ties, was viewed as an expedient means of resolving real and imagined challenges of cultural heterogeneity—both in the nationalising continental empire and the indeterminate spaces of new far-flung colonies. Boarding schools, reformers contended, served as ideal vehicles for promoting qualified inclusion into the ranks of American citizenry or the emerging subordinate nationalisms in overseas territories. Advocates never fully aligned on the pacing or extent of this inclusion, with many forecasting it would take decades or even centuries, but cohered on a sense of its value. Held as one century closed and another began, the Mohonk conferences bore witness to the colonial boarding school at its zenith, a trend connected to numerous global developments including the rapid spread of empires into Africa and Southeast Asia; transnational/imperial reform networks velocitised by globalising transport and communications technologies; and the spread of racial pseudo-science that rationalised European and Euro-American dominion over people of African, Asian and indigenous American descent.9 This chapter is in dialogue with scholarship examining US settler and overseas colonialism and, more specifically, the centrality of education to the platonic ideal (if not always practice) of America’s empire.10 The onand off-reservation boarding schools of the post-Civil War, once written about as a minor offshoot of western conquest, have an increasingly large literature devoted to them that excavates not only the design, rationales and daily operations of the schools but also, increasingly, the experiences of the Indian children living at them.11 Books and articles focusing on students and teachers in the colonial Philippines and Puerto Rico have appeared with increasing frequency in the past decade, including recent work linking colonial and metropolitan educational programmes.12 The broader links between US settler histories and the overseas colonies are themselves analysed in a series of studies, most recently those by Katherine Bjork and Elizabeth Eittreim.13 The utility of transfer histories linking the settler west to the post-1898 colonies has been challenged by historians concerned with their tendency to diminish local context and agency.14 While they appear briefly in many of these works, the Mohonk

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conferences are rarely centred. Notable exceptions to this are two dissertations—Carlos Figueroa’s 2010 thesis on the post-1898 links between moral reformers and US empire and Larry Burgess’ 1972 survey of the meetings a collected volume of writings and speeches by Mohonk attendees edited by the late Francis Paul Prucha, and an article by Alexandra Harmon.15 The progressivism on offer at the conferences was of a distinctive fin-de-siecle variety shared by reformers throughout the world. It took notions of a globally connected Christian moral empire, which had emerged in the decades prior to the Civil War among Protestant missionaries, and wed them to the reformist spirit of the latter-nineteenth century. Mohonk attendees tended to favour an activist federal state that, bound tightly to religious organisations and sympathetic press outlets, laboured to address the myriad inequalities arising in an era of unchecked capitalist growth, mass migration, labour abuses and frontier settlement. A reinvigorated New World democracy, modelled on temperate and industrious white manhood, would be the result.16 Implicit in this gendered and racialised outlook were notions that ‘lesser’ peoples required guidance and protection to productively assimilate into US society. As they lashed out at corrupt politics and industrial excesses, reform organisations also imagined how the increasingly heterogeneous population of the United States could be effectively “Americanised”.17 With their roster of prominent reformers, the Lake Mohonk conferences became a marquee site for reviewing, debating and coordinating these plans. The collective aims of Mohonk participants entered the slipstream of global colonial tutelage as the US empire grew. Original goals rested on the notion of ‘detribalisation’, an assimilationist (and culturally genocidal) approach attempting to “[dissolve] communal customs and thought patterns” among American Indians.18 Viewed as an alienating form of dependency, the reservation system would be abolished and replaced by the individual farm, held in severalty by the Anglicised Indian (male) head of household and mimicking “productive” Anglo-Saxon domesticity. US citizenship would follow, with the “new” Indian becoming subject to settler laws and, according to conference regular Isabel Barrows, “[earning] a living like the rest of us”.19 Ensuring the permanency of this transformation would be an extensive schooling system that reproduced Protestant cultural norms among Indian children and trained them for lives as agricultural and industrial workers. The political, economic and cultural clout of key figures at Mohonk ensured these fantasies of race

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reform manifested throughout the United States. Speaking at the opening ceremonies of the 1900 meeting, presiding officer Merrill Gates praised the work done to solve the “Indian Problem” but noted new opportunities for tutelary colonialism: “Whether we look eastward toward Cuba and Porto Rico, or westward toward Hawaii and the ten million of Filipinos, we stand face to face with the question, ‘As a nation, what are we able to do for the less-favored races with whom we are brought into close relation?’”.20 A renewed focus on the spatial and cultural mastery of the TransMississippi West in the post-Civil War era had led to the end of formal treaty relations with Indian Nations in 1871 and the growth of a network of government-funded boarding schools.21 Designated as “wards” under federal law, unassimilated Indian groups, without consultation, became the responsibility of US state, generating debates over assimilation and citizenship.22 Education figured heavily in these debates, growing in perceived urgency during the mid-1870s as organised armed resistance to the US Army ebbed among the indigenous peoples of the northern and southern plains. The Carlisle Indian School, founded by the military officer Richard Henry Pratt, became the premier state-run institution for Indian education and in the following decades 23 other similar facilities opened throughout the United States.23 Pratt’s model was premised on the complete immersion of indigenous children into white AngloSaxon culture. In her luminous study of this period, Jacqueline Fear-Segal observes that by the Progressive Era the “militaristic off-reservation [boarding school]” was viewed as the “apex” of the education system by reformers, a logical terminus to processes begun at the reservation day and boarding schools.24 In an 1889 report to Congress, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan outlined the ultimate goal of both the Bureau and their allies in the reform movement: a “comprehensive system of training and instruction” that would “convert [Indian children] into American citizens […] and enable them to compete successfully with the white man on his own ground and with his own methods”.25 Anchored by the off-reservation boarding school, the systemisation of Indian education would combine the curricular programmes of the US common school system with an intensified emphasis on industrial and agricultural training. The residential nature of the schools allowed for manifold intrusions into a child’s linguistic and cultural development. In preparation for citizenry and dispersal among the Euro-American population,

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boarders would live surveilled and regimented lives: fixed sleeping schedules, mealtimes, study sessions, fieldwork to abnegate “the irregularities of camp [tribal] life”; introductions to debt, savings and credit; lessons in morality and patriotism; extensive training on farm and shop machinery; and placements in nearby communities with settler families. Although co-educational, boys and girls received different training, with the latter focusing on mastering domestic skills in preparation for Christian motherhood.26 The success of the boarding schools, Morgan claimed, was crucial: “The welfare of the Indians, the peace and prosperity of the white people, and the honor of the nation are all at stake”.27 The report’s recommendations echoed those found in the yearly conference reports from Lake Mohonk, where Morgan was an avid attendee. The 1885 platform urged lawmakers to institute a “comprehensive plan” for Indian education “which shall place all Indian children in schools under compulsion if necessary, and shall provide industrial education for a large proportion of them”.28 By 1889, the year of the commissioner’s report, the Lake Mohonk Conference had become a potent force in steering the US settler colonial agenda. Functioning as an informal think tank with deep ties to federal lawmakers, the “friends of the Indian” were central to the development of the 1887 Dawes Act, an infamous piece of congressional legislation that dismantled communal land tenure, imposed private property on indigenous communities and cleared ‘remaining’ tribal land for white settlement.29 The act’s namesake, Senator Henry Dawes, was a fixture at Mohonk. Mohonk’s reformers also successfully advocated for the expansion of government school funding. Between the 1870s and the 1890s congressional allocations increased from $20,000 into the millions.30 With land severalty underway and Catholic schools sidelined by state funding for secular-but-culturallyProtestant institutions, the Mohonk meetings of the 1890s increasingly focused on the role of education in reconciling American Indian groups with interlinked Anglo-Saxon notions of domesticity, productivity and spirituality.31 “The work at the east and the work at the west are one”, Reverend J.J. Gravatt of the Hampton Institute told the gathering in 1891. He expressed a sentiment common at Mohonk: that threading together the showpiece boarding schools of the east with the frontline schools of the continental interior served the larger goal of gradual, qualified inclusivity within the settler state. The conferences approached the issue not only through high-level policy interventions but also by closely tending to

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the schools themselves. By 1892, there were 149 state-funded boarding schools with an average attendance of 12,442 (up from 71 schools in 1882), outnumbering day schools. Teachers and principals arrived from the Dakotas, New Mexico, California, Kansas and other states and territories to share experiences and strategies. They discussed the futures of “the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the Shawnees and Pottawatomies, the Sacs and the Foxes, the Iowas and Kickapoos, the Pawnees and Tonkawas”, and fretted about the threats posed by the “idle, unkempt, filthy” white settlers who attempted to swindle Indian allotments, thereby undermining the imagined tutelary benefits of severalty.32 A key component of the meetings was the exchanging of strategies for running the boarding schools. Headmasters and teachers shared successes and encouraged others to replicate them. The ‘Outing System’ at Carlisle, which placed Indian students with local white families, was touted as the most effective means of instilling Protestant domestic values. Pratt boasted to attendees that students would be built up into US citizens “just as German and Irish and other children are educated”.33 Just as important were discussions of setbacks. Since the moral foundations of the schools went unquestioned, these setbacks often fell into two categories: those imposed by external bodies and those generated by perceived Indian incapacity. As an advocacy group, the Mohonk conferences pressured presidential administrations and US Congress to increase commitments to Indian education (with some success), arguing there was a national duty for provision of public education. For Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook and conference regular, Mohonk served as “education [for] the white man” on their duties to racialised groups.34 Organisers invited frontier missionaries and teachers, who described underfunding and poor coordination, to reinforce their points. More contentious was the issue of duration and outcomes for Indian education, which drew its imprecision from the pseudoscientific and constantly revised race-thinking of the period. Some felt Indians could be civilised rapidly under the correct conditions, but many disagreed. Philip C. Garrett, a Philadelphia lawyer and member of the executive committee of the Indian Rights Association, typified these sentiments. “The education received by the Indians at our great schools is beautiful […] but it is not a fast color: the rain of barbarism on the reservation washes it away”.35 Although vastly outnumbered by the white speakers, there were indigenous participants at Mohonk, mainly represented by current and former boarding school students. Hattie Longwolf, a Sioux woman from the

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Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, recounted her days at Carlisle among children of “forty-eight different tribes”, while a “W. Townsend”, also from Carlisle, echoed Pratt when he told the audience: “I believe in education, because I believe it will kill the Indian that is in me and leave the man and citizen […] the only good Indian is an educated Indian”36 The Yavapai-Apache rights activist Carlos Montezuma (Wassaja), then resident physician at Carlisle, spoke in 1895. Kidnapped by Pima raiders in Arizona Territory at five years old, he was sold to an Italian photographer and for a time performed in Buffalo Bill’s travelling troupe before settling in Chicago, where he attended both the University of Illinois and North-western University (the first Indian to do so). At Mohonk, Montezuma advocated for complete cultural immersion, declaring white society “must place my daughters and sons with your sons and daughters”.37 The physician’s views about ‘civilisation’ and the fragmentation of indigenous cultures would become more complicated in ensuing decades and he returned home to the Yavapai Nation before his death in 1923.38 Mohonk helped foster a boarding school system that was abusive by design and celebrated the ideological foundations of that abuse—the belief that the homogenised ‘Indian’ needed to be culturally dissembled and rebuilt in order to merit inclusion—at each annual meeting. Reading through the scores of speeches and conversations recorded for posterity, one is immersed in discourses of cultural erasure earnestly conveyed by men and women convinced of the righteousness of their mission. What is obscured in these documents, however, is the intimate, daily violence of the schools. Fragments appear in glowing reports on the military regimentation of student lives and the ‘successes’ of social hygiene programmes but otherwise remain unspoken. Nor is there any clear sense that the enormous cultural disruptions of the reform project may produce intergenerational traumas—only quibbling arguments over how best to achieve a predetermined set of outcomes. The alternative forms of community forged by the students beyond the bounds of their overseers’ designs and expectations likewise escape notice. The lived experiences of youth in these schools have only emerged retrospectively. In the past four decades, indigenous and settler scholars and activists have reconstructed the quotidian rituals of boarding school life, located student writings, revealed histories of isolation, deprivation and death and digitised troves of archival materials connected to the topic.39 Befitting its longevity, scale, location and public visibility, Carlisle has received the most significant attention. A recent collection of essays

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and poetry powerfully threads together its place in indigenous history and memory. In it, the Waganakising Odawa and Minneconjou Lakota writer Warren Petoskey visits Carlisle and wonders what he might do “in honor of my grandfather, great-aunt, and all my relatives that perished in this hellhole […] I saw myself doing a pipe ceremony and a flute song sending our prayers up with so many others over the years to assure the spirit of all these children, those who experienced Carlisle and survived, but have walked on since, and those first-generation children who have suffered from the residuals the Carlisle experience deposited in their moms’ and dads’ and grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ lives”.40 In the spring of 1898, Smiley and the Friends of the Indian watched as the United States fought a war for empire in the Caribbean Basin and along the Pacific Rim. The conflict with Spain was brief, lasting less than four months but bringing millions of people under US sovereignty. It was supported by pro-imperialist politicians, who argued war would reinvigorate white masculinity and strategically situate America within the global imperial contest, and bellicose press outlets that decried Spanish abuses against their colonial wards.41 Cuba fell after a series of skirmishes, including the subsequently mythologised charge up San Juan Hill by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders; in the Philippines, a desultory naval battle in Manila Bay led, several months later, to the stage-managed transfer of the city to the US Army; the Puerto Rican campaign was even less dramatic and the Spanish outpost on Guam surrendered without hostilities. In many respects, the ‘conquest’ of Spain’s colonies resembled a straightforward imperial transfer. Following the Treaty of Paris in 1898, President William McKinley sent a lengthy proclamation to the nearly eight million inhabitants of the Philippines, declaring “that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule”.42 Now shorthand for the US civilising mission, ‘benevolent assimilation’ articulated a familiar set of Progressive Era ideas. As bearers of enlightened and replicable republican modernity, the United States had a moral duty to shepherd lesser races, simultaneously protecting them from degraded European colonialisms and themselves. Although Americans would borrow extensively from the European empires and rely on local interlocutors in the colonies, the maintenance of an over-arching imperial ideal shaped debates within the United States and throughout its extraterritorial possessions, particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century when empire was a live topic in US public discourse.43

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While they lacked McKinley’s memorable phrasing, stateside reformers recognised the spirit of ‘benevolent assimilation’: they had helped script it. As we have seen, the degrading binary of native helplessness and white obligation, famously laminated onto the American empire in Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden, was already well established in the western hemisphere. At the Mohonk meetings it would be tailored for the tropics. At the mountain house, a collection of old and new voices papered over the vast gulfs in language, culture and history that separated the colonised peoples of the North American interior, the Caribbean islands and the Southeast Asian and South Pacific rim. Lecturing on the “work in the Philippines”, former Board of Indian Commissioners chairman Darwin R. James suggested the “sad failure” of “civilizing and Christianizing the Red Man” across three centuries might be salvaged overseas. “I prefer to believe that we have learned something”, he argued, “and that no such wretched blunders will be made in the nation’s efforts on behalf of the inhabitants of the newly acquired insular territories”.44 Perennial participant Lyman Abbott took this line of thinking to its outer limits, linking the ‘duty’ of Anglo-Saxons in the new colonies to formerly enslaved Africans, European migrants, Mormon outcasts and American Indians. “They are one problem”, he declared, using the preferred formulation of the period.45 Although there were isolated dissenters at the meetings (the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson fretted about the “dark possibilities” of empire), most participants subscribed to the moralist fables of redemption, duty and destiny outlined by James and Abbott.46 Held as the US Army waged a brutal counterinsurgency against Philippine nationalists, the 1900 and 1901 meetings articulated this updated agenda and sketched its practical dimensions. Speakers increasingly discussed education and ‘civilisation’ in Hawaii and Alaska (US territories but not yet accepted into statehood), Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The last two of these received the most attention. With populations of 7,800,000 and 1,100,000 and under US control for indefinite durations, the two colonies became focal points for educational reform efforts. Speakers described what came before the arrival of the stars and stripes: ‘superficial’ Spanish school systems marred by underfunding, shabby facilities and other forms of administrative negligence.47 Public and missionary schools, then, functioned as the progressive face of American imperial exceptionalism: a declaration that the United States intended to do empire better. In the Philippines, where anticolonial resistance continued into the 1910s, they would also function as the ‘soft’

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edge of pacification, preventing future generations of insurrectos through English-language instruction, didactic textbooks and rudimentary industrial education. The commitment of the colonial state to this project was evident under both military (1898–1902) and civilian (1902–1946) rule. In 1902, as military governor Adna Chaffee handed power to his civilian successor William Howard Taft, there were over 900 American teachers in the archipelago and programmes in place to train Filipino educators.48 North American boarding schools provided roadmaps and personnel for education in the new colonies. Hampton had emerged in part out of Armstrong’s experiences as the child of Protestant missionaries in Hawaii prior to the American Civil War. There he was exposed to multiple residential schooling projects aimed at Christianising and ‘modernising’ Native Hawaiians.49 Models from Hawaii interacted with those emerging in North America and European ideas about industrial and agricultural education, crystallising at institutions like Hampton, Carlisle and Haskell. Predictably, these experiments in selective inclusivity informed the character of education in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In her work on Puerto Rico, Solsiree del Morel locates these circulations both in “racist ideologies of Anglo-Saxon supremacy” and practical knowledge transfers, while also recognising that the US imperial project was shaped—and rendered more heterogeneous—by the local environments it operated within.50 With the assistance of collaborating Puerto Rican elites, Americans with deep connections to racialised education on the mainland like General John Eaton mapped a school system with familiar contours.51 A similar pattern emerged in the Philippines, where American teachers “[stepped] into the husk of the Spanish educational system”, drawing from pre-existing colonial models, tapping into Filipino networks and importing ideas from home.52 Multiple educators with experience teaching in the boarding schools of North America and Hawaii made their way to the Philippines, although, as Sarah Steinbock-Pratt notes, the residential model was not widely adopted. The anthropologist and colonial administrator David Prescott Barrows typified this selective embrace, touring Indian schools in anticipation of his service in the Philippines but ultimately supporting non-residential village schools as the primary educational vehicle. Boarding schools mainly operated among the socalled wild tribes—namely, indigenous groups of the Luzon highlands and the Muslim Moros of the southern islands, with the aim of preparing them for incorporation in the emerging Philippine national body.53

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After 1898, Mohonk helped produce, link and disseminate knowledge on colonial schooling. Speakers with intra-colonial expertise were especially prized, bridging gaps between the ‘Friends of the Indian’ and the ‘Other Dependent Peoples’ of the overseas colonies. Ruth Shaffner Etnier taught at Carlisle for eight years, publishing a pamphlet called Training Indian Girls in 1901 through the Women’s National Indian Association.54 By then, she had also served as supervisor of schools at Ponce, Puerto Rico, returning to the United States in autumn 1900 to speak at the conference. Praising General Eaton for his work in the Caribbean— “resulting from his long experience in establishing schools among the colored and Indian races”—Etnier shared a familiar story: “It may be said of the adult population of Puerto Rico very much as it is said of the adult Indians, that not a great deal can be expected of this generation […]. It is in the large population of children our hope lies”. Hope, in her estimation, rested in English language instruction and ‘industrial training’. She noted that such methods had been adopted beyond Ponce: an orphanage elsewhere on the island funded by donations from the New York Merchants’ Association and operated by “another former worker of Major Pratt”.55 A comparative lack of boarding school facilities in Puerto Rico and the Philippines spoke to the ways in which Americans selectively particularised colonised peoples. The model was expensive and better suited for the settler colonial needs of the emerging nation-state, which prioritised certain forms of second-tier citizenship for continental ‘out-groups’. The unclear status of the new colonies within the imperium, the difficulties and cost of administering unfamiliar overseas locales, and fears of native unrest led to the prioritisation of public day schools in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. This did not, however, mean the lessons of the boarding school went unheeded. The immersive logics of Hampton and Carlisle guided curricular development in the new schools. American teachers, and subsequently Filipinos and Puerto Ricans trained in the United States or the normal schools (teachers’ colleges) of San Juan and Manila, focused on reforming children through similar English-language learning, basic vocational instruction and fidelity to approved versions of US history and civic life amended to suit the imagined needs of subject peoples.56 While sidelined, residential schooling for children of overseas colonies did not vanish entirely. Small numbers of students travelled to the United States. In 1902, a young Puerto Rican named Alejandro Guilliod spoke at Mohonk. Conference founder Albert Smiley had brought him and others

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to be educated at New Paltz, not far from the mountain lodge, and forty Puerto Rican students were at Carlisle. After providing an overview of race and economics on his island, Guilliod singled out US educational efforts and told the crowd that he and his classmates had come “to this country […] to learn how to be Americans”. He received hearty applause.57 While the number of Filipino students at Pratt’s school in Pennsylvania never reached desired levels, two youth from the islands spent years there. During his seven years at Carlisle, Esteban (Stephen) Glori contributed to the school paper and participated in its literary societies. He remained in the United States after graduation, finding work as a printer and dressing in American Indian garb for performances in an ‘Indian show’.58 In the Philippines, industrial education tailored for local environments remained the gold standard, even if resources often made it aspirational in small villages and towns. Where they existed, boarding schools focused on training natives for leadership positions within their communities. The American summer capital at Baguio had two schools for Igorot youth (one for boys and one for girls) and Nueva Vizcaya, also on Luzon, had one.59 Further ‘reservation’ schools aimed at ‘protecting’ animist groups and incentivising modern agricultural practices existed elsewhere in the archipelago, as did a boarding school for Maguindanao girls in Cotabato.60 Colonial boarding schools in the Philippines outlasted the Mohonk conferences. One of the longest lived, on the island of Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago, was founded by Charles Henry Brent, the most influential colonial missionary in the American empire. Speaking at Mohonk in 1913, he described peoples without Christianity as those without history and thus unable to form national identities. “The difference between the Malays and the Filipinos is the difference between darkness and dawn”, he declared.61 In the Southern Philippines, the “challenge of Islam” stood before the United States and would be resolved by “religion expressed in work”.62 Brent co-founded the Jolo school with Rhode Island socialite Caroline Spencer, who supervised its construction on a disused US military base. Initially named after the liberal philanthropist and founder of The New Republic Willard Straight, the school would eventually house over 300 students and include workshops, farm fields, sports facilities and a printing press. It was later renamed for Brent, who saw it as his gift to the Muslim peoples of the southern islands. The school survived until the Second World War, largely financed by the upper echelons of the former US colonial elite. Many who spoke on its behalf, like the governor general

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of the Philippines Leonard Wood, had also been Mohonk attendees. As with Carlisle a generation before, the boarding school stood as the built tribute to a culture of imperial race management.63 The roster of speakers at the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples changed over time, with an elder generation of frontier reformers joined by increasing numbers of military officers, ethnologists, medical officials and civilian administrators returned from the Caribbean and Pacific colonies. The final conferences, held in the years between Albert Smiley’s death in 1912 and America’s 1917 entry into the First World War, combined old and new subjects. Immersive education remained a priority, although the emphasis had shifted even further towards language training and industrial skills training in day schools.64 Colonial authorities increasingly focused on identifying talented students and encouraging them to enrol in post-secondary instruction, either in the colonial capitals or the mainland United States. At the 1913 meeting, John W. Osborn, principal at Pampanga High School in San Fernando, boasted of his students who had decamped for universities in the United States.65 Reports from the final Mohonk meetings convey a sense of expanding possibility. The racial ‘problems’ of the American West and transpacific ‘Oriental problems’ were now ‘world problems’ that an increasingly powerful United States was morally obligated to solve.66 The end of the meetings signalled an ebbing faith in the utility of the boarding school. By the early 1920s, Carlisle was shuttered and offreservation schools were being critiqued by a growing number of Americans. In 1928, D.C. research group the Brookings Institution compiled a report on federal Indian programmes at the behest of the Department of the Interior recommending a move away from child removal and Eurocentric curriculums. Government policy followed slowly, although it would be decades before indigenous nations received full autonomy to design and deliver education within their communities.67 The island colonies increasingly receded from US public attention in the 1910s. The Philippines underwent a process of “Filipinisation” following the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, with Christian Filipino administrators and military officers replacing Americans throughout the islands. This, of course, did not end efforts to civilise “non-Christian tribes”, but rather shifted them to Manila-based native elites, who developed their own models of inclusion and exclusion.68 Closer to the US mainland, Puerto Rican teachers eventually replaced white Americans as educational officials

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during the 1920s–1930s, part of a long process of colonial reform that granted increasing self-governance to islanders without fully incorporating them into the United States.69 Across thirty-three years, the Mohonk attendees articulated a vision of Christian empire premised on the redeeming power of cultural immersion and the value of the boarding school experience. Reformers viewed themselves as stewards, guiding an establishment prone to corruption and indifference. Yet they also were that establishment: congressmen, Commissioners of Indian Affairs, military generals and agents of education. They invited Indians, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans to speak at the lodge, although only ‘successful’ graduates of the boarding schools who had assimilated the habits and customs of the north-eastern Protestants instructing them. They blamed setbacks and failures on government neglect, settler greed, indigenous indolence and environmental hazard— but, assured of its virtue, rarely questioned the foundations of their own project. The built environment of the boarding school, surveilled and orderly, presented as an ideal antechamber of civilisation, even if life within these institutions rarely synced with the tidy narratives of their white advocates. The Mohonk reports reveal much about an influential strain of thought in the Progressive Era United States. It was one that guided policy on the value of industrial education, boosted residential schooling where it existed, and, more generally, articulated the degrees to which racialised out-groups might be incorporated into the American polity. Although important, these interventions require qualification. Export theories of race were not adopted by all American colonial officials, some of whom, like Barrows, viewed the ‘achievements’ of the US Indian schools with ambivalence (while still borrowing from them).70 Other realities intruded on the reformers’ visions: the necessity of building upon Spanish educational infrastructure in the new colonies; an increasing reliance on Filipino and Puerto Rican teachers with their own political and cultural designs; differing forms of inclusion and exclusion across the empire, most of which did not culminate in citizenship; the under-resourcing and ad hoc organisation of the colonies; and, of course, the many ways that locality and environment shaped the character of each colonial school. The conversations at Mohonk likewise provide limited insight into the life at the schools, with visiting educators idealising their work as a bulwark against the imagined miseries of tribal life and real corruption of reservation officials.

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What the conferences do illustrate well is a desire to narrate the United States’ imperial forms and weave them together through uplift. By functioning as a central hub for personnel involved in colonial administration and missionising, they became an effective lobbying forum that impacted legislation and set the tone for outreach work on the settler frontier and overseas colonies. Held as modern ‘white saviour’ discourse reached its apogee, the Mohonk meetings demanded empire justify itself through tutelary activities—a message that remained consistent before and after 1898. The education programmes premised on removing youth from their immediate cultural environment and inculcating them in AngloAmerican life were key to this. They achieved their fullest expression in the Indian boarding schools but the logics of immersion at play in Mohonk also impacted the character of education in the overseas colonies, which included limited attempts at residential schooling within their broader mandates of Americanisation. Beyond the colonial imaginary, the Mohonk conferences provide evidence of the structural links between these programmes: visits to Carlisle and Hampton by colonial officials tasked with managing students in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, conference participants who had taught on the mainland and overseas, and a clear genealogy of reform provided by the annual reports. This presents us with a complex picture: an imperial polity comprised of highly individuated territories and peoples that was nevertheless coconstituted—sometimes tenuously, sometimes robustly—by a racialised vision of a greater American mission.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Helmer (2005, p. 997); Zimmerman (2019); Horrigan (2017). Reid (2004). Quoted in Fishel Jr. (1993, p. 281). The term is drawn from the famous expose of US-Indian relations by Jackson (1881). 5. Barrows (n.d., p. 6). 6. The nomenclature surrounding the word ‘Indian’ in the Americas is its own topic, subject to extensive debates. Here, I use the preferred ‘American Indian’ or ‘Indian’ to describe the indigenous peoples of North America in general and, wherever possible, use tribal names. ‘Native’ is used in a broad sense throughout the chapter, usually denoting the generalised idea of colonial ‘native policy’. 7. Barrows (n.d., p. 5).

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8. The discourse surrounding this was most typified in the short-lived Journal of Race Development and is analysed in Blatt (2004). 9. Stearns (2009, pp. 90–123). 10. For a concise historiographical survey of the field in the historical discipline see Steinbock-Pratt (2020). 11. Some key texts on the Indian schools include Adams (1995); Coleman (1993); Emery (2017); Fear-Segal (2007); Hoxie (2001). 12. Del Moral (2013); Rafael (2015); Steinbock-Pratt (2019). 13. Bjork (2018); Eittreim (2019). 14. Kramer (2011). 15. Burgess (1972); Figueroa (2010); Harmon (1990); Prucha (1973). 16. Tyrrell (2010, pp. 47–120). 17. Lake (2019, p. 5). 18. Utley (2004, p. 204). 19. Barrows (n.d., p. 12). 20. Gates (1901, p. 12). 21. These schools had deep roots in educational programmes in the British colonial and early national periods. For a brief survey see Rehyner and Eder (2004, pp. 40–80). 22. Ibid., pp. 59–80. 23. Ibid., pp. 149–152. 24. Fear-Segal (2007, p. 41). 25. Morgan (2014, p. 222). 26. Ibid., pp. 231–238. 27. Ibid., p. 238. 28. (No Author Cited) (1886, pp. 48–49). 29. The most comprehensive account of the struggles over allotment is Genetin-Pilawa (2012). 30. Coppock (1893, p. 106). 31. These ideas were by no means limited to the United States and surfaced, in modified forms, elsewhere in the empire. See, for instance, Charbonneau (2021, pp. 25–47). 32. Coppock (1893, pp. 107–108). 33. Pratt (1891). 34. Abbott (1893, p. 75). 35. Garrett (1892, p. 44). 36. Longwolf and Townsend (1893). 37. Montezuma (1896). 38. Iverson (1982, pp. 147–175). 39. Charbonneau-Dahlen et al. (2016); White (2018). 40. Petoskey (2016, p. 335). 41. Hoganson (2000, pp. 15–42). 42. William McKinley. New York Times, 6 January 1899, p. 1.

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43. McDougall (2017, pp. 26–29). 44. James (1902, p. 32). 45. Abbott (1902, p. 38). On the idea of race ‘problems’ in early Progressive Era thought see Ring (2012, pp. 1–57). 46. Higginson (1901, p. 56). 47. Etnier (1901b). 48. Steinbock-Pratt (2019, pp. 13–17). 49. Beyer (2007). 50. Del Moral (2013, p. 36). 51. Ibid., pp. 53–55. 52. Steinbock-Pratt (2019, pp. 19–20). 53. Ibid., p. 190. 54. Etnier (1901a). 55. Etnier (1901b). 56. Harrington (2019, pp. 148–151). 57. Guilliod (1903, p. 159). 58. Hunziker (2020, p. 430). 59. Harrington (2019, p. 98). 60. Ibid., pp. 108–110. 61. Brent (1913, p. 186). 62. Fallows (1913, p. 96). 63. Charbonneau (2020, pp. 81–86). 64. Monroe (1913). 65. Osborn (1913, p. 174). 66. Monroe (1914, p. 184). 67. (No author citied) (1928, pp. 3–51); Lomawaima and McCarty (2006). 68. Woods (2020, pp. 1–45). 69. Del Moral (2013, pp. 181–184). 70. Kramer (2011, pp. 165–169).

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Barrows, Isabel C. n.d. A Moral Citadel: A Sketch of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Philadelphia: National Indian Association. Beyer, C. Kalani. 2007. The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawaii. History of Education Quarterly 47 (1): 23–48. Bjork, Katharine. 2018. Prairie Imperialists: The Indian Country Origins of American Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Blatt, Jessica. 2004. ‘To Bring Out the Best That is in Their Blood’: Race, Reform, and Civilization in the Journal of Race Development (1910–1919). Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (5): 691–709. Burgess, Larry E. 1972. The Mohonk Conferences on the Indian, 1883−1916. PhD dissertation, The Claremont Graduate University. Brent, Charles Henry. 1913. National Awakening in the Philippines. In Report of the Thirty-First Annual Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, ed. H.C. Phillips, 144–148. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Charbonneau-Dahlen, Barbara K., John Lowe, and Staci Leon Morris. 2016. Giving Voice to Historical Trauma Through Storytelling: The Impact of Boarding School Experience on American Indians. Journal of Aggression Maltreatment & Trauma 25 (6): 598–617. Charbonneau, Oliver. 2020. Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Charbonneau, Oliver. 2021. Colonizing Workers: Labor, Race, and U.S. Military Governance in the Southern Philippines. Modern American History 4 (1): 25–47. Coleman, Michael C. 1993. American Indian Children at School: 1850–1930. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Coppock, Benjamin S. 1893. A Phase of Progress in Indian Education. In Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 104–108. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Del Moral, Solsiree. 2013. Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of School in Puerto Rico, 1898−1952. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Eittreim, Elisabeth M. 2019. Teaching Empire: Native Americans, Filipinos, and U.S. Imperial Education, 1879−1918. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Emery, Jacqueline. 2017. Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Etnier, Ruth Shaffner. 1901a. Training Indian Girls. Philadelphia: The Association. Etnier, Ruth Shaffner. 1901b. Untitled Comments. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 44–45. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference.

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February. https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2017/02/15/did-new-paltzs-moh onk-mountain-house-inspire-the-shining-thoughts-on-a-local-legend/ Hoxie, Frederick E. 2001. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Hunziker, Alyssa A. 2020. Playing Indian, Playing Filipino: Native American and Filipino Interactions at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. American Quarterly 72 (2): 423–448. Iverson, Peter. 1982. Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Jackson, Helen Hunt. 1881. A Century of Dishonor. New York: Harper. James, Darwin R. 1902. The Work in the Philippines. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 30–33. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Kramer, Paul A. 2011. Transits of Race: Empire and Difference in PhilippineAmerican Colonial History. In Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, ed. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, 163–191. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lake, Marilyn. 2019. Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lomawaima, K. Tianina., and Teresa L. McCarty. 2006. To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Longwolf, Hattie and W. Townsend. 1893. Untitled Comments. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 23 and 104. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. McDougall, Walter A. 2017. The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed National Interest. New Haven: Yale University Press. Monroe, Paul. 1914. America’s Occupation of the Philippines A Lesson to the Orient. In Report of the Thirty-Second Annual Lake Mohonk Conference of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, ed. H.C. Phillips, 184–188. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Monroe, Paul. 1913. What the Philippine School System is Doing for Philippine Freedom. In Report of the Thirty-First Annual Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, ed. H.C. Phillips, 96–103. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Montezuma, Carlos. 1896. Untitled Comments. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 68. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Morgan, Thomas J. 2014. Supplemental Report on Indian Education. In Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian’,

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1880−1900, 2nd edition, ed. Francis Paul Prucha, 221–238. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (No Author Cited). 1886. The Platform. In Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, 48–50. Philadelphia: Sherman & Co. Printers. (No Author Cited). 1928. The Problem of Indian Administration: Summary of Findings and Recommendations. Washington: Institute for Government Research. Petoskey, Warren. 2016. Response to Visiting Carlisle: Experiencing Intergenerational Trauma. In Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamation, ed. Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, 333–336. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Osborn, J.W. 1913. Limitations of Education Facilities in the Philippines. In Report of the Thirty-First Annual Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, ed. H.C. Phillips, 174–176. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1891. Commentary on “Education: Its Progress, its Obstacles, and its Limitations”. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, ed. Isabel C. Barrows, 95. New York: The Lake Mohonk Conference. Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. 1973. Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian’, 1880–1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rafael, Vincente L. 2015. The War of Translation: Colonial Education, American English, and Tagalog Slang in the Philippines. Journal of Asian Studies 74 (2): 283–302. Rehyner, John, and Jeanne Eder. 2004. American Indian Education: A History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Reid, Cecilie. 2004. Peace and Law – Peace Activism and International Arbitration, 1895–1907. Peace & Change 29 (3/4): 527–548. Ring, Natalie J. 2012. The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880−1930. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press. Stearns, Peter N. 2009. Globalization in World History. Abingdon: Routledge. Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah. 2019. Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah. 2020. New Frontiers Beyond the Seas: The Culture of American Empire and Expansion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. In A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present, vol 1, ed. Christopher R.W. Dietrich, 233–251. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Tyrrell, Ian. 2010. Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Utley, Robert M. 2004. The Indian Frontier 1846–1890. Revised. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. White, Louellyn. 2018. “Who Gets to Tell the Stories?” Carlisle Indian School: Imagining A Place of Memory Through Descendant Voices. Journal of American Indian Eduaction 57 (1): 122–144. Woods, Colleen. 2020. Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zimmerman, Karl. 2019. Quaker Twin Brothers, a Magical New York Resort and Why It Mattered to Redlands. Los Angeles Times, 3 August. https://www.lat imes.com/travel/story/2019-08-02/mohonk-resort-new-york-redlands.

CHAPTER 11

Living on the Fringes: Boarding Secondary Schools in Nigeria and the Paradox of Colonialism Ngozi Edeagu

In 1940, the Nigerian colonial government requisitioned its educational facilities for military purposes. While it transferred some of the students of these secondary schools to missionary-run institutions in other parts of Nigeria, students at the Kings College Lagos (KCL) were relocated to alternative facilities to “meet the circumstances”.1 In 1944, however, the 75 male boarders at the school located in the Crown Colony protested by refusing to attend classes after barricading themselves in their temporary hostel accommodation with a notice stating, “King’s College Boys on Strike”.2 The entire student body instigated by junior students in Classes I, II and III who had first voiced opposition to their conditions, had now

N. Edeagu (B) Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_11

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grown tired of managing their unsuitable accommodation and “an unsettled life in academics and in sports”, which included an onerous two-mile daily commute on foot to and from their classrooms and then again in the evening for games.3 The aftermath of this demonstration elicited what was aptly described by a former Kings’ College student as the ‘colonial big stick’.4 In other words, their actions led to arrests, school expulsions, a court trial and the conscription of eight boys ‘technically’ no longer students considered students including a traditional ruler’s son. Among them was 15-year-old S. M. Oparocha, who died at a military hospital before his deployment, and his two cohorts who perished at the Burma war front.5 News of the 1944 Kings College saga spread to other institutions in other parts of colonial Nigeria, including its sister school, the Government College Ibadan,6 thanks to ample press coverage, particularly in the West African Pilot (Pilot ) by Anthony Enahoro. He was not only the newspaper’s Assistant Editor but also a former student of the school.7 The KCL episode underscores how selected schoolchildren extricated from a supposedly ‘primitive’ African society were introduced into secluded boarding facilities to produce a privileged Western-educated class who would run society along with the British colonial administration as “little English gentlemen”.8 Furthermore, while children in these boarding secondary schools may not all have originated from elite backgrounds, they were destined to be created in them.9 However, this conversion process had the opposite effect, with the proposed beneficiaries vocally rejecting colonialism. Pupils in boarding houses, supposedly excluded from the rest of Nigerian colonial society, were not as isolated as formerly perceived by their hosts. Instead, they were integrated into the ‘outside’ world of nationalists and broader anti-colonial processes. This chapter thus explores this exclusion process and why it deviated to produce an inclusion of children into wider anti-colonial processes. The underlying conditions that induced the KCL-type incident have remained unexplored in the historiography of anti-colonialism, with narratives on grievances in colonial Nigeria underestimating the peculiar problems of privileged secondary school children. In particular, academic and residential life perturbed boarders. Emboldened by their knowledge of English, the language of the coloniser and the press in Southern Nigeria, students not only faced colonial hardships, but also publicised their concerns in the local newspapers.10 On a personal level, one boarder, notwithstanding his position as a ‘ward of the state’, often threatened to

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write to prominent journalists-cum-nationalists like Enahoro and Mbonu Ojike to counter, for instance, students’ subjection to “all the colonial brainwashing”.11 The Children and Young Person Ordinance (1946) classified a person under 14 as a child, while anyone between 14 and 17 was a young person.12 These categories remained contested throughout the colonial period.13 Occasionally, the line between a child and a young person or a young person and an adult was blurred. Notably, while a 17-year-old still required paternal consent before enlistment into the army,14 regarding labour the government simultaneously viewed someone “on and above 14 years of age” as an adult and one from 12 to 14 years of age as a juvenile.15 Thus, the fluidness of the categories of ‘child’ and ‘young person’ should be weighed against the term ‘youth’, which in the context of political organisations like the Nigerian Youth Movement and the West Africa Youth League, was depicted in the light of “one’s rejection of the past”16 and not in any chronological sense. The fluid and ambiguous nature of chronological age ultimately warrant the use of child(ren) in a broader context in this text which also signifies underlying power relations. Until the last decade, historical research paid limited attention to children’s agency and experiences in historical processes. To challenge this marginalisation, John Wall introduced the concept of childism to insert children’s voices and agency into historical processes.17 Scholars have started to re-imagine the typologies of children in the colonial era outside negative contexts18 and to produce more inclusionary narratives. In particular, Saheed Aderinto’s work has uncovered new vistas to understanding children’s encounters in colonial Nigeria as transcending the “socially constructed problems of labor, delinquency, and vagrancy”.19 Similarly, student protests also underline what Cooper calls the “contradiction of colonialism”.20 The more successful the colonial administration was in educating these select ‘primitive’ Nigerians to become loyal “EuroAfricans”,21 and ultimately separate them (‘the civilised’) from the masses (‘the uncivilised’), the more vocal they became against perceived injustices. Notably, colonial education contributed to fashioning individuals who “developed the tools to articulate, in the colonizer’s own language, a dialogue of resistance to colonial oppression”.22 These same tools elicited the suspicion of the “educated natives” as potentially dangerous by the colonial administration even before national consciousness erupted.

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Consequently, resistance to the colonial project emerged within the exclusionary spaces of boarding facilities despite their consistent absorption of colonial ideology and praxis.23 This chapter contends that while ‘living on the fringes’ of Nigerian society and British colonial ideals (exclusionary), students in the colonial boarding school system immersed themselves in wider anticolonial processes (inclusionary) occurring in the 1940s. In sum, boarding facilities, supposedly ‘secluded’ social-cultural environments, were fertile milieus for the creation of non-conformists. Consequently, this text highlights the colonial paradox by examining residential life in secondary boarding schools in Southern Nigeria while drawing substantial insights from four elite institutions: Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DGMS), Hope Waddell Training Institution (HWTI), Government College Umuahia (GCU) and King’s College Lagos (KCL).24 A combination of historical sources will deepen our understanding about boarding life conditions that produced ‘rebel’ attitudes and behaviour. Thus, this work not only prioritises school inspection reports, newspaper articles, school records and school histories but also school magazines and biographies that uncover students lived experiences and perspectives.

A ‘Home Away from Home’: Historicising Boarding Schools in Nigeria Unlike the primary school, which served as “the pioneer station for education of the masses”, secondary grammar schools were expected to train a small cadre of local leaders.25 Thus, few secondary schools existed when the colonial government in Nigeria opened its first post-primary school for boys in 1909. Thirty years later, the situation had changed little.26 By June 1948, the colonial authorities ‘recognised’ only 50 secondary schools in Nigeria, with 11 located in the colonial capital of Lagos.27 While children in missionary and government institutions commenced secondary school in the 1930s between the ages of 14 and 16 in a typical five-year institution,28 the maximum entry age into government schools had been lowered to13 years by the 1940s.29 This law did not preclude admission at a younger age, as in the case of Soyinka (1986 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature), who was admitted at the age of 11.30 Nor did this mandate apply to girls admitted into the government-run Queens’ College where there was no official age restriction until 1948.31

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Students’ professed or documented ages nevertheless should be treated circumspectly. In particular, as government school scholarship programmes and entrance examination performance were entangled, the critical struggle for admission encouraged age modification.32 This practice was notably so in an era where chronological age could not be verified. Thus, potential candidates vying for entry into KCL for 1946 were to be turned away if they could not “produce satisfactory evidence of age, such as birth or baptismal certificate or a declaration of age, sworn by some responsible person”.33 Nevertheless, while the ages of most children born in the Colony of Lagos (which was only a minute part of Nigeria as a whole) could be substantiated through birth certificates which had been introduced in 1863, elsewhere, “doubtful cases” often arose where much was at stake for vested parties.34 Thus, for entry into other colleges in 1946, examiners would judge candidates based on “general physical development”,35 not least of all being “under 5 feet in height on the day of the examination”.36 Nevertheless, school authorities were not always successful in verifying ages or eliminating fraud despite asking boys to undress during the school interview stage.37 As noted earlier in KCL in 1937, this failure resulted in the admission of some new entrants who “were not unacquainted with a shaving razor”.38 Behind enclosed walls, the regulated boarding school environment not only introduced children to a different way of life, but it aimed to mould every aspect of their lives. In Nigeria, boarding schools had been introduced as part of the Christian mission enterprise and served three primary purposes. First, they served to eliminate disproportionately long commutes to school and simultaneously improve attendance as schools were few and geographically scattered. Second, these facilities aimed to reduce the ‘negative’ influence of the pupils’ homes or rival denominations on missionaries’ Christianising efforts.39 Finally, with the establishment of formal colonial rule, these facilities separated mission institutions from the over-reach or direct control of government. Thus, the “bounded space” of the boarding school was integral to ‘civilising’ privileged locals.40 In general, the missionary societies neglected secondary school level education in Southern Nigeria, generally considering it non-essential to a “traditional mission education” which emphasised religious education and a life of Christian service.41 Nevertheless, in 1899, the Scottish Presbyterians opened a secondary section for their ambitious education project, the Hope Waddell Institute, aiming to forestall secularisation of their

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enterprise in the trail of the 1882 Education Ordinance enacted by the newly constituted colonial administration. With the establishment of the Hope Waddell Training Institution (HWTI), the name of the secondary department, the colonial government reduced its dependence on human resources imported from Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast to fill their vacant clerical positions.42 While the HWTI commenced fully residential,43 it allowed the attendance of day students due to its urban setting.44 By 1902, it became a government-assisted school, meaning a grant-in-aid from the colonial government supplemented its financial efforts and thus opened it to government supervision and inspection rights.45 In 1925, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) established the Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DMGS) to meet the pressing need of the locals for secondary school education among the Igbo, one of the two majority peoples inhabiting the Southern Province of colonial Nigeria. For its erection, the CMS received the support of the local Igbo community and their counterparts living in Lagos and Northern Nigeria. It was constructed in the densely populated city of Onitsha, the headquarters of the CMS Niger Diocese, an important trading and administrative centre, and a strategic point of entry into the heart of Igboland.46 On February 24, 1925, the school opened to 29 boarders with the projection that most of its future intakes would continue to board.47 The following year about one-third of the student population were boarders, and by 1944, it had risen to almost two-thirds—with 170 boys in residence and 70 others in houses controlled by staff members.48 Five years later, the school became exclusively boarding.49 The colonial government’s first secondary school was established against the backdrop of socio-economic and political changes occurring in Lagos at the beginning of the twentieth century.50 With Lagos established as the new capital of the amalgamated Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906, new government offices were established and a skilled workforce was required for the expanding economy. The initial personnel shortage had previously been satisfied by ‘native foreigners’ or Africans from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the West Indies. However, the local people this trend was criticised by and pressured the new government to train “an indigenous educated class which would be the government’s ‘apostolate’ to the local community”.51 Their agitations contributed to the establishment of KCL in 1909. Other government secondary schools (otherwise known as colleges) were established at Umuahia, Ibadan and Zaria in 1929 and at Ughelli and Afikpo in 1945 and 1952, respectively.

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In particular reference to Government College Umuahia (GCU), all students were destined to be boarders due to its remote location with the school site able to accommodate all curricular and extra-curricular activities. It boasted classrooms, boarding houses and extensive sports facilities, including two large fields, a cricket pitch and pavilion, a basketball court, a full-size athletics track and a nine-hole golf course.52 The institution was open selectively to children from the Eastern Provinces and the British Cameroons, as well as those from the Igbo areas of Warri and Benin Provinces, and to pupils of Igbo, River Division, Efik or Ibibio birth attending government and assisted schools (or those receiving financial assistance from the government) in the Northern Provinces.53 Despite the geographic and ethnic selectivity of students attending GCU, the student body was still diverse as the British colonial administration opposed ethnically-segregated schooling to develop “a sense of national identity”.54 Therefore school admissions, particularly into their flagship boys school, KCL and supported missionary schools, were available to students from all over Nigeria, the British Cameroons and beyond.55 As Okunnu recalled regarding KCL in 1940: “Students came from different parts of the country. You would never ask yourselves where you came from; you didn’t ask what language you spoke. We regarded ourselves as one family of young boys”.56 Both missionary and government schools differed from the local communities regarding aesthetics and an ‘upgraded’ standard of living for intakes. However, there was stiffer competition for spaces in government institutions due to the higher quality of care and education received there. Similarly, no distinction existed between missionary and government institutions in terms of “obedience to authority”,57 dissolving both parties in a tight, symbiotic relationship. In particular, for the colonial authorities, mission schools were fundamental partners at the beginning of colonial rule in Nigeria in producing a significant number of “literate, disciplined, and cooperative Africans”.58 Unsurprisingly, Major Macdonald, a devout Presbyterian and consul-general of Calabar, the first colonial capital of Southern Nigeria, provided generous financial support to HWTI.59 On the other hand, missionary schools could not match their government counterparts’ human and material resources, notably a strong graduate staff.60 Nevertheless, instruction in English was a core commonality. Enforced by the 1903 Education Code, English replaced vernacular as the medium of instruction in post-primary schools aimed to facilitate “the diffusion

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of culture” among students61 and respond to growing local demand62 and ‘expert’ opinions.63 Thus, the no-vernacular rule appeared in schools to punish students caught speaking anything but English.64 Inadvertently, the knowledge of English, the supposed marker of ‘sophistication’ in colonial Nigeria, facilitated the spread of ideas and opinions about colonial rule.65 The second area of commonality was the “continual process of mobility”66 engendered by residential life. Government school students, for instance, were given free travel warrants to cover the train portion of their travel to their institutions and back home during the holidays. Consequently, the generation of students who received English missionary and colonial education, particularly in the 1940s, developed a “double consciousness” partly European and partly traditional based on their interactions among close-knit families steeped in the latter during the school holidays.67

On (Re)locations In the 1940s, boarding students opposed similar aspects of their schooling and residential life, and those from KCL can accurately be said to be at the forefront of these protests. While the school did not have a boarding facility until 1926,68 KCL students were still strategically positioned to benefit from and participate in the nationalist activities occurring in their milieu. Lagos, now the administrative capital of colonial Nigeria, had modernised quicker than the rest of the territory due to its direct administration by British officers. Consequently, Lagosians (those born in the Lagos colony and its residents) were British subjects and so unaffected by ‘native’ customary laws like colonials living under the protectorate system.69 They also had a greater freedom of expression than those in the protectorates. Additionally, as Nigeria’s communication and administrative centre, the city accommodated Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Ziks press newspaper conglomerate (consisting of the Comet, the Eastern Nigerian Guardian, the Nigerian Spokesman, the Southern Nigeria Defender, and the West African Pilot , published in Lagos), several libraries, a significant migrant workforce and a new generation of educated nationalists.70 Uchenna Nwosu, a KCL student in the 1950s describes it as “being near the vortex of the political ‘wind of change’”.71 Another former student supported this idea in discussing his exposure to the open debates and speeches held by the Legislative Council in Lagos, where he watched Azikiwe debate with Sir

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Hill Foot, the Chief Secretary to the colonial government.72 In addition, the Lagos Racecourse (now Tafawa Balewa Square), close to KCL, hosted political meetings which had so stirred schoolboys like Enahoro.73 In contradistinction, GCU’s remote location did little to shield its students from the unwanted ‘negative’ tendencies that came to be associated with its sister institution in Lagos, nor could it withhold the spread of agitation from it to more ‘conservative’ mission schools. Before its requisition in 1940, GCU had enrolled 149 students who the colonial administration subsequently redistributed unevenly to other post-primary institutions.74 Samuel Oparaocha, one of the eight conscripted KCL students, was initially a student at GCU and had only spent a year there when the school was closed down. He was readmitted to another school at Oron then enrolled in the Owerri Middle School before his father opted to send him to KCL where he was admitted in 1942.75 Subsequently, some of the 22 students relocated to Kings College Lagos (KCL) engaged in anti-colonial activities.76 Conversely, the GCU students, redistributed among mission schools in Eastern Nigeria,became dissatisfied with their stay in their host institutions. Through the Pilot, they demanded that their “extinct” institution be reopened or the most senior students, at least, be transferred to KCL or the newly reopened sister school at Ibadan.77 The 21 more secular and politically-charged GCU students at Methodist College, Uzuakoli (MCU) clashed with their politically ‘docile’ counterparts over what they referred to in whispered voices as “oppressive rules and regulations concerning speech, movement, dress and meals”.78 Thus, one consequence of wartime school requisitions was the concentration of children in government and missionary schools. As difficult as it may be to fully assess the impact of GCU students’ presence or actions at MCU or the 26 at Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DGMS), a spirit of agitation arose on their departure. In 1942, a student of MCU expelled in 1941 for unstated reasons joined the Zikist Movement, the militant arm of the nationalist political party, National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC), on his return. This movement drew those who had become impatient with the older politicians and eulogisers of Azikiwe’s virtues and beliefs into its ranks.79 After that, this MCU student secretly organised student groups, “indoctrinating them with the anti-colonialist philosophy of Zikism”. Furthermore, like Epelle, he introduced them to Azikiwe’s book Renascent Africa with the students’ favourite portion being “A Beatitude of Youth” which, among

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other things, urged the youth to take preeminent control of the institutions of their society.80 The text blessed the “mentally emancipated” “youth of Renascent Africa” “who refuse to be intimidated, brow-beaten, cowed, mocked, mobbed by the Old Africa”.81 Consequently, Uzuakoli students demanded changes in the strict rules surrounding “student movement, speech, and dress”. While the school met most of their demands, the students embarked on another strike in 1945 after complaints about their living conditions were ignored. As a result of the boarders’ “unconstitutional” methods, MCU expelled eleven students from Classes 3 to 5.82 Similarly, boarders at DMGS protested over the substandard food served in their school in October 1951.83 As a result, the school management expelled some students, including those in Class 5, who were allowed to return as private candidates to write their exit examinations.84 Although the Class 5 boys could not return to school after the strike, the students still scored a victory as there was an appreciable improvement in the food quality in 1952.85 The following section provides some insight into the conditions of boarding school life, particularly in the 1940s, that propelled students to demand changes of the kind illustrated above.

The Hidden Curriculum An integral part of the school term, extra-curricular activities forged “widening personal networks among pupils”.86 For instance, under Principal William Simpson, GCU boys, save for “the week’s culprits,” were entitled to spend their Saturdays freely, namely frequenting the neighbouring town of Umuahia.87 Others chose to remain in school where they experienced and engaged with the outside world through print culture, debating societies through leisurely reading. Reading rooms and libraries which emerged in schools and communities during the Second World War “as a means and symbol of progress”88 were supplied with English language newspapers and other propagandist materials “aimed at arousing people’s emotions against the enemy”.89 In particular respect to schools, the 1944 colonial government publication, Children’s Own Paper, was targeted at school children. By 1949, its editor introduced a novel section, the “Sunray Diary”, which provided a monthly summary of events happening in Nigeria and beyond.90 For some boarders, the school reading room was “perhaps the most enjoyable part of the institution”.91 In these spaces, students were

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inspired by the words they read on the pages of newspapers such as the Nigerian Eastern Mail, the Nigerian Daily Times, and the ‘seditious’ Pilot, published in Lagos but widely circulated in Nigeria and the Englishspeaking parts of West Africa.92 In particular, the Pilot was available in missionary and government-owned secondary schools in southern Nigeria in the 1940s. In 1943, the Ilesha Grammar School library, for instance, received a free supply of the daily publication.93 Soyinka recalled that the students involved in the 1944 KCL incident were partly “fired by the rising nationalism” they encountered daily on the pages of the newspapers like the Pilot.94 While the extent to which the Pilot ’s March 8, 1944 editorial, which called for the return of the school building to its “peacetime occupiers”,95 played in the KCL saga remains fuzzy, it is clear the students had already reached their tolerance limit. Five days later, the picketing began with school children barricading the main entrance to their boarding facilities.96 Eager to avert a KCL-type protest reoccurrence, the colonial government forbade “nationalist literature” in all its schools as they were allegedly exerting a bad influence on schoolboys in particular.97 Nevertheless, this proscription did not prevent the reading of the Pilot surreptitiously by KCL students, as will be shown later.98 Nor could it forestall a second strike in 1948 by KCL junior students boarding in separate facilities at Onikan away from their seniors over the quality of their food and uncomfortable beds and mattresses. Although twenty-seven boys were expelled, the boarding house at Onikan was closed down and the boarders there reunited with their counterparts at the main campus resulting in a victory of some sorts.99 Furthermore, once widely distributed among many secondary schools, Azikiwe’s newspapers were banned in many missionary institutions for their anti-colonial position. Notably, the Roman Catholic Church forbade teachers and students in their 16 full-fledged secondary schools from reading proscribed literature and severely punished contraveners.100 The regular disavowal of Azikiwe’s newspapers by Roman Catholic missionaries raised debates in the Pilot about why church leaders declared it a “mortal sin” to read the Pilot and other nationalistic text published by Nigerians.101 Nevertheless, the missionary response differed depending upon the religious denomination. While the European Catholic Fathers’ political stance was to refuse to meddle in the politics of Nigeria and forbade their students from doing the same,102 political education was central to the Presbyterian’s work. This perspective, driven by HWTI principals

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who were all of Scottish origin until 1957, accounts for the leniency accorded to political activities in Presbyterian missionary schools. The encouragement by Scottish teachers at HWTI for students to actively participate in local and national politics is also evident in the school’s magazine editions in the 1950s.103 Conversely, the CMS introduced a class on citizenship in their schools to counter the “campaign of bitterness, hatred and mistrust” by the local press against the government and everything connected to Britain, including the churches.104 The CMS’ decision followed a 1947 disturbance by their secondary students during a Chapel prayer which they linked to a visit by representatives of the NCNC to the school the previous year. The KCL also introduced citizenship as a compulsory subject by Principal J. R. Bunting in the wake of the 1948 student strike.105 The church’s official assessment of these lessons was that they were well-received by the students, generated thoughtful discussions and cleared up misunderstandings “intentionally fostered by the local press”.106 The CMS’ appraisal highlights two contrasting issues: their awareness that students were reading ‘seditious’ newspapers and their supposed ignorance that students could access newspapers elsewhere. The DMGS was conveniently situated close to a “propaganda centre and reading room” that opened to the public in February 1941 on New Market Road, the same road where the school was located.107 At its official opening, the school principal and the Editor of the Pilot (Onitsha Branch) were among those invited.108 The room was open to the reading public free of charge. Thus all books, papers and magazines were also to “be freely given”109 including the Pilot whose New Market Road representative had sought to sell subscriptions for the Pilot and the Eastern Nigeria Guardian.110 Hence, despite the restrictions of the Pilot on the school premises, students could still read, borrow or purchase the Pilot during their weekends in Onitsha town, another centre of anti-colonial and nationalist activity in the 1940s.111 Regardless of the ban on the Pilot, it was used as a teaching tool in government schools by European teachers. In the late 1930s, the English teacher at KCL occasionally brought a copy of the Pilot to class, asking his students to translate the editorials, which he denounced as “American and atrocious,” into ‘English’.112 Perceptive students like Enahoro instead privileged the Pilot ’s content over its grammar,113 emulating his peers, missionary school-teachers and traders who read articles about political freedom within its pages.114 Similarly, in the 1940s, Adrian

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P.L. Slater, the English teacher at GCU, pointed out to students “how badly written the articles were”, hoping to dissuade them from reading the Pilot.115 Inexorably, these teachers were complicit in introducing the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the Pilot ’s anti-colonial discourse, found in its editorials and in “Inside Stuff by Zik”, Azikiwe’s personal column, reflecting an increasingly anti-colonial public opinion.116 Accordingly, Anthony K. Sam Epelle, a well-known “rebel and something of a nationalist agitator,117 became the first GCU student to smuggle into school copies of the Pilot and Azikiwe’s book, Renascent Africa, which had won the author a large following among young people in the 1940s.118 Epelle was among the students sent to KCL after GCU was closed on July 4, 1940, to become an internment camp for enemy nationals captured in Cameroons during the Second World War. Before the KCL itself was closed shortly after the GCU arrival,119 Epelle participated in an antiwar revolt there before returning to the original GCU campus site in 1943.120 Like Epelle, KCL student Femi Okunnu became politically active while tracing the controversies between the two major opposition political parties of the day, the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) and the NCNC, in the Daily Times and the Pilot newspapers,121 infighting that students would continue to observe into the 1950s.122 In addition, school-related literature was a central mode of interaction for both current and former students. The earliest text was The Eastern Star created in 1934 by Reverend Robert Fisher, the founding principal of GCU.123 The tri-annual publication contained local news and general news articles124 covering current world affairs, information on bills under consideration by the government, and information on social and outreach projects. However, the Fisher’s successor, Mr. W.N. Tolfree (of the Education Department), discontinued the magazine towards the end of 1937.125 School magazines also created a shared community of student readers and writers in government and missionary boarding schools.126 For instance, the handwritten The Umuahian appeared in GCU in the 1940s to encourage creative writing among students.127 By the 1950s, each of the four residential units (‘houses’) in GCU started its own handwritten text, namely the Excelsior (Niger House), The Sphinx (Nile House), the Athena (School House) and The Compleat Angler (Fisher House).128 Each student was obligated to contribute an article.129 Conversely, the Presbyterian missionaries had arrived in Nigeria with their lithographic printing press, which finally found a home at HWTI in 1895.130 The press first produced religious and secular texts such as The

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Calabar Observer 131 and later the Hope Waddell Magazine, described by a student as “an omnium gatherum of the talents of all the dormitories”.132 The publication’s reach extended beyond its immediate locality to Scotland, the British Isles, Jamaica and North America—geographies where the missionaries possessed networks. Current HWTI students thus connected with former students based in Nigeria, Great Britain and the United States,133 while the school privileged these alliances by soliciting more content and purchases from their former students.134 The networks developed in school unified students as brothers, and physical walls could not easily obstruct these bonds.

Conclusion School extra-curricular activities involved a sound knowledge and application of English. In linguistic, cultural and political terms, they also unified students who sought to repudiate different forms of indoctrination and control. In this regard, there was no distinction between government or missionary boarding schools as incubators of Nigerian nationalism. This conclusion is solidified when examining the post-colonial national leadership that KCL and GCU graduates dominated,135 and the bulk of the political and intellectual leaders produced by the missionarycontrolled HWTI, DMGS (and, to a lesser extent, MCU) in the emergent Eastern Region of Nigeria.136 Nevertheless, while the English language was a unifying factor among students, the focus of agitation differed in each institution. Notably, the KCL 1944 and 1948 agitations were strongly tied to intrusions to children’s socially privileged position as the “élite of Nigeria’s school population”,—the shortcomings in their living conditions and disruptions to their social lives. Anti-colonial narratives have ignored boarding schools as sites of resistance, yet these schools, in general, co-existed as both sites of control and liberation. Within excluded boundaries, boarding institutions sought to mould children in every respect except skin colour. A regimented lifestyle and codes of conduct may have restrained student thinking and actions in some ways, but it was never complete. Instead, school students were incorporated into anti-colonial ideas partly through the English language press they encountered in their supposedly confined spaces. Children, thus, transcended concrete school walls and ideologically constrained boundaries by consuming newspapers and, to a lesser extent, other nationalist texts that highlighted voices that deviated from

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official reports. The limitations children experienced with these exclusions warranted protests as they were able to connect their unique experiences of oppression as young people to those published in newspapers like the Pilot. Thus, colonial boarding schools unexpectedly developed children’s national consciousness.

Notes 1. This chapter benefitted greatly from conversations held during the November 2020 “Exclude to Include” virtual conference organised by Felicity Jensz and Daniel Gerster, discussions with Alhaji Femi Okunnu, SAN , old boy of Kings’ College Lagos and critical comments from Emma Hunter, professor of Global History, University of Edinburgh and Dmitri van den Bersselaar, professor of African History, University of Lepizig. “The Children of Lagos Send Letter to British Children”, West African Pilot (thereafter WAP ), April 25, 1941, 1, 4. 2. “Further Hearing in Case Against King’s College Boarders is Fixed for Friday”, WAP, March 16, 1944, 1. 3. Okunnu, (n.d., pp. 21–23) ; Enahoro (1965), pp. 68–70. 4. Enahoro (1965, p. 68). 5. “Shifting King’s College”, WAP, April 16, 1941; “Son of Oni of Ife and 7 Other King’s College Boys are Alleged Conscripted”, WAP, March 21, 1944, 1; “King’s College Boy Who was Conscripted Dies at Enugu Army Hospital at Sixteen”, WAP, April 28, 1944, 1; Okunnu, (n.d., pp. 22–23). 6. Soyinka (1994, p. 144). 7. Enahoro (1965, p. 70). 8. Enahoro (1965, p. 53). 9. For an instance of elite formation in other parts of Africa (the Belgian Congo), see Tödt (2021). 10. For example, in respect to the closure of Government College Umuahia, see ‘Students’, Eastern Nigeria, “Inside Stuff by Zik: Ask Me Another”, WAP, August 2, 1941, 2. Also see students’ veiled objections to their school closure in “The Children of Lagos”. 11. See Soyinka (1994, p. 161). 12. Elias (1967, p. 383). 13. Aderinto (2015, p. 22). 14. Enahoro (1965, p. 56). 15. “Order in Council made under the Labour (Wage Fixing and Registration) Ordinance, 1943”, in supplementary to Nigeria Gazette, no 42, vol 3, September 17, 1944, 871 & 872.

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

Isichei (1977, p. 271). Wall (2019). For instance, see Fourchard (2006); George (2011); Heap (1997). Aderinto (2012, p. 243). Cooper (1997, p. 408). Chinweizu (1975, p. 79). Dillard (2003, p. 414). See also Sharkey (2003, p. 8). For a pertinent example of this paradox in colonial French West Africa, see Bryant (2014). The predominantly Muslim Northern Nigeria is excluded in this analysis as educational developments in the area took a different trajectory and occurred at a different pace. Fafunwa and Aisiku (1982, p. 66). Whitehead (1981, p. 71). HMSO, Colonial Annual Reports on Nigeria for the Year 1948 (London: HMSO, 1949), 59. Church Missionary Society Periodicals, Adam Matthew Digital online archives (hereafter (CMSP), “Are Recruits Needed”, CMS Outlook, December 1932: 254; Education Department, Annual Report for the Year 1938 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1940), 16. For instance, see Govt. Notice No. 660 (third publication), “Education: King’s College, Lagos Scholarship and Entrance Examination, 1944”, Nigeria Gazette, no. 29, vol. 31, June 13, 1944, 318; Govt. Notice No. 728, “Government College, Ibadan: Scholarship and Entrance Examination for 1945”, Nigeria Gazette, no. 29, vol. 31 June 13, 1944, 318. See also, “King’s College Entrance Exam is Fixed for August 21 and 22”, WAP, July 1, 1941, 1; and “Entrance to Ibadan Govt. College Billed for Aug. 21 & 22”, WAP, July 2, 1941, 1. Soyinka (1994, p. 11). Candidates were expected to be less than 13 ½ years of age on January 1, 1949 and required “to produce satisfactory evidence of their date of birth” if admitted. See Govt. Notice No. 607 (second publication), “Queen’s College, Lagos, Entrance Examination, 1948”, Nigeria Gazette no. 24, vol. 24, April 15, 1948, 297. Soyinka (1994, p. 94). Govt. Notice No. 684 (second publication), “Education: King’s College, Lagos, Scholarship and Entrance Examination, 1946, Nigeria Gazette, no. 30, vol. 33, May 30, 1946, 329. Annual Report of the Education Department of Education for the Year 1949 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1951), 67. Govt. Notice No. 686, “Government College, Ibadan Entrance and Scholarship Examination for 1947”, Nigeria Gazette, no. 30, vol. 33, May 30, 1946, 329.

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36. Govt. Notice No. 606 (second publication), “Government College, Umuahia: Entrance Examination for the year 1945”, Nigeria Gazette, no. 25, vol. 31, May 25, 1944, 280. 37. Onwueme (2014, p. 104). 38. Enahoro (1965, p. 51). 39. Ikejiama (2016, p. 82). 40. Simpson (1999, p. 36). 41. Taylor (1996, p. 204–205). 42. Aye (1967, p. 151). 43. Carr (1900, p. 5). 44. Ade-Ajayi (2019, p. 88). 45. Fafunwa (1982, p. 24). 46. Nwabara (1977, p. 49). For a history of the school, see Nduka (1976). 47. CMSP, “Notes on Africa and the Mohammedan World”, The Church Missionary Review, no. 842 (June 1923): 113. 48. Church Missionary Society Archives, Adam Matthews online archives (hereafter CMSA), Nigeria-Niger Mission (1935–1949) (herafter NNM), Correspondence from Principal to C.T. Quinn-Young, “Information for Elliot Commission on Higher Education”, January 18, 1944, 1. 49. CMSA, NNM, “Extract from C.M.S. Niger Mission Annual Conference, January 1949: The Dennis Memorial Grammar School”. 50. For a history of the school, see Ogunlade (1974). 51. Ogunlade (1974, p. 329). 52. Ade-Ajayi (2019, p. 204). 53. Govt. Notice No. 606 (second publication), “Government College, Umuahia: Entrance Examination for the Year 1945”, Nigeria Gazette, no. 25, vol. 31, May 25, 1944, 280. 54. Whitehead (1981, p. 71). 55. Annual Report on Nigeria: Report for the Year 1955 (London: HMSO, 1958), 83. 56. Adefaka (2011). 57. Abernethy (1969, p. 77). 58. Abernethy (1969, p. 77). 59. Ajayi (1965, p. 303). 60. CMSA, extract from C.M.S. Niger Mission Annual Conference, January 1949, “The Dennis Memorial Grammar School”. 61. Beck (1966, p. 120). 62. Notably among the Igbo, English was seen as “the language of modernity and (white) power, while education in Igbo was rated low among Igbo speakers themselves”. Harneit-Sievers (2006, p. 94). 63. Whitehead (1995, p. 2). 64. Taylor (1996, p. 142). See also Enahoro (1965, p. 53). 65. Newell (2002, p. 67).

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Kea and Maier (2017, p. 823). Nwakanma (2010, p. 18). Ade-Ajayi (2019, p. 104). Awolowo (1960, p.117). Baker (1974, pp. 55–56). Nwosu (2010, p. 59). Adefaka (2011). Enahoro (1965, p. 172). “Umuahia Government College Should Be Transferred to Owerri”, WAP, April 14, 1942, 1. “King’s College Boy Who was Conscripted Dies at Enugu Army Hospital at Sixteen”, WAP, April 28, 1944, 1. Ochiagha (2014, p. 94). ‘Students’, Eastern Nigeria, p. 2. Udo (1965, pp. 232–233). Enahoro (1965, p. 88). Udo (1965, p. 233). Azikiwe (1937, p. 48). Udo (1965, p. 234). Alexander O. E. Animalu, “DMGS-Looking at the Future”, an address delivered at the Annual Graduation and Prize-giving day of the Dennis Memorial Grammar School, Onitsha, July 3, 1993, provided by author, an old boy of DMGS, on March 21, 2021 via email. CMSP, CMS Historical Record, 1952–1953, p. 18. Animalu, “DMGS-Looking at the Future”. Harneit-Sievers (2006, p. 117). Ochiagha (2015, p. 52). Bardeen (2013, pp. 114–115). Ochai (1984, p. 315). Annual Report on the Public Relations Department for the period January, 1949 to 31st March, 1950 (Lagos: Government Printer, 1951), 2. Etitem U. Nsek, “The Reading Room”, Hope Waddell Magazine (hereafter HWM ) 1, no. 4 (July 1951): 6–7. Idemili (1980, p. 202). “First Annual Report of the Ilesha Grammar School Reveals List of Successful Events”, WAP, April 5, 1943, 2. Soyinka (1994, p. 144). “King’s College Deserves a Better Fate”, WAP, March 8, 1944, 2. “Three Lawyers Defend King’s College Boarders: Day Boys Strike in Sympathy”, WAP, March 15, 1944, 1. Nwakanma (2010, p. 45). Nwakanma (2010, p. 45).

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99. Ade-Ajayi (2019, p. 107). 100. Omenka (1989, pp. 245, 363). Also see, “Roman Catholic Priest Urges Boycott of African Paper, Chicago Defender Foreign News Page, April 30, 1938, 1 which reported how Reverend Father Melver, a Roman Catholic priest, was almost mobbed by his congregation for forbidding them from reading the Pilot. He was dismissed as an “agent of Mussolini”. 101. Mbonu Ojike, “Weekend Catechism”, WAP, 23 April 1949, 2; Mbonu Ojike, “Weekend Catechism”, WAP, April 10, 1948, 2. 102. Omenka (2003, p. 363). 103. For instance, see “Class Six Discussion Groups”, HWM 1, no. 4 (July 1951): 8–9; “Clubs and Societies”, HWM 1, no. 4 (July 1951): 14–16. 104. CMSP, CMS Historical Record, 1947–1948, p. 5. 105. Interview with Alhaji Femi Okunnu (SAN), KCL student librarian in 1950, Zoom video conferencing, November 23, 2020. 106. Interview with Alhaji Femi Okunnu (SAN), KCL student librarian in 1950, Zoom video conferencing, November 23, 2020. 107. National Archives of Nigeria, Enugu (thereafter NAE), Onitsha Provincial Education Office Records, Onitsha Reading Room (thereafter Onitsha Records), ONED 5/1/369, [unreferenced document] Letter from W.B. Benton Evans to Information Officer, “Propaganda Centre and Reading Room”, January 13, 1941. 108. NAE, Onitsha Records, ON 297A/129, Letter from the Acting Senior Education Officer to the Resident, Onitsha; Principles of CKC, DMGS and St. Charles’s Onitsha; Gen. Mgr. CMS Onitsha; Secretary, European Club; Secretary, African Club, January 1941. 109. NAE, Onitsha Records, ON 297B/41, Letter from Acting Senior Education Officer to M. O. R. Uwechia, February 11, 1941. 110. NAE, Onitsha Records, ON 297A/129, Letter from M. O. R. Uwechia to Education Officer, February 4, 1941. 111. Nwakanma (2010, p. 21). 112. Enahoro (1965, pp. 54, 61). 113. Enahoro (1965, p. 61). 114. Achebe (2009, p. 29). 115. Achebe (2009, p. 30). 116. See response to Cobina Coker in “Ask me Another”, Inside Stuff by Zik, WAP, February 11, 1938, 4. 117. Nwakanma (2010, p. 44). 118. Coleman (1958, p. 289). 119. Enahoro (1965, p. 55). 120. Nwakanma (2010, p. 44). 121. Adefaka (2011). 122. Hannerz, “Tai Solarin”, 115.

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123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

134. 135. 136.

Ochiagha (2015, p. 36). CMSP, “News from the Missions”, Eastern Ho, September 1935, p. 141. Ochiagha (2015, p. 43). Nwakanma (2010, p. 45). Ade-Ajayi (2019, pp. 210, 213). Ade-Ajayi (2019, pp. 212–213). Nwakanma (2010, p. 45). J. E. Obong, “The Hope Waddell Printing Press”, HWM 1, no. 2 (August 1950): 11. Ibid., 11. “Editorial”, HWM 1, no. 3 (November 1950): 1. For instance, see Thomas Adesanya Grillo, “A Letter from Dublin”, HWM 2, no. 1 (August 1950): 22–23; Nkata K. Abba, “My Impressions of American Education”, HWM 1, no. 4 (July 1951): 24–26; Ani E. Offiong, “A Letter from Ibadan”, HWM 2, no. 1 (August 1950): 24. “About this Magazine”, HWM 1, no. 4 (July 1951): 5. Smythe (1958). Abernethy (1966).

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PART IV

Practices and Processes

CHAPTER 12

Girls’ Bodies as a Site of Reform: The Roman Catholic Boarding Schools in Flores, Colonial Indonesia, c.1880s–1940s Kirsten Kamphuis

I would like to have sisters here, as it seems to me that all the work is only halfway done as long as I only teach the men and fail to educate little housewives. Through her tact, tenderness, and piety, the woman has to win or keep her husband and children for God.1

In 1889, the Dutch priest Petrus Bonnike explained the important role that he envisioned for religious sisters in the Roman Catholic mission in Flores, an island in the eastern part of the Dutch East Indies. Under

K. Kamphuis (B) Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics (2060), University of Münster, Munster, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_12

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Dutch colonial rule, the island became a stronghold of Roman Catholicism. Through a combination of “coercion and convincing altruism” in the realms of education, health care and agriculture the mission secured itself a solid position as a representative of colonial, political and religious power.2 Education was of central importance to this project because the missionaries could directly engage with local children in the classroom and they considered children particularly susceptible to their religious messages. Although they eventually built up a network of day schools in the villages, missionaries initially prioritised the establishment of boarding schools. In the eyes of the missionaries, ‘uncivilised’ local family life would be detrimental to the development of the new generation of Catholic youth.3 Therefore, while their parents sometimes visited their children at the schools in Flores, the pupils themselves rarely returned home. In the 1920s, students at a particular girls’ boarding school run by Franciscan sisters only travelled back to their villages for one day every three months.4 These practices of child separation, which enabled missionaries to create physical, and eventually cultural, distance between children and their families, were common in Roman Catholic and Protestant colonial missionary contexts around the world.5 As noted in the introduction to this volume, these projects depended on complex processes of inclusion and exclusion. Through boarding school education, missionaries aimed to exclude children from their birth environments, while simultaneously including them into the school community, which was saturated with the Roman Catholic faith. After graduation, students were expected to become active members of local Roman Catholic communities. As this chapter demonstrates, education in girls’ boarding schools was based on a disciplinary regime in which local girls were subjected to a specific Roman Catholic version of a civilising mission. For the most part, the project in Flores adopted a standard religious doctrine as it was interpreted in Roman Catholic boarding schools around the globe. However, it also incorporated specific gendered and racialised discourses that characterised local people in Flores as uncivilised. Indigenous girls at the Flores boarding schools experienced this disciplinary regime, quite literally, up to the level of their skin: their hairstyles, clothing and bodily maintenance habits were heavily regulated by the school rules. Historians of colonial missionary projects have shown that an analysis of body politics sheds new light on colonial projects that involved the local people and their children. As Tony Ballantyne noted, “the remaking

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of M¯aori bodies”, for example, through the regulation of tattooing and hygiene practices, was essential to English missionary projects in colonial New Zealand.6 Similarly, Maaike Derksen recently revealed how Roman Catholic missionaries in Dutch South New Guinea encouraged local young people to eschew Papuan dress and hair extensions in order to force a ‘break’ with local communities.7 Body politics were, thus, a way for the mission to exclude children from their families of origin and simultaneously incorporate them into the Christian communities, whose bodily practices differed from those of the local people in several ways. In the disciplinary regimes at the girls’ boarding schools in Flores, conceptions of age, class, race and gender intertwined to shape the experiences of children living under Dutch colonial rule and Roman Catholic educational hegemony. Yet, schoolgirls and their families sometimes found room for resistance in unexpected places. This chapter commences by providing the necessary historical context to Roman Catholic missionary work and Dutch colonialism on Flores. Subsequently, the chapter explores the alliances between the mission and local elites, before moving on to the missionaries’ critiques of gender relations in local societies. As demonstrated in the final section, bodily practices at boarding schools were a powerful tool through which the mission was able to enforce gendered reforms. Yet, local people sometimes found ways to circumvent missionary regulations against all odds.

Catholic Education and Colonial Governmentality Amidst the predominately Islamic religious landscape of the Dutch East Indies, the strong Catholic presence in Flores was an exception. In most regions in the Dutch East Indies, the Roman Catholic Church was not allowed to missionize among indigenous populations until the 1920s. This restriction was the colonial government’s attempt to avoid creating religious tensions between Muslims and Christians. The strong position of the Roman Catholic Church on Flores has its origins in the political history of the region. Even though the influence of the Dutch East India Company dated back to the seventeenth century, the eastern part of the island remained in Portuguese hands until 1859, when Portugal renounced the territory to the Netherlands to cover a debt. It was a condition of this transaction that the local people who had converted

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to Roman Catholicism during Portuguese rule would not be forced to become members of the Dutch Protestant Church. Even though Central and West Flores remained predominately Muslim and a large portion of the population continued to follow local animist religions, Catholicism spread steadily through the eastern part of the island from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Missionaries founded several stations on the island, which generally consisted of a church and one or more schools (Fig. 12.1). The Roman Catholic Church established the Apostolic Vicariate of the Lesser Sunda Islands in 1912 and assigned the missionary work in the region to the Divine Word Missionaries (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD). One year later, the colonial government granted the Roman Catholic mission a complete monopoly over education on Flores.8 This arrangement was beneficial to both the mission and the colonial government in Batavia, which regarded Flores as a peripheral territory of little economic importance and preferred to keep its investments in the islands as low as possible. Moreover, even though the government officially adhered to a policy of religious neutrality, several colonial officials expressed the hope that the mission would help curb the influence of Islam on the island.9 The mission built a school system with the same structure as the public school system in place in other regions of the Dutch East Indies. This was a prerequisite for obtaining governmental subsidies. Mission schools on Flores ranged from coeducational village schools to teacher-training courses, trade schools, a seminary for boys and domestic education for

Fig. 12.1 Map of Flores showing the mission stations with churches and schools. The locations of the mission stations are marked with the symbol of a church. The mission stations of Larantuka and Lela, where the girls’ boarding schools were located, are identified with a circle (Source Taken from Kleintjens [1928, p. 13])

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girls.10 Education on Flores was thus shaped by cooperation between the mission and the colonial government. The boarding schools on Flores were separated by gender. According to Roman Catholic educational thought, it was self-evident that boys and girls needed to be educated separately, even though village schools were often coeducational for the simple reason that there were not enough religious sisters to educate all the girls. In addition to the fact that contact between young people of opposite sexes was considered improper, the system was designed to prepare girls and boys for different roles in society. In the Roman Catholic imaginary, a woman’s place was in the home, as a mother and a wife. Thus, a Catholic girls’ education was not only meant to benefit the students but their future husbands and children as well.11 In colonial contexts such as the Dutch East Indies, this gendered ideology was firmly propagated by the Roman Catholic mission which differed from Protestant ideological thought in the sense that Protestant schools placed less emphasis on gender segregation. For instance, while many Protestant boarding schools were for either boys or girls, it was less controversial for male teachers to work in the girls’ schools.12 Just as Father Bonnike had hoped, the religious sisters played an important role in providing education to local girls. The first girls’ boarding school in Flores was founded by the Franciscan sisters of Heythuysen in Larantuka, on the easternmost tip of the island, in 1879. Ten years later, six Sisters of Charity from Tilburg established a second girls’ boarding school at the mission station of Maumere. After a few years, they moved their convent and the school to Lela because of the more temperate climate. According to the foundational papers of the school of the Sisters of Charity, the school focused on “Christian education and the religious and social upbringing of the female youth”.13 Similarly, the Franciscan sisters aimed to transform their pupils into “virtuous people, diligent Christians, efficient housewives and good mothers”.14 The girls’ schools in Larantuka and Lela developed into flourishing institutions. In the 1920s the Sisters of Charity and the Franciscan sisters left Flores and moved their missions to Java and Sumatra. Their schools were taken over by the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters (Servae Spiritus Sancti, SSpS). This order was established in the southern Netherlands by a German priest in 1889 as anticlerical legislation during the German Kulturkampf made it impossible for Roman Catholics to establish new missionary houses on German soil. By 1924, the two SSpS boarding schools in Lela and Larantuka were offering a five-year programme of

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general, domestic and religious education. The schools had a combined total of three hundred students.15 The support of the colonial government was not the only reason for their success attracting students: the mission also benefitted greatly from alliances with influential local families.

Children as ‘Gifts’ to the Mission: The Alliance with Local Elites The girls’ boarding schools in Larantuka and Lela enjoyed a good reputation among the local people, the church and the colonial government alike. Many local leaders, such as village heads, sent their daughters to the schools.16 From the establishment of the first mission stations onwards, the Roman Catholic clergy understood that it was crucial to build a good relationship with local rulers. Indeed, this approach was characteristic of Dutch colonialism in general. The colonial government habitually incorporated local governance structures into the colonial administrative hierarchy. The most important political entities in East Flores were the kingdoms of Sikka and Larantuka, both of which were headed by a Catholic raja (king). The position of these rulers changed drastically with the intensification of Dutch colonial rule. After a long period of non-interference in what it considered an unprofitable corner of the empire, the colonial army brutally repressed a series of armed rebellions on Flores in 1907–1908. Following this bloody penal expedition, colonial rule intensified, and the local rulers were incorporated into the colonial administrative service.17 The rajas effectively found themselves at the bottom of the political hierarchy, as they were obliged to report to Dutch administrators, yet they maintained their elite status in local society. For the village populations, the intensification of colonial rule meant that they were subjected to taxation and forced to plant cash crops. Men were also subjected to forced labour, such as road building, in service to the government.18 Education was central to Dutch missionary work from the start. The first missionary on the island, who arrived in Larantuka shortly after the transfer of power to the Dutch in 1859, was not impressed with the religious observance of the Christianised population. He immediately started catechism courses for children and adults and strove to enrol the children of the local village heads. Especially after the daughter of the local raja, Dona Maria Dias Viera Godinho, joined the classes, many other parents also started sending their children.19 After some initial difficulties, the

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Church managed to establish a stable relationship with the rajas of Larantuka and Sikka, who wished to maintain strong ties with the Dutch now that they had become salaried government officials. Good relations with the mission also reinforced their status as Catholic rulers. The religious sisters also invested in their relationships with highly placed families in the villages. Mother Rudolphis, the mother superior of the Sisters of Charity, described this vividly in the letters she published with the magazine of the missionary fundraising organisation St. Claverbond. The sisters actively tried to persuade the wives of village heads to register their daughters at their school by handing out gifts and organising social gatherings.20 The raja of Sikka, Don Andreas da Silva, also brought in new children. Using distinctly racializing language, Mother Rudolphis described how he brought in “eight most adorable zwartjes [darkies] from the highest class” as a “present” for the sisters. It is unclear whether this had been done with the consent of the girls’ parents.21 The sisters saw no harm in foregoing the approval of local families and, as was common in missionary practice, they often baptised children who were in danger of dying without asking their parents. The baptism of a Muslim woman on her deathbed, against the explicit wish of her family, was presented as a particular triumph for the mission.22 To the sisters’ great pride, Don Andreas also sent his daughters, Maria and Ignatia, to the school in Lela.23 When Dona Martina, the daughter of the raja of Sikka and a former boarding school student, married raja Don Lorenzo of Larantuka in 1938, the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters published a report, complete with pictures, of the wedding in their magazine.24 Having the approval of the rajas was likely a key reason why the girls’ boarding schools gained popularity among local families. Another reason that was of particular interest to families of limited means was that the mission schools were free of charge. Children received free board, clothing and meals there, making it an attractive option for parents who primarily lived off agriculture and fishery. The mission claimed that the people of Flores were too poor to pay school fees and, moreover, that an “uncivilised population” such as this, who did not understand the value of education, could not be expected to contribute financially.25 Such racist sentiments were common among missionaries. For example, the first Dutch priest on the island described his catechism students as “undisciplined half-savages”.26 The role of racial thinking at the sisters’ schools will be explored further in the next section of this chapter.

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Another important motivation behind parents sending their daughters to the boarding schools was that it significantly improved girls’ marriage prospects. The daughter of a village head could receive a much higher bride price if she had graduated from the sisters’ school, as she would have learned valuable domestic and religious skills there. Parents also saw the schools as a respectable environment for their young daughters, who often married promptly after finishing school. In fact, the sisters did not hesitate to forcibly keep girls in the boarding school, forbidding them to return to their village until a suitable Christian marriage candidate had proposed.27 Boarding school graduates were also often attractive marriage candidates for the local teachers who had been educated at mission schools and usually became catechists or headmasters in the villages. In other cases, teachers sent their fiancées, who were sometimes not baptised yet, to the schools for a brief course in religion and domestic skills. According to the sisters, the task of a teacher was much easier if his wife was “spiritually elevated by education”.28 In the Catholic media, Christian marriage was presented as a necessary antidote to the local practices surrounding girlhood, which the sisters unequivocally presented as uncivilised. The gendered practices at the boarding schools had their roots in criticisms made of local marriage traditions, in particular, polygamy and the payment of bride prices.

Against ‘Selling Daughters’: The Campaign for Gendered Reforms In the report of his visits to several mission stations in the Dutch East Indies, the American SVD priest Bruno Hagspiel published a sensationalist picture. In the image, three girls from Flores, two toddlers and an older girl, are holding hands in front of a house and staring intently into the camera lens. An adult man, hardly visible in the shadows, looks on from a distance. The picture is accompanied by the caption ‘“We are already sold” (i.e., sold in matrimony)’.29 This image of local girls as victims of local tradition, which found its way to Catholic audiences in the United States and beyond, is very similar to the one portrayed in the film Ria Rago, de heldin van het Ndona-dal [Ria Rago, the Heroine of the Ndona Valley].30 The mission released this film, directed by the SVD missionary Simon Buis and featuring local people as actors, in 1930. It depicts the trials of a converted girl from Flores who refuses to become

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the second wife of a rich ‘heathen’ after a cunning Muslim convinces her father, a village head, to ‘sell’ her to him. Ria Rago was one of the first major mission propaganda films released in the Netherlands and it enjoyed some success in Germany as well.31 Eight years later, the SVD missionary Piet Heerkens published a book with the same title that largely follows the same plot.32 Ria Rago is exemplary of the way missionaries and religious sisters understood the position of local girls within their families. For local people, the transfer of jewellery, precious woven ikat fabrics, livestock and, in Larantuka particularly, ivory, from the groom’s family to the bride’s, was an important investment in the social relationship between the two families.33 However, missionaries interpreted this as the brutal sale of young girls.34 Hagspiel claimed that girls were often sold when they were still infants, sometimes even before they were born.35 Indeed, missionaries were not the only ones who denounced local marriage practices. Colonial officials also interpreted the payment of the bride price as a purely commercial transaction.36 This kind of criticism was not uncommon among social reformers from various Christian denominations. In the Minahasa region in North Sulawesi, for example, Protestant missionaries also tried to abolish the payment of a bride price.37 The sisters in Flores reported that they sometimes received girls in their schools who had been married off against their will and who came to the sisters to seek shelter from their “heathen relatives and tormentors”.38 In the Ria Rago film and book, the protagonist is physically abused by her father when she refuses her arranged marriage. She runs away to the sisters, who lovingly take care of her injuries. Completely in line with the behaviour that was expected of a good Catholic girl, the gravely wounded Ria forgives her parents for the harm that they have done to her. Yet, while it is unclear in the book whether Ria survives, at end of the film, Ria passes away in the dormitory of the sisters after receiving the last rites and holding a crucifix. Catholic authors painted an equally exaggerated image of polygamy, suggesting that it was more widely practised than it was.39 In fact, the first Dutch priests in the 1860s had already noted that the ‘common man’ and village heads usually had one wife and that polygamy was the prerogative of wealthy aristocrats.40 Sixty years later, a colonial administrator in the Endeh region confirmed that polygamous marriage was the exception.41 Unsurprisingly, the sisters presented Christian marriage as the antidote to what they considered to be heathen customs. They aimed to create

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‘true Christian families’ by fostering unions between their pupils and the boys that were raised at the SVD boys’ schools.42 Thus, in the Ria Rago film, an SVD-trained catechist named Koenoe is presented as friendly and helpful. Dressed in a spotless white suit, the catechist presents a strong contrast to the betel nut-chewing, sarong-wearing husband Ria’s parents chose for her. The book features a budding romance between Ria and this attractive young catechist. According to the sisters, their graduates could potentially contribute to the spreading of the faith as wives of catechists and teachers in remote areas. The sisters boasted that their students, once married, were ideal housewives and faithful churchgoers. Importantly, they also claimed that Catholic couples frequently went out together and shared the ‘good and bad times’ in life, thus embodying the ideal of Christian companionate marriage.43 Companionate marriage was a very important concept in both Catholic and Protestant circles at the time. This ideal encompassed an image of marriage as a shared accomplishment of the husband and wife, based on intimacy and romantic love.44 This stood in stark contrast to the prevailing image of traditional Flores marriages as based on greed and the submission of women. Through domestic education at the boarding schools, the religious sisters propagated values of industriousness and cleanliness. Initially, vernacular languages were used at the schools—Malay in Larantuka and Sikanese in Lela—but the Lela school soon adopted Malay in order to qualify for government subsidies. This meant that many girls at the boarding schools spent their days in an environment where it was forbidden to speak their mother tongue, effectively causing them to be excluded from their families in yet another way. Apart from reading, writing and arithmetic, the students spent most of their time doing domestic chores. They also did a lot of needlework, ranging from braiding for the younger girls in the two lower grades to embroidering, knitting and dressmaking in the higher grades, when the girls were older. The girls wore the dresses, kebaya [long blouses] and bayu [shirts] that they made themselves.45 As will be explained in detail in the following section, clothing had an important role as a disciplinary tool at these schools. The concept of a housewife was alien to the local communities of Flores and women there often performed heavy physical labour in the fields and on construction sites. They also contributed to the family income by trading goods at the market and selling homemade baskets and fabrics.46 However, in the sisters’ eyes, married women’s full dedication

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to their duties as housewives was essential if the domestic arrangements of local families were to be reformed. To them, the nuclear family—as exemplified by the household of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus—was the ideal environment for raising children. People in Flores, in contrast, traditionally lived in narrow, long wooden stilt houses, with extended families that could consist of eight to twelve couples plus their children.47 When the Mother Superior of the Franciscans travelled from the Netherlands to visit Larantuka in 1901, she was shocked at the sight of villages crowded with people, pigs, chickens and dogs. Mother Ludmilla dismissed their houses as “indescribable”.48 This image stood in stark contrast to the quiet, wellorganised and protective safe haven that a home was supposed to be in the minds of the missionaries. To bring a more Christian domestic atmosphere into the homes of local people, the sisters decorated the single-family houses of newly wedded couples with images of saints and embroideries made by the sisters in the Netherlands.49 This direct intervention in the home environment of the local people suggests that the mission would not be satisfied if their girls only fulfilled their religious obligations. The sisters strived for the complete transformation of the gender relations at the heart of family life so that this would conform to their ideal of the Roman Catholic family. To this end, the sisters adopted an approach that had been used in Europe for generations: rigid school discipline. In the colonial context of Flores, this discipline was lined with racist attitudes.

Clean Nails and Combed Hair: Body Practices as a Civilising Tool The moment they arrived at the boarding school in Larantuka or Lela, the new pupils began a process of physical transformation. The girls were washed thoroughly and the long hair, of which they were very proud according to the sisters, was shaven off: they were not allowed to grow it out again until they finished primary school. This was, ostensibly, done for the sake of hygiene and it had the additional advantage of contributing to a uniform physical appearance among the girls. Religious sisters valued communal life highly and wanted to stimulate a feeling of collective belonging among their students.50 This was reflected in the school’s strict dress code. In Larantuka, the youngest children, who were six to eight years old, wore jumpsuits or a short dress with short trousers. When they moved into the next age group, the girls dressed in a blouse

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and a wrapped skirt. Once they came of age and entered the domestic science course, they wore a sarong and kebaya and put their hair up in a bun.51 All their clothes were made from the blue fabric provided by the congregational motherhouse in the Netherlands.52 On Sundays and holidays, the girls wore white dresses. Lace, ribbons and jewellery other than religious medallions and rosaries were not allowed.53 As in the Roman Catholic schools in Europe, the sisters rejected such embellishments as signs of sinful vanity. The dress code also applied to the sisters themselves. They wore elaborate multi-layered habits that were illsuited for the tropical climate of the equator. In contrast, school uniforms were uncommon at Protestant schools in the Dutch East Indies, most likely because of the greater value attached to individuality in Protestant communities compared to the Catholic emphasis on the collective. The picture shown here gives an impression of how the mission presented the body practices at the girls’ school in Lela. It depicts a group of fifteen schoolgirls of various ages, most of them squatting on the floor. Some of the girls are sitting on a stool or a bench. The original picture shows the arm and leg of another girl on the right side, suggesting that more girls were engaged in the same activity when the picture was taken. Only a few girls are looking directly at the camera. Most of them seem busily engaged in their work, which gives the picture a homely atmosphere, as opposed to the majority of mission photographs in which the girls are more obviously posing. In the background, we see the walls of buildings and trees. The teenage girls in the picture appear to be helping the younger children. While Hagspiel suggested that the girls were doing each other’s hair, captioning the picture “Reciprocal assistance in the preparation of the toilet is the rule”, it is more likely that the older girls were checking the heads of their younger schoolmates for lice. The young girls were obliged to keep their hair very short, so it seems unlikely that the older girls were braiding it, and they are not visibly holding combs or other grooming tools. The heads of two older girls are also being examined. In accordance with the rules, the hair of the older girls is much longer than that of their younger peers. They are also wearing different clothes, a blouse with a long skirt in a chequered fabric, while the younger girls are dressed in plain frocks (Fig. 12.2). This picture is an example of how the mission presented the bodies of girls as evidence of its own success. Pictures of neatly dressed girls with

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Fig. 12.2 Schoolgirls in Lela examining each other’s hair, c. 1925 (Source Taken from Hagspiel [1925, p. 128])

tidily combed hair were published in Catholic media as proof of the effectiveness of missionary work. It is not surprising that the mission was not keen to stress the possible presence of lice at the school in propaganda material. These pictures functioned to underline the potential of the pupils and convince European and American audiences that their donations to the mission would be helpful. Missionaries assured their readers that the children of Flores could become industrious, devout believers, if they were “guided with a firm hand”.54 In this context, cleanliness was considered a sign of civilisation. In the Ria Rago book, an image of local village people as ‘dirty’ and rough is juxtaposed with the ‘clean and friendly’ students of the sisters.55 As the headmistress of the Larantuka school assured the colonial government in the early 1930s, the sisters constantly reminded the girls of the importance of cleanliness.56 In boarding schools in both metropolitan and colonial contexts, daily school life unfolded according to a strict schedule punctuated by religious obligations.57 As in Catholic schools all around the world, the rhythm of the day in Lela and Larantuka was determined by the sounding of the angelus bell, the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Mass and

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daily praying of the rosary. The Roman Catholic faith, personified in the Pope, was the highest authority, eclipsing the worldly power of the Dutch Queen. The Calvinist, Dutch royal family was not an important point of reference in Flores’ schools. This is another notable difference from the Protestant girls’ schools, where portraits of the royal family were often prominently displayed and devotion to the Queen was seen as an essential aspect of being a good colonial subject. At Protestant schools, the birth of Princess Juliana in 1909 was extensively celebrated, while the sources for Flores do not allude to this event at all.58 Dutch identity, in general, did not play a prominent role at the Roman Catholic schools, as Roman Catholicism claimed a universal status that transcended national and colonial boundaries. The marginalised status of Roman Catholics in the Netherlands probably contributed to this as well. Despite the similarities in their school days, there were important differences between Roman Catholic girls’ schools in the Netherlands and Flores. Upper-class schoolgirls in the Netherlands, France and other European countries spent their leisure time reading, doing needlework and playing games with friends. For the schoolgirls in Larantuka and Lela, the after-school schedule looked very different. Their lessons lasted from eight in the morning until noon, and the rest of their day was primarily dedicated to work. The activities of the schoolgirls ranged from spinning cotton, weaving and producing embroidered ritual objects for the Church, to heavier physical labour such as carrying sand from the beach for construction works, working in the gardens and collecting firewood. In Lela, the girls also produced coconut oil that the sisters sold to local people.59 The picture below shows boarding school students at work in Larantuka. The girls sitting in the first row are weaving baskets, while the girls who are sitting on their knees behind them are spinning cotton. They are all wearing simple dresses and have shaved heads, as was common for girls of their age group at the school. One girl is wearing a necklace, most likely a religious medallion, as this was the only jewellery that was allowed at the school. The picture is very obviously staged. Almost all of the girls, except for the girl on the left who is looking down, are looking directly into the camera. They have a serious look on their face, which seems strangely at odds with their young age. In Europe, such an emphasis on work was common in schools for working-class children.60 As the sisters’ schools on Flores were mainly populated by the daughters of families of

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high social standing, it is worthwhile investigating how this difference can be explained (Fig. 12.3). The large amount of time spent working was, in part, born from necessity. The schoolgirls’ labour was indispensable because the schools owned large gardens and orchards, as well as livestock. Furthermore, the sisters wanted to provide their students with marketable skills in case they could not find a husband after graduation. If the girls could make their living weaving or doing laundry, the sisters believed they would be able to maintain a respectable lifestyle as unmarried women in their villages if necessary.61 More importantly, though, the Roman Catholic mission saw labour as an ideal way of acclimating local children to an industrious life. An industrious attitude, the missionaries argued, was instrumental in developing the ‘civilisation’ that indigenous people lacked.62 The mission believed that the local people on Flores were “primitives” or “children of nature” [Naturkinder] whose culture had hardly developed, and who consequently lacked the will to work. Therefore, the missionaries viewed

Fig. 12.3 Girls from the boarding school in Larantuka performing manual labour, c. 1925 (Source Taken from Zuster Maria Eliana [1925, p. 91])

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it as their task to provide them with Erziehung zur Arbeit, which can be roughly translated as “cultivating a sense of work”. This was a specific German term that reflected the many positive qualities ascribed to regular work. It was associated with character building, vigour and preparedness for life. Moreover, the missionaries considered work an essential element of Christian communities.63 For these reasons, both manual and physical labour held a central place in schools for boys and girls. The idea that the people on Flores were in a state of low cultural development was by no means unique to the Roman Catholic mission. Indeed, it was a well-established theory among physical anthropologists and, as such, it gained influence among Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and other colonial social reformers. As people in East Flores generally had curly hair and dark skin, they were also considered to be at a lower stage of evolution than the so-called Malay people from the western parts of the Indonesian archipelago.64 Thus, the main reason the girls and boys at the mission schools spent so much time working was that the missionaries believed this would not only be advantageous to their individual personalities but that it would contribute to the uplifting of their entire ‘race’. The many pejorative terms that missionaries used to describe their students must be seen against this background of racial prejudice and pseudo-scientific theory. The schoolgirls’ hair, for example, was often the subject of criticism, with one sister claiming that their curly hair gave the girls from the highlands a ‘wild’ appearance.65 SVD priest Piet Heerkens, the author of the Ria Rago book, used various racist terms for local people. His protagonist, an indigenous girl herself, characterises her kin as “stupid, black kampong [village] people”. Ria, as a student of the religious sisters, no longer identifies with her family and instead longs to belong to the world of the ‘clean and friendly’ white colonisers.66 The strict schedule, continuous supervision and hard work at the boarding schools were difficult for the pupils to bear, especially as many of them had been separated from their families at a very young age. Against all odds, some children found a way to take matters into their own hands. The missionaries recorded several instances of girls running away from school. On one occasion, a small group of girls walked ten kilometres through the mountain forest back to their village.67 As other scholars have noted, running away was a common form of resistance among boarding school pupils in colonised territories.68 Alternatively, girls who stayed at the school sometimes disobeyed the rules, for example, when it came to having contact with boys. According to the memories of an SVD priest

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who was a seminary student in the 1930s, seminarists and schoolgirls frequently exchanged love letters, even though students were immediately expelled if a teacher discovered the notes.69 Sometimes parents went against the school regulations too. When there were deaths at the schools, parents often took their daughters out of school out of fear for their children’s health.70 While such traces of resistance are hard to find in the archives, it is important to highlight them because they are a testament to the resilience and inventiveness of a disenfranchised population.

Conclusion On Flores, as in so many colonised territories around the world, body politics were an integral part of the missionary practices of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter has demonstrated that the mission imposed a strict disciplinary regime on the local boarding school students they hoped to shape into diligent housewives. School life was characterised by a strict schedule, manual labour and regulations surrounding dress and hygiene. Drawing on contemporary theories about race and civilisation, the religious sisters believed that hard work would be beneficial to their students. This emphasis on physical labour as a disciplining tool is an important difference between elite schools in colonised contexts and in Europe, where girls with high social standing were not subjected to heavy physical labour to the same extent. Thus, focusing on embodied experiences and the disciplinary regimes that underwrote them provides insight into the crucial role that race played at the girls’ boarding schools in Lela and Larantuka. From the cleanliness of their hands to their hairstyles, for the schoolgirls in Flores, the civilising mission of the Roman Catholic mission was written on their bodies. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters for generously hosting me on Flores in 2017 and for granting me access to their archives in Rome. This chapter has greatly benefitted from conversations with Pastor Eduard Jebarus as well as from the comments of editors Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz. Julie Davies provided meticulous language correction. Archival work in Indonesia, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands was made possible by funding from Nuffic, the European University Institute, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

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Notes 1. Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, St. Agatha, the Netherlands (hereafter ENK), archive Zusters van Liefde uit Tilburg (hereafter ZvL), inv. no. 410, Pastor P. Bonnike to his family, 20 May 1889. All translations from Dutch and German are by the author. 2. Schröter (2010, p. 95). 3. Loo (1917, p. 53). 4. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 101). 5. Mak et al. (2021). 6. Ballantyne (2014, p. 6). 7. Derksen (2020, pp. 65–67). 8. Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië, no. 309 (1913), De reorganisatie van het Inlandsch Onderwijs in de Residentie Timor en Onderhoorigheden. 9. Steenbrink (2014, pp. 109–114). 10. Jebarus (2008, pp. 63–107). 11. Essen (1990, pp. 104–107). 12. For examples of Protestant boarding schools, see the contributions of Divya Kannan and Rebecca Swartz in this volume. 13. ENK ZvL inv. no. 401, ‘Overeenkomst aangaande een te Maumerie op het eiland Flores in het Apostolisch Vicariaat van Batavia op te richten Gesticht van Onderwijs en opvoeding voor de vrouwelijke jeugd’, Den Bosch, 2 May 1889. 14. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 90). 15. Arsip Societias Verbi Divini, Ende, Indonesia (hereafter SVD), Folder Sekolah Statistiek, Jahresbericht ueber die Schulen des Apost. Vicariates der Kl. Sunda Inseln. Stand am 31. December 1924, 1925. 16. SVD, Folder Sekolah, damaged file, 1935. 17. Dietrich (1989, pp. 62–96). 18. Dietrich (1989, pp. 168–70). 19. Laan (1962, pp. 83–89). 20. Rudolphis (1896, pp. 16–18). 21. [Rudolphis] (1900, p. 52). 22. Schwester Laurentia (1933, pp. 19–22). 23. [Rudolphus] (1898, p. 65). 24. Schwester Guitmara (1939, pp. 35–36). 25. ENK ZvL inv. no. 401, ‘Circulaire aan het bestuur en de leden van den St. Claverbond’, 9 September 1890. 26. Laan, ‘Larantuka 1860–1863’, 40. 27. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, pp. 117–119). 28. Schwester Laurentina (1924, p. 89). 29. Hagspiel (1925, p. 111).

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30. Simon Buis, dir., Ria Rago, de heldin van het Ndona-dal (1930, Soverdi). Available through the website of the Dutch Film Museum EYE, https:// filmdatabase.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/film-history/film/ria-rago, last accessed 22 October 2021. 31. For an in-depth analysis of SVD propaganda films, see Ray (2017, pp. 107–127); and (2021), pp. 147–87. 32. Heerkens (1938). 33. Dietrich (1998, pp. 242–243). 34. Schwester Ludgarda and Schwester Bonosa (1925, p. 84). 35. Hagspiel (1925, p. 105). 36. Suchtelen (1921, pp. 98–99). 37. Bemmelen (1992, pp. 181–204). 38. Schwester Laurentina (1933, p. 89). 39. Hagspiel (1925, p. 111). 40. Laan (1962, p. 23). 41. Suchtelen (1921, p. 113). 42. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 119). 43. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 119). 44. Osselaer (2014, p. 17). 45. Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (hereafter ANRI), Jakarta, Indonesia, Archive Algemene Secretarie Grote Bundel Besluit (hereafter AS GBB) inv. no. 2926, ‘Schoolverslag over het jaar 1931 betreffende de R.K. Meisjesschool te Larantoeka, Onderafdeeling Oostflores en Solor Eilanden, van de Afdeeling Flores, Gewest Timor en Onderhoorigheden, 1 January 1932. 46. Suchtelen (1921, p. 99). 47. Generalate Servae Spiriti Sancti (hereafter SSpS), Rome, Italy, Archive Indonesia, Folder Travel Reports/Correspondence in German 1917– 1937. Sister Pulcheria to Mother Superior, 1 February 1917. 48. Mère Madeleine (1902, p. 91). 49. [Rudolphus] (1903, p. 47). 50. Hilhorst (1988, pp. 456–459). 51. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 90). 52. SSpS, Archive Indonesia, Folder Travel Reports/Correspondence in Dutch, 1917–1933. Sister Willibrorda to Mother Superior, 21 August 1917. 53. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 90). 54. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 101). 55. Heerkens (1938, p. 21). 56. ANRI AS GBB inv. no. 2926, Schoolverslag over het jaar 1931 betreffende de R.K. Meisjesschool te Larantoeka, Onderafdeeling Oostflores en Solor Eilanden, van de Afdeeling Flores, Gewest Timor en Onderhoorigheden, 1 January 1931. 57. Rogers (1995, pp. 529–530).

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58. Kamphuis (2020, p. 144). 59. SSpS, Archive Indonesia, Folder Travel Reports/Correspondence in Dutch, 1917–1933. Sister Willibrorda to Mother Superior, 21 August 1917. 60. Poelstra (1992, p. 67); Verhoeven (1992, p. 76). 61. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 119). 62. Loo (1917, p. 53). 63. Schwester Eustochia (1926, pp. 52–53). 64. Sysling (2016, pp. 104–107). 65. Zuster Maria Eliana (1925, p. 89). 66. Heerkens (1938, p. 38). 67. IJsseldijk (1896, p. 38). 68. Fitzgerald (2001, pp. 175–192); Vallgårda (2015, pp. 94–95). 69. Pusat Penelitian Agama dan Kebudayaan Candraditya, Maumere, Indonesia, Manuscript Collection,inv. no. 300 NTT Ms. 004, L. Lame Uran, ‘Sejarah persekolahan pulau Flores. Bagian I: 1862–1985’ (typescript; Maumere, no year), 128. 70. [Rudolphis] (1895, p. 32); [Rudolphis] (1900, p. 52).

Bibliography Ballantyne, Tony. 2014. Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, M¯ aori, and the Question of the Body. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Bemmelen, Sita van. 1992. The Marriage of Minahasan Women in the Period 1861–1933: Views and Changes. In Indonesian Women in Focus: Past and Present Notions, eds. Liesbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof, 2nd ed., 181–204. Leiden: KITLV Press. Derksen, Maaike. 2020. “Removing the Youth from Their Pernicious Environment”. Child Separation Practices in South Dutch New Guinea, 1902–1921. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 135 (3–4): 56–79. Dietrich, Stefan. 1989. Kolonialismus und Mission auf Flores (ca. 1900–1942). Hohenschäftlarn: Renner. Dietrich, Stefan. 1998. “We Don’t Sell Our Daughters”: A Report on Money and Marriage Exchange in the Township of Larantuka (Flores, E. Indonesia). In Kinship, Networks, and Exchange, eds. Thomas Schweizer and Douglas R. White, 234–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Essen, Mineke van. 1990. Opvoeden met een dubbel doel. Twee eeuwen meisjesonderwijs in Nederland. Amsterdam: SUA. Fitzgerald, Tanya. 2001. Jumping the Fences: Maori Women’s Resistance to Missionary Schooling in Northern New Zealand 1823–1835. Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 37 (1): 175–192.

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Guitmara, Schwester. 1939. Eine königliche Hochzeit. Missionsgrüße Der Steyler Missionsschwestern 18 (3): 35–36. Hagspiel, Bruno. 1925. Along the Mission Trail II: In the Netherlands East Indies. Techny: Mission Press SVD. Heerkens, P. 1938. Ria Rago. Adat-roman uit de Timor-archipel. Eindhoven: Het Poirtersfonds. Hilhorst, M. 1988. “Pas à deux mes enfants!” Meisjesvriendschappen en opvoeding op kloosterpensionaten, 1920–1965. Comenius 8: 442–460. IJsseldijk, A. 1896. Het Missiewerk op Midden-Flores gedurende het jaar 1893. St. Claverbond 8 (5): 38–43. Jebarus, Eduard. 2008. Sejarah Persekolahan di Flores. Maumere: Penerbit Ledalero. Kamphuis, Kirsten. 2020. An Alternative Family: An Elite Christian Girls’ School on Java in a Context of Social Change, c. 1907–1939. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 135 (3–4): 133–57. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgnlchr.10870. Kleintjens, J. 1928. Atlas der R.K. Missie in Nederlandsch Oost- en West-Indië. Maastricht: Firma van Aelst. Laan, Petrus. 1962. Larantuka 1860–1863. Drie jaren missiewerk door twee wereld-heren. n.p.. Laurentina, Schwester. 1924. Missionsarbeit auf der Insel Flores. Missionsgrüße Der Steyler Missionsschwestern 3 (6): 88–90. Loo, J. Van., and der. 1917. Van hier en daar en overal! St. Claverbond 29 (1): 51–62. Mak, Geertje, Marit Monteiro, and Elisabeth Wesseling. 2021. Child Separation: (Post) Colonial Policies and Practices in the Netherlands and Belgium. BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 135 (3–4): 4–28. Mère Madeleine. 1902. Visitatiereis der Eerwaarde Moeder Ludmilla, Generale Overste der Zusters Franciscanessen van Heithuizen, naar Indië. Nijmegen: L.C.G. Malmberg. Osselaer, Tine Van. 2014. Religion, Family and Domesticity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. An Introduction. In Christian Homes. Religion, Family and Domesticity in the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Tine Van Osselaer and Patrick Pasture, 7–25. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Poelstra, Jannie. 1992. Dienstbaarheid en handwerkonderwijs. Opleidingen voor meisjes uit de arbeidende klasse in de negentiende eeuw. In Een tien voor vlijt. Meisjesonderwijs vanaf de oudheid tot de MMS, ed. Karen den Dekker, 59–71. Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Ray, Sandeep. 2017. Two Films and a Coronation: The Containment of Islam in Flores in the 1920s. In The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia, ed. Ian Aitken and Camille Deprez, 107–127. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Ray, Sandeep. 2021. Celluloid Colony. Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia. Singapore: NUS Press. Rogers, Rebecca. 1995. Schools, Discipline and Community: Diary-Writing and Schoolgirl Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Women’s History Review 4 (4): 525–554. [Rudolphis]. 1895. Uittreksel uit een brief van de Eerw. Moeder Rudolphis aan de Algemeene Overste der Zusters v. Liefde te Tilburg. St. Claverbond 7 (1): 32–33. Rudolphis. 1900. Uittreksels uit brieven van de Eerwaarde Moeder Rudolphis aan de algemeene Overste te Tilburg. St. Claverbond 12 (4): 44–56. Rudolphis, Zuster M. 1896. Brief van de Eerw. Moeder Rudolphis aan de Algemeene Overste der Zusters van Liefde te Tilburg. St. Claverbond 8 (1): 15–18. [Rudolphus]. 1898. Uittreksel uit brieven van de Eerw. Moeder Rudolphus aan de Algemeene Overste der Zusters v. Liefde te Tilburg. St. Claverbond 10 (2): 62–67. Rudolphus. 1903. Brief van de Eerwaarde Moeder Rudolphus aan de Algemeene Overste te Tilburg. St. Claverbond 15 (3): 50–54. Schröter, Susanne. 2010. The Indigenization of Catholicism on Flores. In Christianity in Indonesia: Perspectives of Power, ed. Susanne Schröter, 90–105. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Schwester Eustochia. 1926. Missionarische Erziehungs- und Kulturarbeit auf der Insel Flores, Niederländisch-Indien. Missionsgrüße der Steyler Missionsschwestern 5 (4): 52–59, 71–74. Schwester Laurentia. 1933. Boma. Eine Geschichte aus der Floresmission. Missionsgrüße der Steyler Missionsschwestern 2 (2): 19–22. Schwester Ludgarda and Schwester Bonosa. 1925. Volkssitten und Gebräuche bei den Eingeborenen auf Flores, Niederl. Indien. Missionsgrüße der Steyler Missionsschwestern 4 (6): 84–88. Steenbrink, Karel. 2014. Dutch Colonial Containment of Islam in Manggarai, West-Flores, in Favour of Catholicism, 1907–1942. Bijdragen Tot De Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 169 (1): 104–128. Suchtelen, B.C.C.M.M. Van. 1921. Endeh (Flores). Mededeelingen van het Bureau voor de Bestuurszaken der Buitengewesten, bewerkt door het Encyclopaedisch Bureau, XXI. Weltevreden: Papyrus. Sysling, Fenneke. 2016. Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia. NUS Press. Vallgårda, Karen. 2015. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Verhoeven, Dolly. 1992. Christelijke lering en vrouwelijke handwerken. Onderwijs aan meisjes op het Oostbrabantse platteland omstreeks het midden van de negentiende eeuw. In Een tien voor vlijt. Meisjesonderwijs vanaf de oudheid tot de MMS, ed. Karen den Dekker, 72–87. Zutphen: Walburg Pers.

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Zuster Maria Eliana. 1925. Het missiewerk der zusters te Larantoeka. De Katholieke Missiën en het Christelijk Huisgezin 51: 89–91, 101–114, 116–117.

CHAPTER 13

‘Just a Bit of Fun’: Recreation, Ritual, and Masculinity in Irish Boys’ Boarding Schools, 1800–1880 Mary Hatfield

When student ‘Mr. Boyd’ left Wesley College in 1862, his fellow students devoted two columns of their student newspaper The Eaglet to describing his best attributes. An able member of the debating club, a contributor to the newspaper, and a good sportsman, he was noted for: “His good nature, and a vein of ready wit, that can [came] thro’ his conversation, and gave in brilliance, are known to all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. Many times shall we miss his pleasant smile at the Breakfast table and long will lovers of boating look in vain for one to awake up their party and take his place at the helm or oar.”1 He departed from Wesley College to “begin his life work, the noble task of preaching the Gospel.”2 While no other information about Mr. Boyd’s life is available, the aspects of his

M. Hatfield (B) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_13

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school career singled out by his schoolfellows suggests how the hallmarks of sociability, athleticism, and spirituality were essential attributes of the successful graduate. Wesley College, a Methodist school founded in 1845 by a group of Dublin businessmen, was one of many boarding schools established during the first half of the nineteenth century to provide for the education of Irish boys from middle and upper class backgrounds. These kinds of middle-class boarding schools cultivated an aura of exclusivity through selective admission policies, prohibitive tuition rates, and the provision of a classical curriculum. The reputation of the boarding school as a purveyor of social capital and respectability was central to its success. Irish parents expected their sons to emerge from boarding school with the social and cultural skills to assume their role in the world of business, politics, or professional life. While Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and Presbyterian schools had marked differences in their religious beliefs and school traditions, the cultivation of a bourgeois sensibility and masculine respectability pervaded the aims of school administrators across the religious divide.3 The environment provided an immersive experience into a ritual system intended to influence a pupil’s personal religious devotion, intellectual maturity, and politesse.4 Focusing on the culture of manliness in Irish boarding schools allows us to examine the idea of boyhood learning and masculine maturity that were implicit in the Irish boarding school experience. Well-read in Greek and Latin classics, sporting, spiritually devoted, and refined in manners and accent; these were the ideal attributes of the accomplished Irish boarding schoolboy. The Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, and her father Richard, in 1798 described the value of the boarding school as way for those with newfound fortunes to breed out rusticity and parochialism while simultaneously gaining access to university matriculation or the professions. According to the Edgeworths’, “Persons of narrow fortune, or persons who have acquired wealth in business, are often desirous of breeding up their sons to the liberal professions: and they are conscious that the company, the language, and the style of life, which their children would be accustomed to at home, are beneath what would be suited to their future professions. Public schools efface this rusticity, and correct the faults of provincial dialect: in this point of view they are highly advantageous.”5 The Edgeworths’ were not champions of the boarding school model, preferring home education with tutors and

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close parental supervision, yet they appreciated that the boarding school could provide a form of refinement essential for social mobility.6 Historians have observed that British elite boarding schools adopted a particular kind of liberal masculinity during the mid-nineteenth century.7 Patrick Joyce argued that the pedagogy and curriculm of boarding schools encouraged independent study, in order that boys would learn selfdiscipline. The study of Latin and Greek were thought to promote depth of thought, a consistent hermeneutic and sophisticated writing style. Subjects like English grammar, the modern languages, and algebra conveyed social capital because of the required expense of securing a tutor in the subject.8 Student independence was also cultivated through interaction with fellow schoolmates and teachers, where the expectation was for a stalwart individual negotiation of rights and privileges. Participation in the traditions and miniaturised hierarchies of school life were intended to prepare boys for the political customs and pomp of elite life.9 Their education and socialisation aimed at enculturation into a class of business and political leaders, and, as this chapter argues, the boarding school provided an immersive experience for boys to practise and develop the confidence and skills needed for such a future. The institutionalisation of organised sport in the English elite public schools is a well-documented feature of the late Victorian period, associated with the Arnoldian reforms at Rugby during the 1830s and the idea of ‘muscular Christianity.’10 Thomas Arnold’s introduction of sport and more importantly the virtues associated with good sportsmanship, were intended to rehabilitate the reputation of effeminacy, superficial scholarship, and low moral tone which clouded the public image of the English public schools during the 1820s. Febrice Neddam observed that Arnold’s changes were inculcated through implementation of a hierarchical and competitive structure of schooling, designed to reward values of personal endurance, duty, and self-reliance resulting in a manly, Christian leader.11 The introduction of sport was designed to curb immorality and youthful excess through robust spiritual and physical regimes.12 Physical education provided physical and moral discipline and elevated the best features of masculine competitiveness and sportsmanship. In Ireland, the history of sport and elite schooling carries different connotations, since certain sports were identified with nationalist and unionist political loyalties during the nineteenth century.13 Though recent work has challenged the idea that ‘Irish’ or ‘British’ sports can always be readily associated with a particular religious or political background, there was certainly

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pressure on Catholic and Protestant schools to choose recreational activities which aligned with the values of parents and administrators.14 The Gaelic Athletic Association, formed in 1884, was an important cultural force for Irish nationalism, but its invention did not necessitate the end of other sport clubs like cricket, rugby, polo, or football. Hurling and Gaelic football were adopted at some Catholic boarding schools after Ireland gained independence in 1922, but prior to that rugby and cricket were the chosen games because of their association with the English public schools.15 Sport has been studied as an important aspect of the boarding school experience; this chapter explores other aspects of physical regulation and social development in the boarding school environment, arguing that sport was just one facet of the physical education on offer in these institutions. Schools differentiated between healthy forms of physical competitiveness and unsanctioned acts of student violence or bullying. The micro politics of religion, gender, and class within the Irish boarding school suggest a distinctive political environment for Irish boys, shaped by complex ideas about political rights and the perceived state of the British/Irish relationship.16 Far from being ‘just a bit of fun,’ the physicality of a boarding school education allowed boys to imagine and act out their position in society and defend the rights they envisioned as their natural inheritance. In colonial Ireland, these liberal rights were channelled through religious, national, and political ideology. Irish masculinity underwent tremendous change in the late nineteenth century, as militant nationalism and a more strident form of cultural nationalism introduced new masculine heroes for young Catholic boys.17 However, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Catholics and Protestants utilised the boarding school to gain social advantage, consolidate class identity, and protect familial wealth. Unlike some of the other examples in this volume, Irish schools were run on a mostly private basis, the state took little interest in regulating or monitoring these boarding schools. Royal schools received state subsidy and did report to the education board, but oversight and inspection were largely cursory. Catholic boarding schools operated in a tradition of ultramontanism and intellectual cosmopolitanism which separated them from British elite schools and encouraged mild opposition to the anti-Catholic policies of the British state.

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Irish Boys’ Boarding Schools The emergence of the Irish boarding school system during the nineteenth century cannot be properly understood without reference to effect of the Penal Laws.18 Politically and economically disenfranchised since the 1650s, Catholics in the British Isles faced a set of draconian measures including prohibition on worship, education, voting, and landownership.19 In Ireland from 1695, Catholics could not hold long term leases, vote in municipal or parliamentary elections, employ more than two apprentices, travel abroad for an education, nor establish schools and colleges.20 To replace Catholic monastic schools, grammar schools affiliated to Protestant dioceses were founded, the first established in Kilkenny by Sir Piers Butler in 1538.21 James I established five Royal schools at Armagh, Dungannon, Raphoe, Enniskillen, and Cavan in 1608, with additional schools added at Carysfort, Wicklow (1628) and Banagher, Offaly (1629). Designed with an agenda for anglicisation during the Plantation era, they were Protestant schools educating the sons of Scottish and English planter families, in effect keeping them separate from the native Irish and ensuring their loyalty to the British colonial project in Ireland.22 At the end of the eighteenth century these schools were in a poor state, mismanaged and under-subscribed. By the mid-century, they were revived by an influx of middle-class pupils who valued the aristocratic origins of the school and needed the classical education to entrance into the professions. The Royal schools, particularly Portora, Armagh, and Dungannon, positioned themselves as elite fee-paying schools, yet they were insufficiently elite to attract the sons of the aristocracy or landed class, who by the nineteenth century tended to prefer an English secondary education.23 A sample of 457 boys in Armagh’s school rolls born from 1765–1853 provides an indication of how this diversification of social class played out over time. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, most students were sons of Church of Ireland clergy and often sought an ecclesiastical career themselves. The more interesting story emerges in the differences in the student backgrounds from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. From 1770 to 1789, Armagh attracted the sons of a traditional elite drawn from aristocratic families, military elites, politicians, and a few wealthy merchants’ sons. By 1830–1850, there was a wider diversity of backgrounds and Church of Ireland clergy no longer dominated the student cohort. Aristocratic boys were almost completely gone from the school, replaced by sons of the

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new professional classes. The sons of state bureaucrats, working variously as high sheriffs, justices of the peace, or revenue officials composed 24% of the student body.24 The sons of clergymen were still a robust 19% of the student body, but these boys were drawn from regional parishes, rather than from the upper echelons of the church hierarchy.25 Rather than send their sons to Protestant schools, Catholic families sent their sons to the continent, often France or Spain, for education and religious seminary.26 Irish colleges at Salamanca, Saint-Omer, Douai College, and Paris were centres for Irish seminarians and students.27 The legacy of the penal laws limited Catholics’ ability to set up permanent, large-scale educational instructions in Ireland until the end of the eighteenth century. St. Kieran’s college in Kilkenny, founded in 1783, was the earliest attempt by a Catholic diocese to establish a preparatory school and seminary for boys. After Catholic Emancipation (1829), which removed remaining legal discrimination, the activities of Irish Catholic religious orders expanded rapidly.28 There were 30 schools founded by male religious congregations in 1824, this number rose to 55 in 1851 and 132 in 1871.29 Some of these institutions ran a tiered system of education providing free education in basic literacy and numeracy, with a separate school established for classical or superior education for paid pupils, a fee structure also common among the female teaching religious orders.30 Many of the Catholic boarding schools for boys were middleclass from their foundation, providing access to the professions for sons of the Catholic merchant or large farming class. While there was certainly a range of elitism across the topography of Catholic education, the more exclusionary policies of the Catholic elite schools did not occur until the 1880s and into the twentieth century, as the Irish Catholic elite grew and consolidated itself with the establishment of the Irish Free State.31 For both Catholic and Protestant boys, attendance at a fee-paying boarding schools signalled inclusion in a rather small and exclusive group, however, within this group of middle-class and elite boarding schools there was a well-established hierarchy which distinguished the unique brand of the school and its place in the educational landscape. Inside the school, boys’ inclusion in the social hierarchy was determined by their age, intellectual, physical, and social prowess. In general, the idea of ‘belonging’ as a student in an Irish boarding school required more than a simple payment of fees. For example, in 1812, William Trimble, proprietor of the Fermanagh Reporter, reported that sons of local merchants who attended the Portora Royal school as free pupils had their jackets and hats hacked

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to pieces by their aristocratic classmates.32 Social inclusion required the successful negotiation of relationships with teachers and fellow students and a demonstration of behaviour which aligned with the values of the school in order to be a fully fledged member of the student body.

Boys’ Republic Boys’ schools were characterised by their pupils as miniature republics, small democracies, and politicised milieus. Perhaps this appellation is simply the aggrandising autobiographical tendency of their authors, but on the other hand indicates the early sense of civic responsibility and political awareness these schools promoted and depicted as a boy’s natural inheritance. During Charles Gavan Duffy’s first year at a Presbyterian boarding school ‘a boys’ parliament, a boys’ regiment, and a boys’ newspaper were established.’33 In Dublin, Charles Lever (1806–1872) was involved in a skirmish between boys’ schools that included makeshift cannons and land mines, set with gunpowder. According to Lever’s biographer William John Fitzpatrick, the conflict happened because of political disagreements with boys from an ‘inferior social caste.’ After several fights, a pitched battle was agreed to and the boys used gunpowder to set off a small cannon in response to the sticks and stones hurled at them from the opposing party of ‘roughs.’34 Among the boys involved in this battle was Edward Dix, future police magistrate. When the boys were brought before the Marlborough street police headquarters the following day Charles Lever claimed that their offensive was “all sound and smoke, sir; our cannon were only toy-guns, and the mine, a mimic mine. Most of us take up arms yet in defence of our king and country; and might we not be worse employed that in learning the science at the most susceptible period of our lives?”35 The magistrate let the boys off with small fines. The episode demonstrates how, if couched in the language of patriotism and loyalism, their battle was an acceptable and even admirable course of action. In Lever’s case this was even more acceptable given that they described their skirmish as rising from political differences; which showed that they had principles and not simply a taste for brutality. Upon entrance to a boarding school, boys were faced with a new set of routines, regulations, and disciplines. Former students recalled that admittance to the social hierarchy of the school was a matter of great seriousness, a first step towards manhood. When John Norris Thompson entered the Royal School at Raphoe he had “an intense terror of the royal

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school […] and fought wildly against going in to the school room.”36 William Trench, age 10, arrived at the Armagh Royal School in 1821 and promptly burst into tears. He was allowed to stay with the wife of the headmaster and her daughters for a day, delaying his entry until he could control his tears.37 Upon meeting his classmates he was promptly beaten by an older pupil who didn’t like his disrespectful response to a question, and thus his ‘hardening’ began.38 A much derided, but accepted tradition within the boarding school experience was the practise of ‘fagging’ of younger boys to older pupils.39 Fagging was part of the initiation process for new pupils, where a senior boy would claim him, and then offer protection in exchange for favours like shining shoes or doing extra chores. The responsibility was on both parties, as the senior pupil took responsibility for his fag’s happiness in the school, and the younger pupil did menial tasks at his master’s request. At its best it could serve as a mentoring relationship where first year students were integrated into the school with the guidance of a senior pupil, at worst it was a sanctioned form of bullying and abuse. William Blacker, former student at Armagh Royal School, was undecided about the effectiveness of the fagging system, “Of course the system of Fagging prevailed in the one as in the other. I am not going to discuss the propriety or impropriety of that system here; to ‘Mammie’s Darling’ it was purgatorial enough, yet it involved not a few ups and downs of life and served to teach numbers to feel for others in a way they might not otherwise have done.”40 In Blacker’s case he was the fag of Tom Pakenham, later the Earl of Longford. My mentor, though he afterwards turned out one of the most estimable characters in the land, was somewhat tyrannical in his goings on. One of his favourite amusements was to seat me on the uppermost step of the stairs, tying my wrists to my ankles until I say in the shape of a triangle and then seizing my feet he dragged me down, bump, bump, bump, step by step to the bottom. I must say, however, that he always gave me a bit of plumcake or the like by way of compensation and allowed no one to molest me but himself.41

In 1821, fagging was still part of Armagh’s traditions, William Trench was treated rudely and told to shine his master’s shoes as part of his initiation.42 According to Trench, a pupil at Armagh Royal school in the 1820s, “All the old fashions had been retained; and no alterations in the

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customs -or what the boys called ‘the rights of the school’-had been introduced. ‘Fagging’ in its most extensive application was in full force; and as I was a little boy and put down into the lowest class, I was seized on as a fag by one of the boys in head form.”43 Trench stated it was indeed a rough and wild school, but boys and teachers were bound by a strict code of honour and tradition. “There was a constant affectation of manhood amongst the boys -carrying them so far that upon one occasion, the elder boys agreed to settle some quarrel which had arisen between them with the pistol, rather than the ordinary course of fighting it out with their fists.”44 The duel went off with neither party receiving a bullet, and the boys then declared themselves satisfied with the outcome. Boys seemed to accept that the system of punishments and chores was offset by hardearned privileges. In theory, the system was supposed to promote a degree of compassion, as all students had to start as fags before they joined the senior classes and became masters, the idea was that they would be more compassionate masters because they had once been fags themselves. Clongowes Wood, a Jesuit run school, expressly forbid the practise of fagging at their school. They wished to “forestall the development of the bully, with all the sinister associations of that term; […] to secure and to develop that independent personality that has no use for, no toleration of, the subjection of boyhood to the perils of fagging and irresponsible punishment.”45 By the end of the nineteenth century, fagging had fallen out of favour at most Irish institutions, though it carried on in many schools without official sanction. Within Irish boarding schools, the relationship between teachers and students was characterised as a kind of Lockean social contract; privileges and discipline were meted out in accordance with the principals of the school. When pupils believed that their rights were being trampled they had grounds for protest. If demands were ignored, students had cause for an outright school rebellion, or a ‘barring out.’ These were moments when the traditional hierarchy of the school was upended. The timing of the most famous ‘barring out’ episodes in Ireland coincide with the American and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, suggesting the tremendously destabilising effect they had on the social order.46 The language of liberal rights and democratic rule were enacted against the teaching masters and recalled with a great deal of mirth and mischievousness.47 In 1788–1789, a barring out incident took place at the Armagh Royal school. When their discretionary holiday was taken away by Headmaster

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Carpendale, the boys, led by one or two dissatisfied students, gathered pistols and ammunition and prepared the dormitory as their fortified citadel. William Blacker recalled that the conflict was seen as a matter of rights; the students were claiming their right to a holiday from the headmaster adopting the language of rights and civic duty that were part of their history lessons.48 During this episode the senior boys barricaded themselves into a dormitory and demolished the stairs to the second floor with axes. The pupils’ account of these events may indeed have been exaggerated, and certainly the ‘legend’ of such an insurrection became part of the school’s lore. Three decades later, another student rebellion took place at Armagh Royal School, this time with much greater effect and escalation. At the time of the episode, there were about 100 boarding students in the school and a large number of day students. The occasion of the barring out was set into motion when a new boy joined the school, described as “an idle, bad, good-for-nothing boy; and having been severely flogged more than once for his lessons […] conceived a real hatred for the Doctor.”49 In retaliation, the student put a half pound of gunpowder in the stove of the schoolroom and called it “blowing up the ushers.”50 In response, the headmaster Dr Miller took away the privilege of school holidays from the boys, which consisted of a half day every Wednesday, until the culprit of the gunpowder explosion was known. Because of this infringement of their rights, the older boys plotted a fullblown rebellion, Trench asserted that there was tremendous joy among the boys when they decided upon this course of action, which contrasted with their respectable upbringings. We could not even claim the excuse of being sprung from an oppressed race. We were all Protestants; all of us amongst those who are now called ‘the dominant class.’ We were all gentleman’s sons, most of us landlords’ sons, and as such we had never suffered under any obnoxious land code […]. I am not aware that any of us had ever suffered an injustice in our lives. And yet there is no denying that our delight was unbounded whenever we thought of a rebellion.51

The barring out was successfully initiated and the boys settled in to defend their dormitory, firing grapeshot at the gardener when he tried to break down their door.52 When the headmaster tried to get the local militia to help put down the rebellious boys, the officer in command flatly refused, recognising that the boys could fire on his troops with impunity,

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but the militia could not fire back at a group of children.53 The episode was finally brought to a conclusion when the boys ran short of water after three days and brokered a peace with the sovereign of Armagh, submitted to being flogged, and received no further expulsions or punishments. The school holidays were subsequently reinstated. Boyhood in a boarding school could be a prolonged period of youth indeed. Until they left school, boys were considered dependent on their families and thus allotted a degree of leniency for boyish misbehaviour. Using correspondence and school records from the period, it is evident that discipline was regularly meted out to pupils, but there was an accompanying permissiveness towards youthful defence of liberal rights. Bullying a teacher or initiating a ‘barring out’ were discouraged behaviours of course, but school administrators also begrudgingly respected student rights by capitulating to their demands. While headmasters and teachers clearly disapproved of student mutiny, the political culture in the school provided the language and values of individual rights and liberty which boys claimed in their defence. Appealing to these liberal values provided some support for this iteration of boyish heroism. Inclusion in the boarding school was expressed in physical culture through official sporting teams, but also through traditions like fagging. Through these practices, boys situated themselves in a social hierarchy and understood their place in the pecking order. The day-to-day activities of the boarding school demonstrate how bourgeois masculinity imbibed restraint, honour, loyalty, and physical strength as essential pedagogical lessons for the future masters of industry. Irish boarding schools were intellectually and socially connected to the public school tradition in Britain, yet also differed substantially in their social demographic and religious composition. Catholic schools looked to Continental Europe and particularly the Jesuit order for pedagogy and staffing, whereas Protestant schools were much more closely tied to Protestant traditions in England and Scotland. Thus, religious affiliation remained the key exclusionary criteria for admission to an Irish boarding school and reflected the ongoing sectarianism between the official state religion and the religion of the Irish majority. Though the ideal of the sporting young gentleman was shared across the denominations, it was not a sufficient remedy to the exclusionary politics of the colonial administration in Ireland. Boys’ political and professional prospects upon departure from boarding school remained tied to their confessional identity for most of the nineteenth century.

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Notes 1. Eaglet and Wesleyan Connexional School magazine, 17 May 1861, Wesley College Archive, Ballinteer, Dublin. 2. Ibid. 3. For more on this see Hatfield (2019, pp. 169–217). 4. The use of the term ritual system refers to Peter McLaren’s theory of ritual performance, see McLaren (1999). Also, Henry and Gardiner (1993). 5. Edgeworth and Edgeworth (1835, p. 95). Practical education was first published in 1798 and reprinted throughout the nineteenth century in England, the USA, and Ireland. See also Armstrong (2020). 6. Ibid., pp. 95–98. 7. Ibid. 8. Percy (2009, p. 82). 9. Joyce (2013, p. 232). 10. For an introduction into this literature see Harvey (2012); McDonald (2007); Mangan (1981) and Mangan (2014). 11. Neddam (2004, p. 306). 12. Joyce (2013, p. 241). See also Boddice (2009). 13. Finn (2010); Cronin (2011); Hickey (2013); Mangan (2014). For more on Irish girls physical education see, Nic Congáil (2013); Raftery and Delaney (2019). For more general accounts of women and sport see Freeman (2016); Verbrugge (2017); Vertinsky (1994). 14. Hunt (2007); Rouse (2015); Sisson (2004). 15. This was true in both Catholic and Protestant elite schools, see O’Neill (2014, pp. 51–53). For more on nationalism and the Gaelic games see, McElligott (2019); Dann (2011). 16. An example of this kind of work in a British context is Gleadle (2015). 17. Sisson (2004). 18. McGrath (1996). 19. The speed and efficacy of the English reformation have generated a large literature, see Muldoon (2000). 20. Connolly (1992); Livesey (2009, p. 55); McGrath (1996); Kelly (2007). 21. Stanford (1976, p. 19). 22. Planter families refer to the plantation of Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of the British colonisation of Ireland. It involved the confiscation of Irish owned land and its transferral to the English crown in a bid to ‘civilise’ and anglicise the Irish Catholic population. Bardon (2008). 23. For more on this see O’Neill (2014). 24. 16 students out of a sample of 66 boys born between 1830 and 1850. 25. These figures are compiled from Ferrar (1993) and are discussed in further detail in Hatfield (2019, pp. 169–217).

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Ansell (2015). Mooney (1978); Turner (1981); Goméz Rivas (2011); Fenning (2009). Barr (2003). Logan (1992, p. 66). Other Catholic secondary schools were established for a middle-class catchment of pupils, such as the diocesan seminary and boarding school St. Flannan’s in Ennis (1846) and the Crescent College in Limerick, established by the Jesuits in 1862. Blackrock College (1860) and Rockwell in Co. Tipperary (1864) were founded by the French Holy Ghost Order. Superior schools were designated as such if they offered instruction in foreign languages. For more on this see Hatfield (2020). For more on the social mobility of the Irish Catholic see McBride (1991); Campbell (2009). Endowed Schools (Ireland) Commission, 1855–58. Evidence Vol 1, 650– 663. Duffy (1898, p. 7). Fitzpatrick (1879, pp. 20––21). Ibid. Journal of John Norris Thompson, 1795–1899, MIC162/1, PRONI. Trench (1868, p. 7). Trench (1868, pp. 8–9). For an examination of a similar system to ‘fagging’ in colonial Ghana see the contribution of De-Valera N.Z.M. Botchway and Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten in this volume. Trench (1868, pp. 8–9). Ibid. Trench (1868, p. 2). Ibid. Trench (1868, p. 10). Corcoran (1932, pp. 112–113). Van Reyk (2009). A barring out took place at William and Mary College, Virginia USA in 1702, they also were reported at Eton, Harrow, and the Royal High School Edinburgh. See [Anonymous] (1908). Paterson (1936). Trench (1868, p. 11). Trench (1868, p. 12). Trench (1868, p. 21). Trench (1868, p. 30). Trench (1868, p. 31).

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Bibliography Anonymous. 1908. A Barring Out at William and Mary College. The William and Mary Quarterly 16 (3): 180–199. https://doi.org/10.2307/1915609. Ansell, Richard. 2015. Educational Travel in Protestant Families from PostRestoration Ireland. The Historical Journal 58 (4): 931–958. Armstrong Charles. I. 2020. Educational Experiments: Childhood Sympathy, Regulation, and Object-Relations in Maria Edgeworth’s Writings About Education. In Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy, eds Martina Domines Veliki, Cian Duffy, 135–157. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bardon, Jonathan. 2008. The 1608 Royal Schools Celebrate 400 Years of History 1608–2008. Northern Ireland: The 1608 Royal Schools. Barr, Colin, and Paul Cullen. 2003. John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland 1845–1865. Herefordshire: Gracewing Publishing. Boddice, Rob. 2009. ‘In Loco Parentis’? Public-School Authority, Cricket and Manly Character, 1855–62. Gender and Education 21 (2): 159–172. Campbell, Fergus. 2009. The Irish Establishment 1879–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Congáil, Nic, and Ríona. 2013. ‘Looking on for Centuries from the Sideline’: Gaelic Feminism and the Rise of Camogie. Éire-Ireland 48 (1): 168–190. https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2013.0012. Connolly, Sean, and Religion. 1992. Law and Power; the Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corcoran, Timothy Joseph. 1932. The Clongowes Record, 1814 to 1932: With Introductory Chapters on Irish Jesuit Educators, 1564 to 1813. Dublin: Browne and Nolan. Cronin, Mike. 2011. ‘Trinity Mysteries’: Responding to a Chaotic Reading of Irish History. The International Journal of the History of Sport 28 (18): 2753– 2760. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2011.626223. Dann, Jeff. 2011. The Representation of British Sports in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Elite Irish School Publications. Media History 17 (2): 133–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2011.554725. Duffy, Charles Gavan. 1898. My Life in Two Hemispheres. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Edgeworth, Maria, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. 1835. Practical Education. New York: Harper and Brothers. Fenning, Hugh. 2009. Students of the Irish College at Salamanca, 1592–1638. Archivium Hibernicum 62: 7–36. Ferrar, Michael Lloyd. 1933. Register of the Royal School, Armagh. Belfast: W. & G. Baird. Finn, Gerry P. T. 2010. Trinity Mysteries: University, Elite Schooling and Sport in Ireland. The International Journal of the History of Sport 27 (13): 2255– 2287. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2010.508874.

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Freeman, Mark. 2016. Sport, Health and the Body in the History of Education. New York and London: Routledge. Fitzpatrick, William John. 1879. Life of Charles Lever. London: Chapman and Hall. Gleadle, Kathryn. 2015. Playing at Soldiers: British Loyalism and Juvenile Identities During the Napoleonic Wars. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (3): 335–348. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12216. Harvey, Andy. 2012. Tom Brown’s Schooldays: ‘Sportsex’ in Victorian Britain. Critical Survey 24 (1): 17–29. https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2012.240102. Hatfield, Mary. 2020. Catholic Convent Schools and the History of Irish Girlhood: Curriculum and Continuity 1780–1920. Irish Economic and Social History 47 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0332489320950078. Hatfield, Mary. 2019. Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Cultural History of Middle-Class Childhood and Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henry, Mary E., and Mary E. Gardiner. 1993. School Cultures: Universes of Meaning in Private Schools. Norwood, N J: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Hickey, Colm. 2013. The Evolution of Athleticism in Elite Irish Schools 1878– 1914. Beyond the Finn/Cronin Debate. The International Journal of the History of Sport 30 (12): 1394–1417. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367. 2013.795552. Hunt, Tom. 2007. Sport and Society in Victorian Ireland: The Case of Westmeath. Cork: Cork University Press. Joyce, Patrick. 2013. The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, James. 2007. Poyning’s Law and the Making of the Law in Ireland 1660– 1800. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Logan, John. 1992. Schooling and the Promotion of Literacy in Nineteenth Century Ireland. PhD Thesis. Cork, University College Cork. Livesey, J. 2009. Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World. London: Yale University Press. Mangan, James A., 2000 [First Published in 1981]. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology. London: F. Cass. Mangan, James A. 2014. ‘Manufactured’ Masculinity: Making Imperial Manliness, Morality and Militarism. London and New York: Routledge. McBride, Lawrence W. 1991. The Greening of Dublin Castle: The Transformation of Bureaucratic and Judicial Personnel in Ireland, 1892–1922. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. McDonald, Janet. 2007. Boys at Gender-Play Inside the Muscular Christian Ideal. Boyhood Studies 1 (1): 84–94. https://doi.org/10.3149/thy.0101.84.

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McElligott, Richard. 2019. ‘Boys Indifferent to the Manly Sports of Their Race’: Nationalism and Children’s Sport in Ireland, 1880–1920. Irish Studies Review 27 (3): 344–361. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2019.1584977. McGrath, Charles Ivar. 1996. Securing the Protestant Interest: The Origins and Purpose of the Penal Laws of 1695. Irish Historical Studies 30 (117): 25–46. McLaren, Peter. 1999. Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures. London: Routledge. Mooney, Gary. 1978. The Irish Student Diaspora in the Sixteenth Century and the Early Years of the Irish College at Salamanca. Recusant History 14 (4): 242–260. Muldoon, A.R. 2000. Recusants, Church-Papists, and ‘Comfortable’ Missionaries: Assessing the Post-Reformation English Catholic Community. The Catholic Historical Review 86 (2): 242–257. Neddam, Fabrice. 2004. Constructing Masculinities Under Thomas Arnold of Rugby (1828–1842): Gender, Educational Policy and School Life in an EarlyVictorian Public School. Gender & Education 16 (3): 303–326. O’Neill, Ciaran. 2014. Catholics of Consequence Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite 1850–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paterson, Thomas George Farquhar, ed. William Blacker. 1936. Armagh Royal School 147 Years ago. Armagh, n.p. Percy, Carol. 2009. Learning and Virtue: English Grammar and the EighteenthCentury Girls’ School. In Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, ed. Mary Hilton, Jill Shefrin, and Deirdre Raftery, 77–98. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Quantz, Richard A., Terry O’Connor, and Peter Magolda. 2011. Rituals and Student Identity in Education: Ritual Critique for a New Pedagogy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Raftery, Deirdre, and Catriona Delaney. 2019. ‘Un-Irish and Un-Catholic’: Sports, Physical Education and Girls’ Schooling, Irish Studies Review 27 (32): 325–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2019.1584378. Rivas, Gómez., and M. León. 2011. Letters from the Irish College in Salamanca During the Peninsular Wars (1808–14). Archivium Hibernicum 64: 194–208. Rouse, Paul. 2015. Sport and Ireland: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sisson, Elaine. 2004. Pearse’s Patriots: St Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood. Cork: Cork University Press. Stanford, William Bedell. 1976. Ireland and the Classical Tradition. Dublin: A. Figgis. Trench, William Stuart. 1868. Realities of Irish Life. London: Longmans, Green. Turner, Michael. 1981. The French Connection with Maynooth College, 1795– 1855, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 70 (277): 77–87.

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Reyk, Van, and William. 2009. Christian Ideals of Manliness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. The Historical Journal 52 (4): 1053–1073. Verbrugge, Martha H. 2017. Active Bodies: A History of Women’s Physical Education in Twentieth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vertinsky, Patricia Anne. 1994. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

CHAPTER 14

Subverting Exclusion and Oppression: Historical Perspectives of Student Experiences at Boarding Schools for the Deaf in German-Speaking Countries Anja Werner ‘Hearing people are much better than you [deaf1 students] are’, deafblind deacon Peter Hepp remembered a nun telling him during his boarding school days, ‘[y]ou are disabled children, that’s why you’ll have to make a much greater effort, and still you’ll be worth not half as much as the hearing’.2 Hepp was born deaf. He lost his eyesight as a young adult. He remembered Catholic boarding school for the deaf in Southern West Germany during the 1970s mainly for the discrepancy between the negative self-image that the teachers tried to instil in him versus his own

The original version of this chapter was revised: The word “Counties” has been changed to “Countries” in title of the chapter. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_17 A. Werner (B) The University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_14

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sense of self-worth. It took Hepp years to come to terms with the question of why deaf kids were called ‘stupid’ although they skilfully used sign language to make fun of uncomprehending hearing teachers.3 Schools for deaf students have traditionally—though not exclusively—been residential, for deaf persons make up a comparatively small percentage of the population. Students often have to travel long distances to reach the nearest school. As, however, Hepp’s memory insinuates, other considerations need to be considered when building schools for deaf students. Hearing loss has a huge impact on a person’s way of communication. Deciding on a certain type of school significantly influences communicative contexts. In contrast to a day school, a boarding school can provide much more space for natural communicative inclusion by sign language. For this reason, a boarding school can also be less effective than a day school in what would nowadays be called ‘mainstreaming’, a (from a ‘Deaf perspective’) exclusionary strategy that forces deaf students into the (to them) foreign communicative culture of spoken language. In this chapter, I explore this notion in more detail, taking experiences of deaf students at boarding schools for the deaf in German-speaking countries as examples. In Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, a particularly strong tradition may be observed of teaching articulation and lip-reading to deaf and hard-of-hearing students, which was even referred to as the ‘oral German’ method in contrast to the ‘French manual’ method that incorporated signs and sign language. The underlying idea was to prepare deaf students for a life in a predominantly hearing world where often even the students’ families would not know how to sign. While appearing to be inclusionary in nature, this teaching concept actually served as a means to keep them from delving into sign-language culture, especially as deaf adults were excluded from deaf education for the most part of its history. Despite the long history of boarding schools for deaf students, the subject has not yet been studied thoroughly. In this chapter, I provide a methodological basis for further research. I review available sources, whereby I am particularly interested in interviews with stakeholders in an attempt to unearth genuinely ‘deaf perspectives’. I focus on Germanlanguage contexts both to make research available to English-language readers and also because little English-language research exists. I start by reviewing the literature before moving on to providing contexts for comparisons from different regions and time-periods since the sixteenth century. The main focus of this article is on the second half of the

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twentieth century, for which I analyse oppression and exclusion while reconstructing how deaf students have subverted both since 1945.

Sources Research on Deaf History in German-speaking countries is still in its infancy, though several initiatives in the past ten years have contributed to improving the situation.4 By comparison, while in the English-speaking world excellent historical studies on Deaf History have been published since the 1980s, boarding school experiences have not yet received much attention. For this chapter, I examined three interview projects that provide insights into deaf boarding school experiences in the divided Germany and Switzerland5 . In 2018, Ulla Klinkhart published an analysis of interviews with 12 deaf persons who had attended schools for the deaf in southern West Germany between 1939 and 2014.6 Klinkhart focused on transformations in deaf education from the perspectives of deaf persons. In 2020, a team of five researchers led by Rebecca Hesse published a first comprehensive study of 200 years of deaf education in Switzerland. They developed the book from a 2017 online-report. Regarding the second half of the twentieth century, histories composed by mainly hearing teachers were juxtaposed with quotations from interviews with deaf former students, illustrating their at times vastly differing perceptions.7 In 2021, Sandra Uhlig and Sandra Pingel-Schliemann published a study of boarding school experiences of deaf East Germans based on interviews with 200 former students.8 Eight representative biographies of deaf East Germans were included. The latter study was published thanks to a federal German initiative to be executed by the individual Bundesländer (states) geared towards persons with disabilities who suffered abuse in boarding schools. Officials across Germany were surprised that the largest single group of persons to turn to them were deaf. The German national association of the deaf (Deutscher Gehörlosenbund, DGB) has taken an active interest in this initiative and possibly even contributed to stimulating it. Already in 2010, the DGB had pointed out the necessity of dealing with abuse at schools for the deaf.9 In 2018, the DGB published an online-report on the subject.10 More recently, the sign-language news broadcast Sehen statt Hören (“see, not hear”) featured programmes on this subject.11

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Though different in design and scope, the three above-mentioned interview projects have in common a focus on the perspectives of deaf persons. In contrast, older Deaf History studies were commonly written from the viewpoints of hearing teachers who typically did not know sign language.12 Besides these interview projects, a number of memoirs of deaf persons are available from Austria, former East Germany, former West Germany, and Switzerland. Most of these memoirs preceded the interview projects. Some of the authors are public figures such as German actor Benjamin Piwko, aforementioned deaf-blind deacon Peter Hepp, dancer Sarah Neef, and Helene Jarmer, the current president of the Austrian national association of the deaf and former first sign-languageusing deaf member of the Austrian parliament.13 Others like Swiss Fiona Bollag and East German Sabine Helbig represent a deaf mainstream.14 The biographies illustrate diversity in deaf persons’ biographies. For instance, whereas Neef outspokenly opposes sign language, Jarmer fights for equal opportunities for sign-language-using deaf people. The contrast of these early twenty-first-century autobiographies to the 1996 memoir by Gisela Holdau-Willems is striking: Whereas Holdau-Willems struggled with notions of disability, later deaf authors never question their Deaf selfconsciousness.15 All of these memoirs have communication and schooling as central themes. Including deaf persons’ perspectives into Deaf History highlights the fact that communication is at the core of deaf education. As hearing persons could not easily converse orally with those who could not hear, they perceived of hearing loss as a ‘grave defect’ without realizing that communication may also occur on purely visual levels. Hearing teachers therefore often saw their oral teaching efforts as acts of charity to ‘return’ deaf beings to an exclusively hearing world.16 Yet this kind of help is illfated if it is construed without asking those concerned for their input. Exclusion started when hearing educators refused to ‘listen’ to their ‘deaf charges’, when they defined them exclusively by hearing standards, and when they placed hearing on a higher level than not-hearing. The history of deaf education is a history of two groups of people talking past each other, with the larger group in charge unrelentingly dominating the discourse. The three interview projects illustrate that boarding school experiences of deaf persons in German-speaking countries are not primarily tied to a specific political context. The most striking feature appears to be a tradition in the German-speaking world to focus on providing deaf

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persons with an oral education at the cost of their exposure to sign language. Political contexts nonetheless left an impact on deaf education, which is why analyses of different regions are telling. For example, in communist East Germany, the idea was prominent that persons may be changed through education, which also allowed for alternative views of deaf education.17 Then again, early diagnosis and education became increasingly important in Western deaf education starting in the 1950s. I have argued elsewhere that instead of ‘eradicating deafness’, German doctors (the idea also quickly caught on in the East) tried to work with orally oriented pedagogues and parents to improve deaf children’s oral skills.18 At least until the 1970s, deaf education remained focused on such exclusively hearing expectations. Against the backdrop of international developments like civil rights movements and sign-language research, the situation slowly began to change. The process is ongoing.19

Contexts: A Sketchy International History of Boarding Schools for the Deaf While institutionalized deaf education did not start until the eighteenth century, earlier attempts of deaf education had led to assembling deaf offspring of the nobility in the homes of hearing teachers. The modern tradition originated in sixteenth-century Spain, when the Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de León accepted a few deaf children of well-todo Spanish nobility to educate them at San Salvador Monastery.20 When permanent state-sponsored schools for the deaf opened in Paris (France) and Leipzig (Saxony, now Germany) in the 1770s, the deaf students likewise came to stay with the teacher. As was the case in Spain, the early French and German teachers were clergymen: Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée and the protestant pastor Samuel Heinicke.21 One may wonder whether the fact that de l’Epée resorted to signs while Heinicke insisted on speech might not be inherent in communicative practices rooted in the Catholic and Protestant religions. A closer look at available sources from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries reveals that the French started much later than the Spanish and Germans to experiment with educating the deaf before the creation of actual schools. However, in the age of enlightenment, they would communicate with deaf persons directly and thus listen to what they themselves had to say. In contrast, enlightened hearing German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made

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up their minds about deafness without actually communicating with the deaf.22 In her biography of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the founding principal of the first US school for the deaf founded at Hartford (Connecticut) in 1817, Edna Edith Sayers provided a vivid description of the school’s first generation of boarding students. She revealed that students enjoyed signing with each other. Some of them were already young adults, and thus had developed personalities and strong opinions, which proved a challenge for hearing teachers like Gallaudet, who expected students to be gratefully submissive.23 From a deaf perspective, it is obvious that such an atmosphere fostered growth. Indeed, some deaf students quickly turned into teachers themselves. The best-known early-nineteenth-century deaf teachers of the deaf included the Frenchman Laurent Clerc, who taught at Hartford, and, in northern Germany, Otto Friedrich Kruse.24 Because of the language barrier, evidence of deaf boarding school life is hard to come by—sign languages do not have written forms as do vocal languages. Historian Sylvia Wolff discovered excerpts of deaf student diaries reprinted in reports of the Hamburg school for the deaf in the 1830s and 1840s. The syntax and grammar suggest that the letters were not edited. They were apparently meant to show sponsors and parents that deaf students could learn how to express their thoughts in writing.25 Wolff’s research furthermore revealed that, as numerous schools had been founded by the mid-nineteenth century, more deaf students received schooling. It was no longer practical to stay at the principal’s house. With regard to Hamburg, Wolff observed that most students actually lived at home. One student, who lived too far away, boarded with a family. Some very poor students lived at the poorhouse.26 More research is needed to obtain a clearer idea of which schools had dormitories for their students at which points in their history. As regards the Hamburg school for the deaf, it featured a dormitory in the twentieth century.27 The ‘oralist turn’ towards the end of the nineteenth century forced deaf boarding school life underground. Whereas around 1800 schools in Berlin (then Prussia)28 and Schleswig Holstein (then Denmark)29 had also used signs for instruction, by 1880, mainly hearing teachers of the deaf decided during the international Congress on deaf education in Milan (Italy) that a purely oral method was to be recommended at all schools for the deaf.30 This put an end to sign-language instruction and deaf community life there (with a few exceptions31 ). A main result was furthermore that deaf persons could no longer aspire to

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teaching careers. The Milan-decision forced them into blue-collar jobs exclusively. It furthermore took away deaf adult role models from deaf students, and it removed signing deaf culture from the (hearing) public eye. Of course, this did not happen overnight. It was a process that lasted throughout the nineteenth century and benefitted from a not yet satisfactorily researched medicalization of deafness, which had taken on momentum since mid-century. A hearing teacher of the deaf who understood the importance of sign language—because, like T.H. Gallaudet, he used it like a native—was Johann Heidsiek at the (boarding) school for the deaf in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). Between 1889 and 1899, he published four books, one of which earned him a trial for ‘insulting’ the profession. He had claimed that children at two Prussian schools for the deaf could only be made to talk by torture. The court found Heidsiek’s accusations of deaf child abuse to be true but irrelevant to the trial. He was declared guilty of insulting hearing officials and sentenced to pay a fine.32 The decision sanctioned abuse, strengthened the position of hearing teachers of the deaf, and contributed to forcing sign communities at boarding schools for the deaf ‘underground’. A century later, in 2001, Renate Fischer, one of the first academics to study the history of deaf Germans, pointed out that the subject of punishments at schools for the deaf remained a ‘delicate issue’, though ‘not a prominent one’ in the relevant literature.33 Two more nineteenth-century developments need to be mentioned: A desire to optimize costs and to ensure a ‘purely’ oral education led to discussions about reducing the number of boarding schools or, alternatively, turning them into day schools. The first option may be traced to early forms of ‘mainstreaming’, which had the one positive effective that more deaf students would be able to access education—an oral education was better than none at all.34 The second option meant that deaf students would board in (hearing) families rather than live with other deaf students at a dormitory. Moving away from the boarding school concept in deaf education limited deaf students’ opportunities to sign amongst each other. The hearing ideal of day schools for the deaf was, however, hard to realize, as many students lived too far away. Hence, by the time of the 1930s, of the then 73 schools for the deaf in Nazi Germany, 68 remained residential.35 The climate at these boarding schools was fiercely oral. Oralism initially also prevailed after 1945. Deaf students at West German boarding schools

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like Achim Blage were allowed to go home only during summer vacations even if their families lived nearby. In Blage’s case, the prolonged stay at the boarding school proved particularly detrimental, as he was the son of deaf parents. Apart from denying Blage family warmth, the boarding school experience prevented him from regular contacts with signing deaf adults. Blage remembered that ‘be quiet’ was the only sign that his hearing teachers knew.36

Boarding Schools for the Deaf as Oppressive Oral Spaces Interviews with former students at schools for the deaf in East Germany, West Germany, and Switzerland reveal two levels of abuse. First, students were punished for ‘offenses’ related to their hearing status, such as the use of sign language. Second, students were punished arbitrarily for other reasons.37 Fischer further differentiated the first type of abuse: She observed that internal and external strategies were developed to boost oralism. Internal strategies included punishments, encouragement of denunciations, and comprehensive supervision to prevent sign-language use. External strategies included demonstrations to the outside how well deaf students learned to lip-read and articulate. Hearing representatives of the schools also constructed a negative image of signs as an auxiliary tool only to be used by ‘weaker’ students. This practice placed students with a higher degree of hearing loss at a disadvantage in comparisons with hard-of-hearing and late-deafened students.38 The repression of sign language developed in complex and contradictory ways at boarding schools. It is a form of abuse that is specific to schools for the deaf and occurred primarily in teaching situations during class. However, it was observed at dormitories as well alongside other forms of punishments for ‘offenses’ that had nothing to do with hearing loss. For example, deaf former student Blage remembered that regarding teachers in the classroom on the one hand and dormitory personnel on the other, the latter tended to be ‘more brutal’. According to Blage, the dormitory staff forced him (and others) to eat their own vomit in the cafeteria.39 This disgusting and inhumane punishment was also reported from boarding schools for the deaf in other parts of West Germany40 and Switzerland.41 In East Germany, students were forced to continue eating their food after they had vomited.42 When in West Germany Blage’s deaf father complained to the headmaster about the abuse, the latter accused

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Blage of lying. Nothing happened. Students and parents were powerless. Abuse was inherently systemic. Do boarding schools encourage systemic abuse? The question seems valid for two reasons. First, reports from different schools reveal that sometimes the same forms of abuse occurred in different, unrelated places. Second, punishments were inflicted arbitrarily—one might be fortunate and get through the boarding school experience fairly unharmed; but too numerous are reports of those who were traumatized in the process. The psychological makeup of the personnel appears to have something to do with it, possibly also their position as well as the duration of their affiliation with a boarding school. Fischer pointed out its interconnectedness with power structures.43 In contrast, one also finds references to kind and understanding teachers. They undermined power structures, provided hope, but, overall, are outshone by the extent and severity of the overall abuse. Abuse that was related to hearing status varied from frighteningly playful maliciousness to inflicting pain and applying psychological terror. Hence, in mid-twentieth-century Zurich, teachers used an ‘apple punishment’, which brings to mind the famous Swiss tale about Wilhelm Tell removing an apple from his son’s head using bow and arrow. Teachers would place an apple on the ‘offender’s’ head and order the deaf child to stand in a corner and do articulation exercises without the apple falling to the ground. It meant that the student had to freeze. Signing along became impossible. The punishment disregarded the fact that nonverbal communication is a part of spoken speech.44 Klinkhart wondered about a possible relation between punishment and hearing status: The less a child could hear, the more it was likely to be punished, because it was more likely to fail hearing expectations.45 Students understood injustices but at times were helpless regarding the reasons for punishments. For instance, one West German student had his desk opposite the window and therefore had great difficulty lip-reading, as the teacher standing in front of the window had his face in shadows. This student was regularly punished. Classmates observed such injustice feeling helpless.46 Then again, deaf students could not always fathom why they were being punished. Some deaf East German children were punished because they chewed gum noisily or did not lift their feet while walking. Being deaf, they could not hear annoying noise. They consequently did not know what they should do to avoid punishments for the same ‘misdemeanours’ in the future.47

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Physical forms of punishments like beatings were common until at least the 1960s. For West Germany and Switzerland, it may be observed that starting in the 1970s, deaf students experienced less physical violence. It is not clear at this point if this held true with regard to East German boarding schools. East and West German schools for the deaf furthermore differ as a consequence of the country’s reunification with the East German education system undergoing a radical makeover in an incredibly short period of time starting in 1989. Although the school system might have changed, the oral approach did not. Some former deaf East German students related that they did not find out until years later that the country was reunified, which attests both to the failure of oral education in providing deaf students with access to information and to the similarity of deaf educational priorities in both German states.48 Generally, in interviews with former students in Switzerland, East Germany, and West Germany, two points recurred: First, when recalling the time they left boarding school, deaf students expressed relief that the educational ordeal was over. Second, they were grateful that someone had finally shown interest and compassion.49 Some interviewees explicitly hoped that their suffering be made public if only anonymously.50 Because of their hearing status, deaf persons suffered additional abuse at boarding schools, the most haunting of which was the prohibition of sign language. For deaf children, it meant to grow up without a native language, as most of them are unable to develop near-perfect vocal skills. Even today, at most (boarding) schools for the deaf, deaf students may use sign language only informally in their spare time in what I would call subversive and inclusionary sign spaces—as opposed to oppressive and exclusionary official oral spaces.

Boarding Schools for the Deaf as Subversive Sign Spaces Abuse on different levels notwithstanding, boarding schools for the deaf illustrate the remarkable potential of deaf persons already at a young age to subvert exclusion and oppression. By signing in secret and despite all, deaf students created subversive sign spaces. Such spaces may be differentiated further into spaces that at least some teachers tolerated, overlooked on purpose, or, occasionally in the more recent past, even helped to nurture. The role of classroom teachers versus overseers at the dorms is

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of interest in this connection, as well as the question of where sign spaces were created—in the classroom, dorm, yard, or cafeteria. Sign spaces were built on deaf community spirit. The students observed punishments of others and developed compassion and a sense of injustice as mentioned above. Moreover, a sense of solidarity may be observed. For instance, the Swiss study found that often in class the student with the best skills in lip-reading would secretly translate the teacher’s words into signs so that the ‘weaker oral’ students could follow.51 Even without this secret support system, the boarding school experience meant to find community, and, possibly for the first time in a student’s life, to realize that there existed others with a similarly different hearing status. East German Helbig remembered a feeling of relief when upon entering a residential school for the hearing-impaired for the very first time, she encountered other deaf children. She suddenly understood that she was not alone: Not just adults, but children as well could be deaf. At the dorm, she nonetheless felt forlorn for a lack of emotional warmth especially on Sundays when most children were gone.52 Closely related to discovering a sense of community was the discovery of visual language. Piwko was initially sent to Susan Schmid-Giovanini’s purely oral school in Meggen, Switzerland, where she discouraged any use of signs. Piwko, though profoundly deaf, grew up thinking that he was hard-of-hearing and eventually attended a day school for the hardof-hearing in Hamburg. At the age of fourteen, he observed a classmate making a telephone call and realized he was deaf. He signed up for a class in German sign language, in which he was the only teenager—the other participants were adults, all hearing, including teachers from his school.53 Piwko did not publish his memoirs until 2019. He was educated fairly recently, and also was fortunate to live in Hamburg, where German sign language research was initiated in the 1970s. It is one of the few places where deaf Germans have access to an education that comprises sign-language instruction.54 In contrast to Piwko, Jarmer’s parents were both deaf. Schooling for Jarmer consequently meant to discover that Deaf Culture was not the only way of being and that, in fact, it was an unacknowledged underground way of being. For Jarmer, her Austrian schooling experience did not so much mean to discover a Deaf World, but to hide from hearing officials that she knew of its existence. She had to grabble with the fact that upon entering school, her parents told her for the first time in her life to hide that she was Deaf and instead pretend to be hard-of-hearing.

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Her parents knew she would have to excel orally in order to get ahead in life—her future professional success depended on her ability to be able to communicate in a predominantly hearing world (or pretend to be able to do so).55 Like Piwko, Jarmer was the only deaf child among hard-ofhearing students. Her teacher told them that they were disabled—much like what Hepp experienced during his boarding school days in southern Germany. Jarmer’s deaf mother taught her to pretend and otherwise not to listen to the hearing teachers.56 Some interviewees related that some teachers would sign in class, while others at the dorm would look away when students signed. This happened more frequently in the recent past. One deaf West German in the 1990s particularly enjoyed physical education classes, because the teacher knew how to sign very well, ‘He adapted to our needs and signed’.57 Similar examples from the East German dictatorship are less likely, for this opening up towards sign language started slowly during the 1980s. It apparently did not reach East German schools before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In some cases, students enforced their sign spaces by sheer numbers. At the Swiss schools for the deaf, students in the 1950s were not allowed to sign in class, but they would sign during breaks in the yard—there were too many students, supervisors could not stop them all. The same happened during meals and at the dorms in the evenings. In doing so, students nonetheless depended on friendly personnel who overlooked their signing. Then again, signing students had to be careful when many hearing overseers assembled in crowded places like the cafeteria.58 Of course, one needs to differentiate the types of signs that students used. In the context of the Swiss interview-project, many interviewees pointed out that the signs, which they used informally, were rather simple, and that they followed the sentence structure of the corresponding vocal language rather than constitute a sign language in itself. One reason was that no sign-language-using adults were available at school; another was that the majority of students had hearing parents. Students consequently often did not really learn to sign until after they had graduated and joined deaf clubs or began socializing with other deaf adults.59 It is nonetheless impressive how deaf students have illustrated their resilience in light of a blatant lack of understanding of their visual communication needs in a deaf education system that was—and often still is—run by mainly hearing personnel. Although deaf students for the most part lacked deaf adult role models, they managed to turn their

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boarding schools into places of deaf identity building where signed forms of communication could be preserved, developed, and passed on to next generations if only as an underground operation. Hence, while the hearing personnel at boarding schools for the deaf officially claimed to include deaf children into a hearing mainstream, they actually (and, despite all abuse, somewhat ineffectively) attempted to exclude them from the sign culture of deaf adults. In an instance of Deaf Agency, deaf children perpetuated deaf sign culture as older deaf students prepared their younger peers for an adult world where they would be able to choose to live in sign-language communities despite all.

Conclusion At boarding schools for the deaf, the proclaimed inclusionary goal of ‘returning’ deaf students to hearing culture actually served as an exclusionary mechanism, for it encouraged students to develop a negative self-image as defective hearing persons; it also prohibited their exploration of Deaf Culture as an alternative way of being without hearing. Deaf students were (and often still are) supposed to speak and ‘hear’ (rather: pretend to hear) like their hearing peers without cultivating a visual native language. While hearing children are allowed to speak a foreign language with an accent and make mistakes, deaf students are considered ‘oral failures’ when they do not manage to blend into an oral mainstream. Hearing teachers wanted to ensure students’ comprehensive oral education, which was typically achieved at the expense of the students acquiring factual knowledge. Deaf children were taken away from their families for extended periods of time already at a very young age. They were thus denied an emotionally stable environment. Teachers furthermore abused children in multiple ways, ranging from prohibiting sign language and Deaf Culture as a type of abuse that is specific to persons with a hearing loss to punishments for ‘offenses’ that might also have occurred at boarding schools for hearing students. A comparison with boarding school experiences of indigenous children may illustrate the point. In both cases, boarding schools exerted pressure to assimilate into a mainstream culture with a different language and customs. This assimilation happened with a complete disregard for any native—or visual—cultures. However, a significant difference may be observed as well: Indigenous children had tightly-knit native communities at home that ensured multi-generational transmissions of culture.

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In contrast, the vast majority of deaf students come from hearing families. For these children, boarding schools became places where they for the very first time met other children like themselves. They would teach each other sign language. Of course, without any fluent deaf adult signers present, deaf children were limited in developing a multi-facetted visual language. Still, the fact has not yet been appreciated as a cultural achievement that deaf children kept signing alive especially at boarding schools. Boarding schools for deaf students were ambivalent spaces. They provided deaf persons with contradictory if not arbitrary experiences, which I would like to illustrate with three concluding observations: First, from the very start, boarding schools created Deaf Spaces. In contrast to boarding schools for other minority groups, those for the deaf allowed many of its students to experience deaf community life often for the very first time. Boarding schools for the deaf contained ‘official oral spaces’ like classrooms and ‘subversive sign spaces’ like living quarters. A physical space could take on either meaning depending on who commanded it—hearing teachers or deaf students. Examining the fluctuating meanings of spaces at boarding schools reveals deaf students’ unacknowledged subversive agency. Second, the idea of boarding schools as Deaf Spaces stands in stark contrast to the fact that these schools were typically run by hearing personnel with little understanding of signed forms of communication. Deaf adults in all German-speaking countries have haunting memories of their boarding school days. Evidence suggests two forms of suffering. On the one hand, students experienced the suppression of their language. They were only allowed to sign in private at best; often signing was altogether prohibited. The use of signs was punished either by corporal means or by psychological terror. Considering that some children were admitted to boarding schools at a very young age, the separation from parents and the lack of a language to communicate their emotions could do significant harm. Third, the boarding school experience was arbitrary. Deaf students could be lucky to have teachers that tolerated sign language. If a student did not have to face punishments for signing or for other ‘misdemeanours’, a boarding school could be an important place for a deaf child to be initiated into Deaf Culture. Boarding schools for the deaf may thus be considered special and even necessary for identity building especially as inclusion (or mainstreaming) in German-speaking countries continues

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to be a one-way street in which deaf students are expected to appear to be hearing without consideration for their deaf selves. Boarding schools for deaf students can be seen as complex exclusionary spaces: Although hearing persons created them often with little regard for the students’ native visual culture, these schools turned into subversive sign spaces where students could explore and develop this very culture. Of course, my conclusion is a somewhat idealized one. There were limits to what students without deaf adults could achieve. Still, accounts of former students at boarding schools for the deaf transport a feeling of wholeness regarding their ‘deaf experiences’: Signing on a child’s level was still more fulfilling than not signing at all. The fact that—if only subconsciously— deaf students subverted the attempted exclusion from Deaf Culture at their boarding schools attests to their agency and ability.

Notes 1. In Deaf Studies, scholars nowadays distinguish between ‘Deaf’ meaning culturally deaf persons who use a national sign language and ‘deaf’ meaning persons with a hearing loss who use vocal language. In historical research, unless a self-reflective context is evident, I typically use ‘deaf’ as the capital ‘D’ signifier for ‘Deaf consciousness’ is a product of civil rights movements that would be anachronistic in German contexts pre-dating the 1980s. For a definition of d/Deaf, see Ladd (2003). 2. Hepp (2005, p. 63). My translation. 3. Hepp (2005, pp. 67–79). 4. For an overview of available research, see Schmidt and Werner (2019). 5. There are other projects. E.g., from 2016 through 2020, the European Commission funded in its Horizon 2020 framework program SIGNHUB, a project to preserve, research, and foster the ‘linguistic, historical and cultural heritage of European deaf signing communities with an integral resource’, see ‘The Sign Hub’. Life stories of elderly deaf signers were collected in seven sign languages, including German sign language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS). Unedited interviews are available online, see ‘Life Stories of Elderly Deaf Signers’. For a first analysis of Sign Hub interviews, see Pfau et al (2021). 6. Klinkhart (2018). 7. Hesse et al. (2020, p. 156). 8. Uhlig and Pingel-Schliemann (2021). 9. Anonymous (2010). 10. Mitterhuber (2018, p. 4). 11. See, Sehen statt Hören (2019, 2021).

320 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

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For example, Armin (1992); Kröhnert (1966). Piwko(2019); Hepp (2005); Neef (2009); Jarmer (2011). Bollag and Hummel (2006); Helbig (2006). Holdau-Willems (1996). Lane (1992). On East German education, see Glenn (1995, pp. 267–310). On deaf East German education, see Werner (2015). On deaf East Germans under communism, see Werner (2022, forthcoming). Werner (2021). I trace the impact of the international sphere on deaf education in the divided Germany in my forthcoming book, working title Deaf History Meets the History of Science and the Humanities. Plann (1997). The two men and their methodological differences have been mythologised, but differentiated recent biographies are lacking. A good starting point is the English translation of their correspondence, see Heinicke et al. (1968). Wolff (2013). Sayers (2018, pp. 126–35). On Clerc, see Lane (1984); on Kruse, see Vogel (2001a, b). Wolff (2019, pp. 51–81), here pp. 58–64. Wolff (2019, p. 74). For a detailed history, see Groschek (2008). Wolff (2013). Degner (2019). See Baynton (1998). Exceptions included segregated schools for Black Deaf students in the US South, where racism could lead to less expensive—and less prestigious— manual instruction, see Werner (2017). Muhs (1999, 2000). Fischer (2002, p. 336). As regards a history of mainstreaming deaf children in German countries, see Leonhardt (2007). Schuchmann (2002, p. 108). Mitterhuber (2018). For example, punishments and humiliation occurred when students wet their pants or beds, because they were not allowed to go to the restroom. See Uhlig and Pingel-Schliemann (2021, p. 94). See also Klinkhart (2018, p. 67); Hesse et al. (2029, pp. 199–219, pp. 221–224, p. 232). Fischern (2002, pp. 341–342). Mitterhuber (2018). Klinkhart (2018, p. 67). Hesse et al. (2020, p. 212).

14

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

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Uhlig and Pingel-Schliemann (2021, pp. 46–48). Fischer (2002, p. 341). Hesse et al. (2020, pp. 159–160). Klinkhart (2018, p. 67). Klinkhart (2018, p. 67). Uhlig and Pingel-Schliemann (2021, p. 49). Uhlig and Pingel-Schliemann (2021, p. 60). Hesse et al. (2020, pp. 224–227). Anne Drescher, ‘‘Vorwort’. In Uhlig and Pingel-Schliemann (2021, pp. 7– 8). Hesse et al. (2020, p. 172). Helbig (2006, pp. 49–51). Piwko (2019, pp. 48–52). Hardly any literature is available. Articles from the first decade of the journal Das Zeichen attest to it. I include a chapter on the beginning of sign-language-research in Germany in my book-in-progress (Deaf History Meets the History of Science and the Humanities ). Jarmer (2011, pp. 82–4). Jarmer (2011, p. 84). Klinkhart (2018, p. 64). My translation. Hesse et al. (2020, p. 174). Hesse et al. (2020, p. 173).

Bibliography [Anonymous]. 2010. Kindesmisshandlung an Gehörlosenschulen. Deutsche Gehörlosenzeitung (August): 8–10. Baynton, Douglas C. 1998. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bollag, Fiona, and Peter Hummel. 2006. Das Mädchen, das aus der Stille kam. Bergisch Gladbach: Ehrenwirth. Degner, Ingo. 2019. Georg Wilhelm Pfingsten. ‘Vater’ der Hörgeschädigtenpädagogik in Schleswig-Holstein. In Zwischen Fremdbestimmung und Autonomie, eds. Schmidt und Werner, 349–371. Bielefeld: Transcript. Fischer, Renate. 2002. Schläge auf die Hand rauben den Verstand. Das Zeichen 61: 336–342. First published in Bergermann, Ulrike, Andrea Sick, and Andrea Klier, eds. 2001. Hand: Medium, Körper, Technik. 101–108. Bremen: Thealit Frauen. Kultur. Labor. Glenn, Charles Leslie. 1995. Educational Freedom in Eastern Europe, 267–310. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

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Groschek, Iris. 2008. Unterwegs in eine Welt des Verstehens Gehörlosenbildung in Hamburg vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Heinicke, Samuel, Charles-Michel. de L’Epée, and Christopher Browne Garnett. 1968. The Exchange of Letters between Samuel Heinicke and Abbe Charles Michel de l’Epée; A Monograph on the Oralist and Manualist Methods of Instructing the Deaf in the Eighteenth Century, Including the Reproduction in English of Salient Portions of Each Letter. New York: Vantage Press. Helbig, Sabine. 2006. Blitzlichter in der Dunkelheit. Das Leben einer tauben Frau. Guxhagen: Kestner. Hepp, Peter. 2005. Die Welt in meinen Händen. Ein Leben ohne Hören und Sehen. Berlin: List. Hesse, Rebecca. 2020. Aus erster Hand. Gehörlose, Gebärdensprache und Gehörlosenpädagogik in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Chronos Verlag. The 2017 Report by the same name is available at https://www.sgb-fss.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Hesse-LengwilerAus-erster-Hand-2017.pdf. Holdau-Willems, Gisela. 1996. Hinter Glas: Gehörlos mit der Behinderung leben. Lahr: Verlag Ernst Kaufmann. Jarmer, Helene. 2011. Schreien nützt nichts. Mittendrin statt still dabei. München: Südwest. Klinkhart, Ulla. 2018. ‘Ich wünsche mir ein kleines bisschen Glück, dass die Lehrer gebärden können.’ Erfahrungen gehörloser SchülerInnen aus dem Zeitraum 1939–2014. Das Zeichen 32 (108): 62–75. Kröhnert, Otto. 1966. Die sprachliche Bildung des Gehörlosen: Geschichtliche Entwicklung und gegenwärtige Problematik. Weinheim: J. Beltz. Ladd, Paddy. 2003. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Lane, Harlan. 1984. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf . New York: Random House. Lane, Harlan. 1992. The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. New York: Knopf. Leonhardt, Annette. 2007. Von der Verallgemeinerungsbewegung zur Gegenwart schulischer Integration. In Hörgeschädigte Schüler in der Allgemeinen Schule: Theorie und Praxis der Integration, ed. Annette Leonhardt, 9–22. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Life Stories of Elderly Deaf Signers. https://www.sign-hub.eu/streaming. (Accessed October 20, 2021). Löwe, Armin. 1992. Hörgeschädigtenpädagogik international: Geschichte, Länder, Personen, Kongresse. Eine Einführung für Eltern, Lehrer und Therapeuten hörgeschädigter Kinder. Heidelberg: HVA/Schindele.

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Mitterhuber, Thomas. 2018. Das Grauen in den Anstalten. Deutsche GehörlosenZeitung—DGZ : 4. Published Online in 2019 on the Website of the German Association of the Deaf DGB, https://gehoerlosenzeitung.de/missbrauchgehoerlose-kinder-schulen-anstalten/. (Accessed October 20, 2021). Muhs, Jochen. 1999. Johann Heidsiek (1855–1942)—Wegbereiter des Bilingualismus. Das Zeichen 47: 11–17. Muhs, Jochen. 2000. Johann Heidsiek. Einer der letzten groBen Vorkämpfer für gebärdensprachliche Erziehung Gehörloser an Taubstummenanstalten (1855– 1942). Vortrag auf den Kulturtagen der Gehörlosen in Dresden 1998. Schriftenreihe “Deaf-History”. Berlin: Deaf-History Deutschland. Neef, Sarah. 2009. Im Rhythmus der Stille. Wie ich mir die Welt der Hörenden eroberte. Frankfurt: Campus. Pfau, Roland, Asli Göksel, and Jana Hosemann, eds. 2021. Our Lives—Our Stories. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Piwko, Benjamin. 2019. Man hört nur mit dem Herzen gut. Was Hörende von Gehörlosen lernen können. München: Mosaik. Plann, Susan. 1997. A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sayers, Edna Edith. 2018. The Life and Times of T.H. Gallaudet. Lebanon NH: ForeEdge. Schmidt, Marion, and Anja Werner, eds. 2019. Zwischen Fremdbestimmung und Autonomie: neue Impulse zur Gehörlosengeschichte in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Bielefeld: Transcript. Schuchmann, John S. 2002. Misjudged People: The German Deaf Community in 1932. In Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe, ed. Donna F. Ryan and John S. Schuchmann, 98–113. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Sehen statt Hören. 2019. Die Gehörlosenschule war mein Zuhause... Bayrischer Rundfunk. https://www.br.de/br-fernsehen/sendungen/sehenstatt-hoeren/gehoerlosenschule-zuhause-120.html. (Accessed October 20, 2021). Sehen statt Hören. 2021. Zeit, über das Leid zu sprechen. Bayrischer Rundfunk. https://www.br.de/br-fernsehen/sendungen/sehen-statt-hoeren/gew alt-im-heim-100.html. (Accessed October 20, 2021). “The Sign Hub.” University of Göttingen, Germany. https://www.uni-goetti ngen.de/en/546745.html. (Accessed October 20, 2021). Uhlig, Sandra, and Sandra Pingel-Schliemann. 2021. Nicht gehört: Gehörlose Kinder in der DDR DDR-Sonderschulwesen. Gehörlosenpädagogik in der DDR. Mit Biographien von Zeitzeuginnen und Zeitzeugen aus MecklenburgVorpommern. Schwerin: Die Landesbeauftragte für Mecklenburg-Vorpommern für die Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur. Vogel, Helmut. 2001a. Otto Friedrich Kruse (1801–1880). Gehörloser Lehrer und Publizist (Teil 1). Das Zeichen 56: 198–207.

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Vogel, Helmut. 2001b. Otto Friedrich Kruse (1801–1880). Mahner gegen die Unterdrückung der Gebärdensprache (Teil 2). Das Zeichen 57: 370–376. Werner, Anja. 2015. ‘Die gehörlosen Menschen sollen auch begeistert am Aufbau des sozialistischen Vaterlandes teilnehmen’. Gehörlosenpädagogik in Ostdeutschland, 1945–1990. Das Zeichen 99 (März): 6–21. Werner, Anja. 2017. ‘Double Whammy’? Historical Glimpses of Black Deaf Americans. In Dis-eased: Critical Approaches to Disability and Illness in American Studies, eds. Tanja Reiffenrath and Gesine Wegner. COPAS thematic issue 18.2. https://copas.uni-regensburg.de/article/view/288. (Accessed October 20, 2021). Werner, Anja. 2021. Otologie, Taubheit und das Erbe des Nationalsozialismus im geteilten Deutschland. Medizinhistorisches Journal 55 (3): 160–191. Werner, Anja. 2022. Building an Organization According to Our Own Wishes: Deaf Agency in East Germany, 1945 to 1960. German Studies Review 45.3 (October 2022). Forthcoming. Wolff, Sylvia. 2013. Elementarunterricht und Sprachbildung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Unterrichtspraxis am Berliner Königlichen Taubstummeninstitut zwischen Aufklärung und Frühmoderne. Berlin, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Diss., 2012. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de: kobv:11-100212189. (Accessed October 20, 2021). Wolff, Sylvia. 2019. ‘…meine Taubheit ist mir aber wohl nicht schädlich…’. Über die Bedeutung von Ego-Dokumenten am Beispiel der Schülertagebücher aus der Hamburger Taubstummenanstalt 1830–1847. In Zwischen Autonomie und Fremdbestimmung, eds. Schmidt and Werner, 51–81. Bielefeld: transcript.

CHAPTER 15

Bullying in the Name of Care: A Social History of ‘Homoing’ Among Students in Ghanaian Boarding Schools De-Valera N. Y. M. Botchway and Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten

In her 2013 thesis, the psychologist Beatrice Dwomfour Williams described homoing in Ghana as “a traditional school ritual […] [which] usually precedes bullying among these students […]”.1 As she further elaborates, it is. the traditional welcome torturing meted out to first year students […] to initiate and prepare them for the life ahead in their secondary education.

D.-V. N. Y. M. Botchway (B) University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana e-mail: [email protected] B. B. Boahen-Boaten Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_15

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Students in the higher grades […] hit them, make derogatory remarks about their looks and where they come from and so forth. […] [O]thers around tend to join in the humiliation and mockery […] [and] derive pleasure from the reactions of the victims.2

Williams’s work seems to suggest that homoing is just a temporary “first” episodic affair of welcome—an act of “inclusion” into the boarding school system. It is true that it “welcomes” freshmen/women, but homoing does not end as a rite of welcoming or rite de passage. It has first episodes, in the form of general school or institution sanctioned ceremonies, but it also continues as part of the behaviours of some students, especially those in upper classes.3 It manifests as repeated long-term acts of aggression, particularly bullying, through different types. Although the praxis of homoing is maintained in Ghana, it has not been historicised. Through examining the Ghanaian students-owned bullying praxis, culture and convention of homoing in Ghanaian boarding schools, this chapter is the first to attempt to historicise a bullying tradition that has been a ubiquitous part of boarding house culture in the longue duree of the history of schooling in the colonial and postcolonial space and place of the Gold Coast and Ghana, respectively. The lack of a historical study has created a situation whereby understanding of homoing is not historically grounded and complex, but shaped by contemporary notions and quite simplistic views and definitions. This chapter, therefore, draws information from disparate primary and secondary sources, including oral history, autobiography, memoirs and personal experiences, to examine the subject matter of the historiography of bullying in general and discuss the historico-ideological foundations of the boarding house system and how these foundations are intertwined with the roots of the popular bullying phenomenon which is colloquially referred to as homoing. Notwithstanding the fact that all sources of history help to reconstruct history in Africa, each has its own limitations; therefore, they are to be used with caution. For example, autobiographies and memoirs, which have been used in this history of homoing, and novels have their shortcomings. Novels, for example, may be characterised by the biases of the novelist, and imagination and creativity instead of factual accounts. However, novels can provide a focused and personal depiction of a certain period of history in an easy to digest format. They can offer a view into the disposition and culture of the period in which they were written.4

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Autobiographies and memoirs, too can be apologias; limited in their scope because they present only one viewpoint and interpretation of what happened; and, because they tend to be remembrances, many years after the period described, the details may become faint and certain aspects forgotten, and the information shaped to agree to views developed since then. But, as it has been demonstrated by the arguments and theories in the scholarship of various scholars including Wallach, Forguson, LixlPurcell, Aurell and Davis,5 autobiographies and memoirs are good sources of history, and they have their advantages. They are a valuable reading of the personality by whom it was written. They serve as windows into the effects of historical events and the lives of individuals who experienced them directly. Thus, generally, the sources that this study has used have offered us advantageous insights, which have collectively enriched our historical understanding about homoing in Ghana in ways that cannot be replicated in just a single source material. This study investigates the origin of homoing, the meaning of the word as a popular term in Ghana, and the practices of homoing in the colonial and postcolonial periods, and how this practice contributed to inclusion and exclusion within the boarding school and broader society.

Etymology of Bullying and Historiography of Bullying in Schools For as long as schools have been in existence, there have been bullying and peer victimisation.6 The term bullying itself has no universally-agreed upon definition. It is a wide-ranging and broad concept, which subjects it to definitional inconsistencies.7 Indeed, as Allanson and her colleagues reflected, the term bullying had evolved over the centuries and manifested different forms, such as direct bullying, indirect bullying and cyberbullying.8 We prefer Askew’s description of bullying as a continuum of behaviour, involving varying degrees of attempt to gain power and dominance over another.9 Moreover, as Allanson and colleagues note: [H]istorical factors that have induce (sic) bullying practices include informal rite of passage into adulthood rituals, bigotry, religious intolerances, hazing, and sexual identifications. Bullying therefore, as viewed in terms of peer victimization, is symptomatic of these aggressive social interactions, or lack of tolerance for others differences. For the most part,

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bullying was considered, and in some societies still is, an accepted part of growing up.10

Within the context of social history, bullying in educational centres has a long documented history in the West.11 The ubiquitous nature of this practise is also evident in popular culture, including references of bullying of child protagonists and the social reactions to those behaviours in earlyEnglish literature such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (c. 1837–1839), and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857).12 For example, Hughes’s novel “indicated that bullying was ‘unofficially’ recognized as a troubling factor in England, […] it was interpreted with a ‘misadventure of young schoolboys’ mentality and accepted as an appropriate behavior of young boys”.13 Beyond historical studies, formal empirical and systematic investigation and insight into the subject, especially in schools, emerged in the Scandinavian context, particularly due to Dan Olweus’s pioneering work in the 1970s.14 Since then, a significant majority of studies on the subject has come from Europe and North America and has spread further to other parts of the so-called Global North, to places like Australia, New Zealand and Japan.15 The thematic genealogy of such works reveals that systematic investigations have been undertaken on psychological, sociological, historical and educational aspects of bullying in schools, homes and society among various age, sex and professional groups, including the military.16 Bullying often has a physical component. Hyojin Koo has traced the general pattern of bullying in schools in the United Kingdom, Japan and Korea over a long period into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has shown that in early periods, bullying was physical harassment that usually related to a death, strong isolation or extortion in school children. Koo further showed that public attitude towards bullying had been dynamic; it used to be considered a part of children’s growing up, but it became considered a social problem that had to be controlled.17 Although the pioneering works on bullying have been in Western societies, it is also noteworthy that there is a burgeoning scholarship on the subject on the postcolonial African scene. This scholarship, featuring different theoretical frameworks, paradigms and interests, has tended to have thematic lineages that are to be steeped in historical investigation.18 However, little is known or researched on the history of bullying particularly in boarding schools in the context of the so-called Global South countries such as Ghana.19

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For Ghana, the few studies that have been undertaken on bullying have not been historical.20 Summarily, the extant literature emanating mostly from the social sciences, such as psychology and education, has dealt with a thematic genealogy that encapsulates several aspects of bullying especially among students, namely causes, courses and effects. Such studies have looked at risk factors of bullying, bullying and absenteeism, bullying and psychological health and bullying and academic performance.21 Undoubtedly, these are useful and novel thematic slabs and analytical frameworks that add to the building-blocks that facilitate the gaining of understanding about bullying and subcultures in Ghanaian schools. Unlike what we know about the physical, psychosocial and educational implications of bullying in Ghana, the history of homoing, regarding its origins, its etymology, and its forms, has not been examined within the history of the boarding house system in Ghana. Accordingly, this chapter addresses the gap in historical knowledge about bullying, specifically homoing, by examining popular notions and memory as well as analysing existing literature to construct a history of homoing which will explain notions, thoughts and mechanisms that induced and sustained homoing over the years. The boarding school system in Ghana largely emanated from the Britain-spawned colonial school model—a Western formal education system—that was installed in the Gold Coast, which became Ghana on the attainment of independence in 1957 from Britain. Some hierarchies of dominance in the colonial schools, bodily punishments by teachers and the convention of fagging of British schools are at the roots of homoing in Ghana.22 Thus, from a historical perspective, homoing is a colonial legacy; however, it is unclear how the colloquial homoing was coined because there is much uncertainty, and very little is known about the historical beginnings of that bullying phenomenon in Ghanaian boarding schools and how it gained currency over the years. Our searches of the historical literature did not yield concrete information on the roots of the slang. Nonetheless, given the foregoing historical information that homoing traces its roots to the British fagging system in which fags were at times forced to offer homosexual favours to their seniors—“masters”— we hypothesise that the colloquial homoing perhaps originated from the homosexual relationship that existed between the masters and the fags in the past. Thus, homoing might be a linguistic throwback. Our hypothesis for the origin of the word becomes more compelling in view of the

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realisation that fag is an archaic word for a homosexual.23 However, our position does not foreclose the genesis of the term from being subjected to further investigation.

Hierarchical System of Homoing We see homoing as having three categories. First is the structural or institutional homoing where certain bullying acts, which are deemed traditional rites of passage in boarding houses, what Williams perceived as a welcome ritual, are meted out to juniors and newcomers by seniors and older students. The institutional homoing happens because the boarding schools have over the years normalised and legitimised certain historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal dynamics of objectification and ordering of juniors. The second type, which is attitudinal homoing, is the individual’s attitude of bullying people, especially juniors, because of their personal feelings, assumptions and beliefs about themselves and their victims. The third is cultural-social homoing, which is the shared attitude of bullying of seniors derived from their beliefs and assumption that they are superior to anyone who is not identified as a senior and so they should exert their superiority by bullying them. When victims eventually progress to the higher classes, many of them also “homo” (bully) those in lower classes. Homoing in the boarding houses of Ghanaian schools is, thus, a cyclical phenomenon of bullying. Structural homoing is underscored by the hierarchical system. Prefects and seniors were emboldened by a hierarchical system of power for students, the prefect system, which was derived from traditions of the British colonial school structure. It perpetrated homoing in the boarding schools in Ghana by carrying out these old acts and methods and new ones that they create. We shall subsequently discuss and describe some of these acts and methods. The institution of the prefect system, which allowed older students, particularly those in higher classes or forms, labelled as seniors, who were considered responsible, to help in maintaining order in the school, where there were few teachers, and in the boarding houses, where there was the absence of parental supervision, birthed fagging in the British public boys schools.24 The prefects and seniors were, thus, made auxiliaries of the teachers in “caring” and disciplining the juniors and younger students to facilitate their inclusion in the community of learners in the eighteenth century. They became the fag masters, guardians, of the juniors.

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The junior, the fag, was to serve the senior. The senior, the fag master, was to protect the fag from harm or exploitation by other senior students and deals with disciplining the fag, which meant that they deputised for teachers and the housemaster (an adult teacher who would oversee the dormitory). Originally designed to be mutually beneficial, where the two served each other while learning something of service within Victorian education and society, the fagging system remained a valued concept to promote discipline to rule in the school and create a progressive social structure in the house. However, the arrangement descended into a tradition of bullying. The older boys and seniors forced the juniors and smaller ones to do various work for them and if they did them badly or refused, they were beating or subjected to different humiliating acts. The duties of servants to the seniors and prefects were composed of almost anything prefects cared to impose. These included warming beds and toilet seats, and, at times, to offer sexual favours.25 Fags were expected to toughen up and become part of the boarding house “family” through such traditional acts of discipline and drilling. As the younger and junior students grew up and progressed to the higher classes or forms as seniors, their status changed. They were then qualified to continue the tradition as fag masters over other students and use the hardships of fagging to release them from childishness and laziness, make them to respect social hierarchy in general, initiate them into the tough life of boarding house and prepare them to be able to face the eventual adversities of adulthood.26 To some extent, the practice of personal fagging was maintained in former colonies by systems that required junior students to perform tasks for the benefit of the general school community. The tradition of the institutional bullying of fagging found expression in the boys’ boarding houses, and, later, the girls’ and co-educational ones in the Gold Coast. This was the beginning of the school father-school son and school mother-school daughter relationships, which set up the tradition in which each junior and younger student was expected to have a senior as a school father or mother whom they served. These relationships are still present in Ghanaian boarding houses. Juniors, known as green horns and freshers, were generally construed as servants, and, so, apart from their school fathers and mothers, other seniors could homo them. Although the power arrangement system of a fag master and a fag relationship must have induced homoing in Ghanaian schools, the formal practice of corporal punishment, including caning, forced weeding, scrubbing dirty

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places, fetching and carrying water to the kitchen or kneeling down, we think, also inspired the practice of homoing. The existence of harsh techniques of corporal punishment in the colonial school, as practiced by the European missionaries and early teachers to correct, actually to show power and make students submit to authority, was an influence. Corporal punishment had become such an integral part of school life that in fact in the 1950s and 1960s teachers in Ghana blamed the “woeful deterioration” and “laxity” of discipline among students on the gradual withdrawal of that kind of punishment.27 There were even protests against the prohibition of corporal punishment, a colonial practice, in schools in the postcolonial moment.28 In the secluded boarding house school environment whereby teachers perpetuated the tradition of violent discipline that brutalised students in the name of care, students, especially seniors, inevitably emulated the use of violent acts to control others. Bullying, as it manifested as homoing, became usual and continuous in the isolated space of the boarding house in the Gold Coast and, subsequently, independent Ghana because students, especially seniors and older ones, mimicked this strategy of domination and control of juniors and other defenceless students. Consequently, as a multiple case study research has reported, various forms of violence have continued as formal institutionalised regimes of disciplinary measures within the everyday life of students in Ghanaian schools.29 Calls for corporal punishment to be formally abolished in schools were made,30 but such punishment continued in the twenty-first century school system in Ghana.31 Homoing generally gained social currency among teachers, parents and students as a norm. Commonly considered to be different from bullying, homoing was simply deemed a traditional practice, a shared value of students, which advantageously facilitated the inclusion of a student into the community of students, and inured the students to the challenges of schooling, and eventually adult life. Having experienced it themselves during their student days, most Ghanaian teachers and parents deem homoing a necessary part of boarding house life, except when a case of visible physical grave harm is caused to a victim, known as a homo or homo odwan (lit. homo sheep).32

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A History of Homoing in Ghana: The Colonial Experience European-style boarding schools have a long history in Ghana. The first Western-style colonial school experiment in the Gold Coast was undertaken by the Portuguese imperial agents around 1529.33 Its goal was to train some of the Gold Coast inhabitants to become literates and, consequently, assist and promote the Christianisation and commercial projects of the Portuguese there. Subsequently, the boarding house scheme and custom was started by some other Western experimenters of mission school systems. As a “centre of cultural alienation”,34 the objective of the colonial boarding house was to detach and exclude the African students that they aimed to ‘educate’ regularly from the undesirable influence and distractions of the other locals who did not go to school. This ideological foundation of the boarding house system was aimed at making the boarding house a means to an end, that is, to give students a significant amount of Eurocentric “Christian” values, to enable their exclusion from the effects of their “pagan”35 environment and make them gravitate closer to Western civilisation and worldviews in order to facilitate their inclusion into the colonisation programme as Westernised colonial subjects. The Dutch missionaries and their assistants considered using the boarding house as a key tool for this programme of social separation. Accordingly, Jacobus Eliza Capitein, a former enslaved African from the Gold Coast, trained by the Dutch to evangelise in Elmina in 1742, counselled the Dutch authorities to take African children and transport them “to a special colony or a walled town where they could be instructed in religion and other exercises by Christians from their youth up”.36 However, the English, under the British Crown, perfected and anchored the boarding house system in the Gold Coast. This was after the pioneer missionary Rev. Thomas Birch Freeman, who became the General Superintendent of the Wesleyan mission in the 1830s in the Gold Coast, had counselled the Missionary Committee in London in 1838 about the need for boarding houses. Talking about his educational plan to the committee he stated that: If I were asked what plan [...] I would say [...] an establishment into which the children, could be taken, and kept entirely beyond the reach of demoralising influences, allowing them no contact with the townspeople until they are capable of taking care of themselves. [...] By a little attention

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on the part of the resident Missionaries, the boys might be made to cultivate a piece of land [...] which would supply the establishment with plenty of corn for bread. [...] Thus the children could be brought to industrious and virtuous habits, daily acquiring knowledge of domestic economy [to the benefit of our Westernisation programme].37

Freeman first experimented with two boys: William de Graft and John Martin, in Cape Coast. The scheme, which is akin to the “kill the Indian in the child” and “kill the native in the child” infamous residential schools in former colonies like Canada, India and Australia by colonisers, and the “kill the Indian, save the Man” Indian Residential Schools of the US government,38 gained broad promotion in the Church in England through the Missionary Notices.39 Initially, the missionary groups like the Wesleyans, Basel, Anglicans and Catholics privileged the training of boys in their schools. Subsequently, the missions and the British colonial government established schools for girls. Some of the early colonial boarding schools, especially the secondary schools, such as Mfantsipim Boys School in Cape Coast (1876), St. Nicholas Grammar School (Adisadel College, formerly SPG Grammar School) in Cape Coast (1910) and Achimota School in Accra (1927), are still well-known in Ghana. Thus, boarding houses in post-colony Ghana come from these historical and ideological antecedents. Ultimately, successive governments, missionaries and private entrepreneurs worked side by side through the colonial period to the present postcolonial era and built more single sex and co-ed schools with boarding facilities in Ghana.40 In the post-colony moment, where the secondary school may have lost some of its colonial purpose and elitist character because of various government-led education reforms and growing student population, these centres of training became “purposeful instruments [of politics] for promoting national unity”,41 because they “put children from the country’s 70-odd ethnic groups into one pot [of social inclusion] and stirs them up to melt”,42 a phenomenon which, according to Kwaku Sakyi-Addo, an award winning Ghanaian journalist and the country’s correspondent for BBC and Reuters between 1994 and 2007, has been cited as a key reason for “the country’s escape from the ethnic tensions which have brought many African countries to bloody ruin”.43 Currently, Ghana’s educational system has a senior high school (formerly secondary school) component.44 It is mostly at this level, where students are offered in-school accommodation in the form of boarding

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house facilities, that homoing is most profound. Thus, this study is confined to the boarding house homoing in the context of Ghana’s secondary school. Historically and into the present day, the boarding house community is a part of town where a people—students—live a created corporate life. This life is founded “on a common [schooling] institution, social networks, values and in-house traditions”.45 Community members are expected to naturally respond and subject themselves to group need by supporting collective activity and partaking in certain rituals and customs, which are deemed necessary to support social connections. Remote from the wider society, this student community initiates its own traditions of laws, rules and practices. In the postcolonial moment, this was particularly evident as students developed peculiar students’ customs, codes, conventions and subaltern cultural items like the Ghana Students Pidgin English,46 food like Gari Soakings,47 dances and music like Gyama (Djama or Jama) and notions of monsterology in the boarding houses. These creations served the different existential and social needs of the students in their new environment. They also revealed and responded to their aspirations, fantasies, realities, imaginations, experiences, visions and situations in the colonial and postcolonial moments. These students’ creations in the boarding house came through an innovative mediation of cultural notions that are Western, or African, or a syncretism of the two.48 As such, homoing is generally considered as one of such customs that serves as a vehicle for the “inclusion” of students into the boarding house community, and a channel for students to feel and partake in the community and express the groups’ thoughts. Williams suggests that certain reinforcing indigenous social factors on the ground allowed the practice of homoing to thrive in Ghana beyond the colonial period. A plausible sociocultural explanation given by Williams for the continuing acts of homoing in Ghana emanates from her views about the ordinary “parenting style which is more towards hitting and verbal exploitation”.49 Hence, she implies that “[p]arents often tend to hit their children upon the least provocation”. And “[i]n most households when children are being ‘disciplined’ for wrongdoing, smacking is quite common”. She reasons, therefore, that because “[m]ost children are exposed to violence and aggressive related behaviours from parents and society […] [and] [r]eligious dogma [of Christianity and Islam] and societal norms [that] support corporal punishment, under the axiom that ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’”, instinctively “when an adolescent

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enters school and is exposed to bullying and victimisation, [which is about control] they tend to see this as ordinary or normal behaviour [and engage in it or acquiesce to it]”. This, situation, to Williams, has kept the practice of the subculture of homoing alive on the terrain of schools in Ghana.50

Experiences of Homoing Although homoing can be understood as a legacy of the colonial programme, with some orders of power in the colonial schools, corporal punishment by teachers and the British tradition of fagging at the roots of contemporaneous homoing in Ghana, there is however a dearth of official written records of homoing in colonial schools. What exist are stories from some old people who attended some of the colonial schools. There are also some memoirs of people who attended some of the colonial schools about bullying from the 1930s to the postcolonial moments from the 1960s to the 1990s. A reading of some memoirs and autobiographies and official school histories that capture school life in the 1930s to the 1960s excavates scenarios and information that show that homoing—structural or institutional, attitudinal and cultural-social—at times violent and humiliating, was very much a tradition that was alive in the colonial boarding schools. For example, writing about his entry into Mfantsipim School boarding house in 1932, Joe Appiah, a renowned Ghanaian diplomat, and the father of the renowned British-American philosopher and educator Kwame Anthony Appiah, disclosed in his autobiography how he was even cautioned at home to expect homoing as a junior or ‘green horn’. Consequently, upon reaching the school, Appiah recounted how he had his “first unforgettable encounter” with homoing: “A smallish-looking student […] ordered me to carry his trunk and chop box to a dormitory […] this student was a ‘senior’ student. He bellowed […] with an air of authority. ‘Are you deaf’?”.51 In describing the tradition in the 1930s, Appiah explained that: “As was the custom, junior students were always positioned near a senior to serve as the senior’s fag”. Appiah’s senior, practising cultural-social homoing, told him authoritatively: “Every morning you will make my bed and clean my shoes; every evening you will soak my ‘gari’ in milk and put it under my bed. On Saturdays, you will collect and wash all my dirty handkerchiefs, socks, pants and singlets. You will […] carry out

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any other orders that I may give to you from time to time […] you can always come to me for help”.52 The senior then threatened: “Discharge your duties faithfully and you will find Mfantsipim a very happy place”.53 Appiah was forced to say “Oh yes, sir” to the senior.54 This deference also went to the wider hierarchy of seniors, especially all fifth and sixth formers, whose “powers of discipline over students in their dormitories were really indistinguishable from those of head prefects. These, then, were the categories of students who ruled the roost”.55 They practiced both attitudinal and cultural-social homoing. Regarding the bullying acts and methods, Appiah related how he was woken up at night and homoed: made to sit on the bare floor, his bed sheet soaked in water, made to carry a bucket of water and to walk downstairs and back, amidst threats, and how on his return to his dormitory he realised that his bed and cloths had been hidden by the intimidators.56 Just as Appiah talked about homoing being common in Mfantsipim in 1930s, a memoir of an anonymous student also captured scenarios of homoing in the 1960s in the school. This information from the old student was reported in Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana, the official history of the school, written by the eminent historian, Adu Boahen, himself an Old Boy of the 1950 vintage group of the school.57 It showed how homoing of ‘green horns’ usually continued for one week after school had reopened. Juniors were “unofficially informed that bullying would continue for a week”58 and threatened by seniors. They were forced to write the alphabets with their buttocks or march to the commands of a senior. Some juniors had their noses rudely pulled and their faces clawed roughly by seniors. As a result, some had nosebleeds. Others were stripped naked.59 The Saturday nocturnal initiation ceremony or “homos night” took place at the Assembly Hall. As structural or institutional homoing, a part of the school’s permitted traditions, it was held annually to initiate the juniors into the school. The new entrants were ridiculed and made to do all sorts of buffoonery acts to entertain the student audience.60 Homoing continued as long as seniors found it exciting and fulfilling to express their seniority in ways such as sending juniors on unnecessary errands and punishing them for imaginary crimes.61 Most of these acts are still done in schools today.62 The official history of Achimota, Achimota in the National Setting, written by the distinguished Ghanaian historian, Francis Agbodeka, himself an old student of that school and a member of the 1952 class,

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reveals that in the 1950s there was a tradition, institutional homoing, where “ninoes” (freshmen and juniors) were forced to stand up and carry plates on their heads and to sing when students were eating in the dining hall.63 Achimota, which was established in 1927, had the custom of “ninoes’ night” to entertain the audience. This old tradition of institutional homoing, which were rites of passage to facilitate the inclusion of freshmen/women into boarding house living at Achimota, attracted the spectatorship and approval of staff and students.64 In his autobiography My Journey … Every Step, General Henry Kwami Anyidoho, one of Ghana’s distinguished military officers and celebrated UN peacekeeper, also recounted his experiences of homoing, the attitudinal and cultural-social types, at Kpandu Trade (Technical) School in 1957. “They shouted at you, and ask you to run with your luggage on your head and called you all sorts of names”.65 Anyidoho escaped and went home, in an effort to exclude himself from the boarding house and its homoing culture, but his father compelled him to return to the school where the students consequently teased him for his behaviour. However, the events of homoing and his father’s decision, he implied, were ultimately beneficial because they toughened him for his life work and made him decide to never withdraw or give up in the face of difficulties again.66

Homoing as a Continued Tradition in Postcolonial Ghana Homoing acts are many and vary from school to school, but there are certain traditionally shared ones. The institutional homoing of “ninoes’ week” and “ninoes’ nights”, which started in the colonial period, has continued in the postcolonial period. The experiences of each freshman/woman year group are by no means exceptional or peculiar. As the Adisadel Old Boys Association website showed, the homoing week and nights are the general pattern with perhaps slight variations here and there over the years.67 Some senior high students that we interviewed about their homoing experiences as victims, witnesses and perpetrators revealed an interesting common notion. Despite the fact that they were of the common view that some of the homoing acts were injurious and humiliating to human dignity,68 they shared a popular psychology on the notion that “Someone did it to you, so you do it to others. The tradition goes on”.69 Homoing, they believed, could sharpen the survival instincts

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of student and prepare them for the vicissitudes of life in the real world of adults.70 Recollecting school life and homoing in the 1960s, D. K. Wellington, an old student of Adisadel, described a “homos ceremony”, in the category of the structural or institutional homoing, in the 1960s, which he referred to as “1969 Kenkey Battle”. He participated in the “battle”: [It] began on the first Saturday of the Advent Term. Throughout the week […] morning till night time, we were the butt of teasing, sneers and what have you. […] We were […] becoming part […] of the great Santaclausian Family […] a privilege and an honour. […] [W]e had to show that we had been toughened […] for the final battle. “Initiation Day, October 3, 1969 […] was to be the official ending of our “woes.” At 4 p.m. […] we were put on a route […] with our shirts turned the other way round. Likewise, our shoes or sandals. [S]ome discarded things were thrown at us and we were subjected to […] pranks until 6 p.m. when at a Mini Homos Dinner of meat stew and kenkey. […] [O]ur kenkey balls were however taken away from us by the seniors. […] After the dinner we got ourselves clad in our white bed sheets with our pillow cases serving as our “headgear”. […] [W]e went […] to the Canterbury Hall […] [where] […]. we, the Homos, were obliged to give displays interspersed with singing and dancing. Our shoes and tables served as musical instruments in the process. Then […] a ball of kenkey unexpectedly flew on to the stage […] for the “Kenkey Battle” to begin. We were shot with cannon balls of kenkey from all sides. […] [A] truce was called. […] […] There was fortunately no serious casualty […] nothing buoyed up our spirits […] than the idea that we had become fully-fledged—SANTACLAUSIANS!71

As underscored, new methods of homoing were developed and added to the repertoire of old ones for institutional homoing, attitudinal homoing and cultural-social homoing. These included: making “homos” to kneel, at times in buckets, for long hours, cry into buckets, fetch many buckets of water for seniors, weed at night, which is colloquially called disco weeding, eat unwholesome food and go on unending errands. “Homos” could be verbally insulted, beaten with belts or towels, kicked, hit on the back of the hand with a ruler, made to sleep under the bed of a senior, not allowed to sleep on their mattresses, forced to give their provisions to seniors and given insufficient food at table in the dining hall. Seniors would pour cold water on the junior whiles they sleep or put toothpaste on the eye of a sleeping junior. “Homos” are forced to wash for

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seniors, dance and sing to entertain seniors, fan seniors for them to sleep throughout the night, scrub the bathroom and toilets at night, do the “pillaring”, that is, remain standing without moving for a long time, carry seniors to the toilet or hold the penis of a “tired” senior to urinate.72 Homoing manifestations, which have found legitimacy in the tradition of ninoes’ night, also known as “homos’ night”, and “homos first week”, which appear on schools’ calendars, are common to most boarding house secondary schools in Ghana. These legitimised structural or institutional homoing moments, as underscored, encouraged attitudinal and cultural-social homoing types. Homoing became accepted by many as part of students’ life or culture, which “will soon pass away once one became a senior”.73 Many parents would tell their children that they would be homoed out of their laziness and toughened when they go to the boarding house. Interestingly, persons who have experienced boarding house life have had different views about it in the past and now. For example, as Anyidoho underscored in his autobiography, his experience of it in the 1950s contributed in making him a determined person in life and a successful soldier. Additionally, the reminiscence of old students of Adisadel about school life in the 1960s largely glorified homoing. One opined that: “Homos were put through a week-long series of trials […] to ‘toughen’ up the boys and make them proud […] members of the happy Santaclausian Family. [N]evertheless, they cheerfully face the situation for the accolade of ‘Santaclausian’ is tempting and well worth striving for by all new comers […]”.74 According to Wellington, his 1969-year group of “homos” felt proud because homoing enabled their inclusion into the boarding house community and living at Adisadel College and, consequently, made them bona fide members of the family of Santaclausians.75

Conclusion A perusal of the strands of narration, description, analysis and report above leads to some understanding about the historico-ideological foundations of the boarding house system on the Ghanaian education terrain and how these foundations are intertwined with the roots of homoing in Ghanaian secondary/high schools. Apart from adding a fresh historical narrative of the beginnings of bullying in Ghanaian boarding schools

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to extant studies on bullying in Ghana, this chapter has offered three perspectives about the history and ontology of homoing. The first standpoint is that in terms of provenance, the genesis of homoing is rooted in a history of domination, violence and colonialism. The second viewpoint is that an intersection of different social, political and cultural discourses and mechanisms of physical and psychological coercion, abuse, vulnerability and consent, transmitted through language, behaviours, and the organisation and routine of the secluded space of the boarding house and secondary/high school have facilitated, institutionalised and sustained the homoing phenomenon overtime in Ghana. The third assessment is that a critical reading of the history of the boarding house programme, and the ubiquitous practice of homoing within the bigger context of the history of education and socialisation in both colonial Gold Coast and postcolonial Ghana leads to some interesting situations and conclusions about the phenomena and processes of social exclusion and social inclusion. The boarding house system was a programme of certain religious and political regimes of colonial control in the Gold Coast, and a paradigm of the postcolonial government of Ghana, to physically exclude, at least occasionally and momentarily, younger bodies and minds from the larger social environment, for some form of socialisation. As an institution, it has facilitated the inclusion of the excluded persons into itself, its secluded educational space and community. It is in this ‘closed’ society of students and boarders, away and different from the ‘open’ society of town, that new rituals, norms, ethos of discipline and punishment and standards of inclusion, of which homoing is part, have developed. While homoing can historically and theoretically be read as a longstanding rite of passage and a system of bodily punishment, it can also be interpreted as a convention, a cultural instrument of students, especially for the excluded-from-widersociety persons in the boarding house, which has animated a subaltern boarding house culture and praxis of social interaction and inclusion based on notions, practices and exhibitions of hierarchies of students’ power and control, domination and bullying.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

Williams (2013, p. 90). Williams (2013, p. 90). Owusu et al. (2011, pp. 231–238). Regarding how novels and autobiographies and memoirs relate to boarding schools in the African context, see Klein (2017, pp. 77–132). Wallach (2006, pp. 446–461); Wallach (2004); Forguson (1979/1980, pp. 139–155); Lixl-Purcell (1994, pp. 227–238); and Aurell and Davis (2019, pp. 503–551). Allanson et al (2015, p. 33). Cornell and Limber (2015, pp. 333–343). Allanson et al (2015, p. 31). Askew (1989, pp. 59–71). Allanson et al (2015, p. 32). Within the British situation, see, for example, Chandos (1984); GathorneHardy (1978); Hickson (1992); Bamford (1967). Hymel and Swearer (2015, pp. 293–239). Allanson et al. (2015, p. 33). Hymel and Swearer (2015). Saracho (2016). Studies have been undertaken on different manifestations of bullying in both civilian schools and military training centres. See, for example: Bourke (2016, pp. 56–64); Brooks (2014, pp. 24–25); Keller et al. (2015). Koo (2007, pp. 107–116). See, for example, Laas and Boezaart (2014, pp. 2667–2702); Brown et al. (2008, pp. 289–299). Owusu et al., “The Association”. In fact, the article Owusu et al. (2011) was a pioneering national study of bullying as it related to mental health among senior high school students in Ghana. Williams (2013); Acquah et al. (2014, pp. 827–840); Kibriya et al. (2015); Dunne et al. (2005); Dunne et al .(2013, pp. 285–300); Antiri (2015). On the issue of fagging in the history of boarding schools, see for example, Schaverien (2015); Nash (1961, pp. 14–21); Wakeford (1969); GathomeHardy (1978); Hickson (1992); Chandos (1984). Agnes and Guralnik (2001, p. 509); Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary Online 2017. Schaverien (2015, p. 23). Nash (1961); Wakeford (1969); Gathorne-Hardy (1978); Hickson (1992); Chandos (1984). Schaverien (2015, p. 24).

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27. Teachers demand corporal punishment in school, Daily Graphic, 13th August 1952, 11. 28. Baba Muhammed, Whip Pupils, Ghanaian Times, 1967. 29. Dunne et al. (2005). 30. Corporal punishment of children in Ghana, www.endcorporalpunishment. org/assets/pdfs/states-reports/Ghana.pdf [Last Accessed 28th February 2017]; RE: The Truth about Corporal Punishment (2013), https:// www.myjoyonline.com/re-the-truth-about-corporal-punishment/?param Last Accessed 28th February 2017]. 31. Glenna Gordon, In Ghana, an effort to abolish violent discipline in schools, 2014, https://reliefweb.int/report/ghana/ghana-effort-abolishviolent-discipline-schools [Last Accessed 30th October 2021]; UNICEF, Corporal Punishment in Ghana: A Position Paper on the Legal and Policy Issues (2018), https://www.unicef.org/ghana/media/1956/file/Cor poral%20Punishment%20in%20Ghana.pdf [Last Accessed 30th October 2021]; Corporal punishment still prevalent in schools (2012), The Ghanaian Times, http://www.ghheadlines.com/agency/ghanaian-times/ 20121108/403990/corporal-punishment-still-prevalent-in-schools [Last Accessed 30th October 2021]. 32. Odwan is a word from the widely spoken Akan Twi language in Ghana. 33. Martin (1976, p. 46). 34. Klein (2017, p. I). 35. Graham (1971, pp. 55–56). 36. See Nketsia IV (1959, p. 269). 37. Methodist Missionary Society (M.M.S.), Missionary Notices 1838–41, ix, 34–40, cited in Bartels (1965, p. 330). 38. See, for example, Churchill (2004). 39. M.M.S., Missionary Notices, cited in Bartels (1965, p. 33). 40. Botchway (2017, pp. 7–9). 41. Ninsin (2007, p. 1), cited in Klein (2017, p. 77). 42. Sakyi-Addo, cited in Klein (2017, p. 77). 43. Sakyi-Addo, cited in Klein (2017, p. 77). 44. This was formerly known as college and secondary school during the colonial and immediate postcolonial eras respectively. 45. Botchway (2017, p. 180). 46. Dako (2002, pp. 53–62). 47. This ‘fast food’ is a mixture of gari (granules made from cassava) and cold water with condiments like sugar, milk and roasted groundnuts (peanuts). 48. Botchway (2017). 49. Williams (2013, p. 97). 50. Williams (2013, p. 97). 51. Appiah (1990, pp. 26–27). 52. Appiah (1990, p. 27).

344 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

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Appiah (1990). Appiah (1990). Appiah (1990, p. 28). Appiah (1990). See appendix one “Memories of Kwabotwe” in Boahen (1996, pp. 514– 524). Boahen (1996, p. 519). Boahen (1996). Boahen (1996, p. 522). Boahen (1996). The interviews that we had with senior high school students in Cape Coast from January-March, 2016 attested to this fact. Agbodeka (1977, pp. 138–184). Agbodeka (1977, p. 161). Anyidoho (2010, p. 14). Anyidoho (2010, p. 16). Reminiscences of Adisadel, ‘Chapter 6: Memorable Routines And Episodes ’, http://www.adisadelonline.com/roa_chapter6.htm [Last Accessed 27th February 2017]. Interview with a sample of senior high school students in Cape Coast. January–March, 2016. Interview with students, January–March, 2016. Interview with students, January–March, 2016. Reminiscences of Adisadel 2017. Reports from a personal interview with DSP George Appiah Sekyi, Coordinator of Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit, Central Regional Police Headquarters, Cape Coast, Ghana, on 5th March 2016, newspapers, and a doctoral thesis have indicated that some of these homoing acts have been extreme and tragic in recent times. See, for example, Bullying Causes Teenager to take her life (2015), News24Ghana, http:// ghana.news24.com/National-News/Bullying-causes-teenager-to-take-herlife-20150918 [Last Accessed 13th September 2016]; S. Asiedu-Addo, 3 students of St Andrews SHS being held by police for bullying (2014), http://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/3-students-of-st-and rews-shs-being-held-by-police-for-bullying.html, Graphic Online [Last Accessed 15th October 2016]; and Antiri (2015). A. Sarpong, Lecturer, Department of Basic Education, University of Cape Coast, Personal interview, Cape Coast, 4th September 2016. Reminiscences of Adisadel 2017. Reminiscences of Adisadel 2017. Note: As a moniker for past and present students of Adisadel College, “Santaclausians”, comes from St. Nicholas (Santa Claus) Grammar School, the name by which the school was known until 1936.

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Bibliography Acquah, E.O., M.L. Wilson, and D.T. Doku. 2014. Patterns and Correlates for Bullying Among Young Adolescents in Ghana. Social Sciences 3: 827–840. Agnes, M., and D.B. Guralnik, eds. 2001. Websters New World College Dictionary, 4th ed. Foster City, California: IDG Books Worldwide Inc. Agbodeka, F. 1977. Achimota in the National Setting. Accra: Afram Publications. Allanson, P.B., R. Rawlings Lester, and C.E. Notar. 2015. A History of Bullying. International Journal of Education and Social Science 2 (12): 31–36. Antiri, K.O. 2015. Bullying of the Male-Child in Selected Senior High Schools in Ghana. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cape Coast. Anyidoho, H.K. 2010. My Journey …Every Step. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publisher. Appiah, J. 1990. Joe Appiah: The Autobiography of an African Patriot. Accra: Asempa Publishers. Asiedu-Addo, S. 2014. 3 students of St Andrews SHS being held by police for bullying. Graphic. http://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/3students-of-st-andrews-shs-being-held-by-police-for-bullying.html [Accessed October 15, 2016]. Askew, S. 1989. Aggressive behaviour in boys: to what extent is it institutionalised? In Bullying in Schools, eds. D.P. Tattum and D.A. Lane, 59–71. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Aurell, Jaume, and Rocio G. Davis. 2019. History and Autobiography: The Logics of a Convergence. Life Writing 16 (4): 503–551. Bamford, Thomas W. 1967. The Rise of the Public Schools. London: Nelson. Bartels, F.L. 1965. The Roots of Ghana Methodism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boahen, A. Adu. 1996. Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana: A Centenary History 1876–1976. Accra: Sankofa Educational Press. Botchway, De-Valera. 2017. Gyama Songs in Ghanaian Schools: A Note on a Student’s Musical Creativity. In Schools and Schooling as a Source of African Literary and Cultural Creativity, ed. T.R. Klein, 3–31, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Bourke, Joanna. 2016. Hazing: Bullying in the Military. Psychology and Education Journal 53 (1/2): 56–64. Brooks, Ethan. 2014. Hazing Versus Challenging. Push to a Breaking Point. Marine Corps Gazette 98 (2): 24–25. Brown, D.W., L. Riley, A. Butchart, and L. Kann. 2008. Bullying Among Youth from Eight African countries and Associations with Adverse Health Behaviours. Pediatric Health 2: 289–299. Chandos, John. 1984. Boys Together: English Public Schools, 1800–1864. New Haven: Yale University Press. Churchill, Ward. 2004. Kill The Indian, Save The Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco: City Lights.

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Cornell, D., and S.P. Limber. 2015. Law and Policy on the Concept of Bullying at School. American Psychologist 70: 333–343. Dako, Kari. 2002. Student Pidgin (SP): The Language of the Educated Male Elite. Research Review NS 18 (2): 53–62. Dunne, M.R., Sabates, Bosumtwi-Sam, C., and Owusu, A. 2013. Peer relations, Violence and School Attendance: Analyses of Bullying in Senior High Schools in Ghana. The Journal of Development Studies 49: 285–300. Dunne, M., F. Leach, B. Chilisa, T. Maundeni, R. Tabulawa, N. Kutor, L. Forde, and A. Asamoah. 2005. Gendered School Experiences: The Impact on Retention and Achievement in Botswana and Ghana. London: Education Series Research. Forguson, Lynd. 1979/1980. Autobiography as History. University of Toronto Quarterly 49 (2): 139–55. Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan. 1978. The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of English Public School. New York: Viking. Graham, C.K. 1971. The History of Education in Ghana. From the Earliest Times to the Declaration of Independence. Milton Park: Frank Cass. Hickson, Alisdare. 1992. The Poisoned Bowl: Sex and the Public School. London: Duckworth. Hymel, S., and Swearer, S.M. 2015. Four Decades of Research on Bullying. An Introduction. American Psychologist 70: 293–299. Keller, K. M., Matthews, M., Hall, K. C., Marcellino, W., Mauro, J. A., and Lim, N. 2015. Hazing in the U.S. Armed Forces: Recommendations for Hazing Prevention Policy and Practice. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Kibriya, S., Xu, Z.P., and Zhang, Yu. 2015. The impact of Bullying on Educational Performance in Ghana: A Bias-reducing Matching Approach. Conference Paper at the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and Western Agricultural Economics Association, San Francisco, California, July 26–28. Klein, T.R., ed. 2017. Schools and Schooling as a Source of African Literary and Cultural Creativity. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Koo, Hyojin. 2007. A Time Line of the Evolution of School Bullying in Differing Social Contexts. Asia Pacific Education Review 8: 107–116. Laas, A., and T. Boezaart. 2014. The Legislative Framework Regarding Bullying in South African Schools. Per 17: 2667–2702. Lixl-Purcell, Andreas. 1994. Memoirs as History. The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 39 (1): 227–238. https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/39.1.227. Martin, C.A. 1976. Significant Trends in the Development of Ghanaian Education. The Journal of Negro Education 45 (1): 46–60. Nash, P. 1961. Training an Elite: The Prefect-Fagging System in the English Public School. History of Education Quarterly 1: 14–21.

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Nketsia IV, Nana Kobina. 1959. The Effect of Christian Missionary Activities on some Akan Social Institutions from the Portuguese Settlement on the ‘Mina Coast’ in 1482–1916. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Oxford. Owusu, Andrew, Peter Hart, Britney Oliver, and Minsoo Kang. 2011. The Association Between Bullying and Psychological Health Among Senior High School Students in Ghana, West Africa. Journal of School Health 81: 231–238. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary Online. Accessed January 02, 2017, http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/fag?q=fag+. Saracho, Olivia N., ed. 2016. Contemporary Perspectives on Research on Bullying and Victimization in Early Childhood Education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc. Schaverien, Joy. 2015. Boarding House Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child. London and New York: Routledge. Wakeford, John. 1969. The Cloistered Elite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School. London: MacMillan. Wallach, Jennifer J. 2004. Remembering Jim Crow: The Literary Memoir as Historical Source Material. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts. Wallach, Jennifer J. 2006. Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material”. Biography 29 (3): 446–461. Williams, Beatrice Dwumfour. 2013. Risk Factors and Psychological Outcomes of School Bullying among Adolescents in Ghana. Unpublished Masters’ Thesis, University of Ghana.

PART V

Epilogue

CHAPTER 16

Epilogue: New Directions in the History of Boarding Schools David M. Pomfret

This volume expands what we know of the history of boarding schools and the impact they had upon those whose lives they touched. It marks a departure from prior studies both in terms of its geographical scope, drawing as it does upon cases from Europe, India, Russia, Africa, South East Asia and the United States, and its temporal frame, which stretches from the late eighteenth century to the post-war era. The impression we gain from the preceding chapters is one of breath-taking variety. In different times and places across the period studied, imperialists, missionaries, revolutionaries, entrepreneurs and a host of would-be defenders of tradition established boarding schools for strikingly disparate ends. Taking such an expansive approach allows this collection to draw insights across local and national contexts. Some schools were intended as engines of privilege, others as sites for ‘civilising’ the poor. Bringing them together

D. M. Pomfret (B) The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_16

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under the same analytic lens allows us to identify aspects of boarding as concept and practice, and to expose the shared operational logics of immersion that connected different lives across seemingly insuperable divides. If their ends varied widely (ranging, as we have seen, from eliminationist assimilation to accelerated state-building and the acculturation of elites) what common features and impacts marked boarding schools as part of a shared episteme? As the authors have shown, lurking on the edges of society, modern boarding schools introduced novel disciplinary regimes. In contrast to the elementary schools expanding across the period in tandem with the rise of the modern state, boarding schools aimed to achieve a far more complete rupture between students, families and their wider communities. They engineered new connections between peers and school authorities (who acted in loco parentis ). They sequestered young people and applied to them a variety of exclusionary strategies. Students admitted to boarding schools experienced highly regimented routines, rituals and new repertoires of symbols and standards. Life in boarding schools typically involved the close monitoring and micro-scheduling of activities from eating to sleeping, to praying and learning. Hairstyles, dress, bodily habits and beliefs were subject to scrutiny and ‘correction’. This marked a striking departure from the premodern era, when boarding schools had served as little more than holding centres for elite children and were often bywords for disorganisation and disorder. What drove school managers to impose this deeper and more ‘total’ regulation of bodies in modern times? The answers in the preceding chapters reveal the extent to which boarding came to be entwined with epochal struggles to reshape the world in a period defined by breakneck modernisation. Across the period as stakeholders sought to justify attempts to sequester young people within boarding schools they did so with reference to the earth-shaking events that were transforming their lives. As the revolutionary waves of the early period covered by this book triggered diasporic movements and defensive reactions, boarding emerged at the forefront of fantasies of insulating the young from the world and preparing them for an uncertain future. Madame Rivardi’s school, discussed in Chapter 2, offered those running from revolution a pathway to new cultural competencies in the United States. Other chapters refer to the work of missionaries cognizant of the threat posed by secularising states, as they seized the opportunity presented by imperialisms to align

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boarding in India, Africa, and South East Asia behind work advancing the Christianisation of the globe. In the twentieth century, states as ideologically diverse as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, where youth was ascribed a special vanguard role in political ideology, turned to boarding schools to produce ‘new men’ and ‘new women’ capable of rejuvenating society. A shared source of inspiration linking these diverse endeavours were new views of nature that had gained ground among educated classes globally from the late eighteenth century. These held that the mind—like the universe more generally—was mechanistic and that human beings could be tinkered with, ‘corrected’ and even made ‘virtuous’ through enhanced training.1 If personhood could be successfully shaped through institutionalisation, new men and women could be created to better serve the most urgent challenges of the day. Stakeholders agreed that boarding schools, by more completely separating young people from society, offered an optimal format for such experiments. It was one that minimised dissonance, shielded the young from ‘inappropriate’ or ‘dangerous’ influences and afforded conditions in which social order could be (re)produced. Given this remit, it is hardly coincidental that throughout this volume we so often find school-enclaves physically located on the fringes of those societies they were intended to reshape. Situated in the countryside or on the edges of urban areas, boarding schools functioned as domesticated geographies where fantasies of ‘empty’ or ‘neutral’ terrain could be given fuller play. Certainly, some elite-facing schools made bold statements using architecture connoting fixity, permanence and weight, as Tim Allender and Jonathan Singerton note, but most tended to be discreetly embedded in the landscape.2 The parochial, clandestine aspect of the schools, situated at one remove, disguised operations of power and deep connections with wider networks. This collection productively uncovers the core importance of networked mobility to the development of the modern boarding school. In the period discussed, imperial networks played an especially important role in transferring the boarding concept across cultures. As the violent expansion of modern states was raising questions of governmentality, boarding schools emerged as an accompaniment to projects intended to achieve eliminationist assimilation or the cultivation of collaborationist elites. Oliver Charbonneau traces the development of an American imperial boarding school network, emerging from the Carlisle School model

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of Richard Henry Pratt, which underpinned projects of forced assimilation, land dispossession and the breaking down of alternative frameworks of nation building in the continental interior. The Carlisle School model was not fixed, but rather moved across borders, travelling outward along the ‘civilising frontier’ where it was projected into the new colonies of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. It also informed the development of boarding beyond the American empire, in places such as Mexico and Canada.3 As stakeholders struggled to solve tensions and pressures of empire, boarding schools in metropoles came to be connected with the intimate operations of power on the colonial frontier. Boarding as concept and practice did not travel as some fully formed ‘blueprint’ or strategy for export. Instead, it was co-produced in a process of networked exchange between metropoles and peripheries. As Tim Allender notes in his chapter, innovations in boarding in Britain often drew upon precedents from the Raj. Within colonial settings the schools themselves were connected, existing in a symbiotic relationship or informal hierarchies. In India, for example, some profitable missionaryrun schools for elites directly subsidised the operations of boarding schools for the poor. This volume helps us to reflect upon the mobility of boarding schools as concept and practice, but it also asks what exactly happened to those whose bodies were stilled and confined, often for years, within their physical walls. The infamous ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs depicting boarders upon arrival and departure from the Carlisle School point to what adult organisers saw as the uplifting consequences of boarding. These portraits depicted departing students who were barely recognisable as their former selves, such was the distance they had purportedly travelled from their origins, without going anywhere. The intended message was that the kind of immersion boarding schools produced was integrative and (re)combinant; capable of resolving difference and yielding stable collectives. Schools notably advanced gendered collectives through sex-segregated boarding, as several chapters in this volume have illustrated. In many cases schools formalised gender difference by preventing or limiting boys’ and girls’ opportunities to interact. Co-educational approaches tended to arise only in conditions where a lack of resources prevented segregation. The schools and their organisation bore the hallmarks of then-dominant views that the future of nations and empires rested in the bodies and minds of young men, to a greater extent than young women.

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Boarding activities regulated sexuality and shaped male bodies in accordance with ideals of masculinity. As it turned out, making men required the careful management of domestic geographies. However, from the end of the nineteenth-century boarding schools’ role in shoring up conservative models of femininity gradually became more apparent, as medical discourses redefined puberty, legal debates swirled around the age of consent and the cultural constructs of the ‘new woman’ and later the ‘modern girl’ scandalised critics. While schools reinforced the formal separation of the sexes they also quite deliberately dissolved other hierarchies with a view to producing new collectives. So, for example, elite-facing institutions promised to resolve the threat of downward social mobility through the acculturation of students into middle class status. This is what was implied by the ‘Gothication’ of Rivardi’s girls in Philadelphia, the ‘breeding out’ of parochialism in the Irish boarding schools discussed by Mary Hatfield and in colonial places the imprinting of value systems marked by modern middle class values: competition, discipline and efficiency. But boarders were never only encouraged to meet expectations of ‘uplift’. Poor-facing institutions often aimed to dissolve hierarchies by ushering residents towards the docile acceptance of lower social status. Amid a drive for global profit, missionaries who opened industrial boarding schools in Cape Colony of the 1860s, like those who ran schools for the Chiricahua discussed by Janne Lahti, aimed to secure labouring bodies, and to manage pupils’ expectations and relationship with colonised space, orienting them back towards villages in the case of Malabar, and therein towards the farm. These collectives forged under colonial conditions underscored racialised thinking while steering students away from the potentially dangerous embrace of proletarian identity. Boarding schools’ ‘failure’ to achieve uplift could be productive in other ways. They were somewhat akin to that other modern institution, the laboratory, in that these were enclosed settings lurking, almost unseen, on the edges of society, engaged in the dynamic testing of subjects and the generation of new knowledge about them. As Rebecca Swartz, Tim Allender and Ngozi Edeagu argue, boarding schools produced evidence of the failure of racialised bodies to meet various tests of civilisation.4 As Lahti shows us in his chapter they were spaces of experimentation where Apache ‘savages’ received white ‘civilisation’ but could not be assimilated, remaining racialised subjects rather than full citizens. In both colonial

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places and settler societies similar processes were under way, and boarding schools’ most profitable yield was not the ‘civilised citizen’ but arguably the proof of inbuilt failings that could be used to justify claims on land and asymmetric power relations. Beyond race and class, boarding schools fashioned collectivities of age, and more specifically of ‘youth’. Childhood and youth were both core concepts underpinning modern boarding. Notions and experiences of both varied widely across the world, but in this period they began to be seen as distinctive phases of life and to converge into more normative or ‘hegemonic’ concepts. Organisers deployed both. For example, claims to protect ‘childhood’ lurked in efforts to justify the separation of children from their families and communities. The only question was how early boarding should begin. In part as a result of the expansion of boarding, childhood became a more recognisable collective of age. However, the most important operational category in play in boarding schools was not childhood, but youth. This is because the stakes were higher when it came to older boarders. Their departure and reintegration into society had to be carefully managed; especially so during a period when contemporaries pointed to youth as soon-to-be-citizens, and agents of change possessing revolutionary potential. Around the world, especially from the late nineteenth century networked intellectuals and reformers linked youth as a concept to opportunity, power, and the productive possibilities of ‘progress’. The purported dynamism of youth extended to claims for a kind of vanguardism, or societal leadership by youth, which would reach its fullest extent in the twentieth century. These ideas meshed with managers’ claims for boarding schools as ‘gateways’ for the transformation of wider society. They would serve as distribution points issuing new collectives entrusted with defending or advancing the interests of nations, empires, and faiths. In this way Catholics in Spain and Ireland, discussed by Till Kössler and Mary Hatfield respectively, identified boarding schools not simply as defensive formations but as launch pads for youthful leaders imagined to be capable of transformative action. Focusing upon people and their stories, rather than institutions and curricula, this collection builds upon recent work uncovering experiences of boarding, and their often-traumatic consequences. As the chapters suggest, schools existed along a spectrum that extended from sweeping, culturally genocidal impacts at one end to lower-level day-to-day microaggressions at the other. A grim abundance of both can be found in the poor-facing institutions which Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz argue in

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their introduction to this volume should be seen as the ‘primary example’ of the modern boarding school. Boarding of any genre could be traumatic but it was more likely to be so when applied to bodies marked as irretrievably ‘defective’ (in spite of their pliant youthfulness). In cases such as this, where the gateway role of the boarding school was compromised, boarding skewed even more heavily towards aggregation, aggression and concealment. Moreover, for those pupils who departed, ‘exclusion’ within the school never translated into being fully ‘included’ anywhere else. Instead departure involved the assumption of a kind of pariah status. In this way, even a ‘star student’ like Jason Betzinez, discussed in Lahti’s chapter, who felt he had joined American society on leaving school, remained torn between his new identity and his culture of origin, which he saw as pitiable but could never entirely jettison. Undeniably, boarding involved the erasure of history and the denial of students’ home cultures. It involved daily violence inflicted upon boarders’ bodies, and resulted in intergenerational as well as individual trauma that is impossible to quantify. But it also created new histories in the process, which deserve consideration. And this collection opens an intellectually productive research agenda by presenting those who experienced boarding schools as more than merely victims. The chapters point to various agentic interventions by boarders and evidence of their attempts to negotiate power relationships. Divya Kannan and Kirsten Kamphuis highlight tactics such as running away or transgressing formalised gender boundaries by playing games with members of the opposite sex. Anja Werner notes that deaf students developed their own subversive sign spaces in boarding schools in Germany. It was rare for these tensions to obviously undermine authority or spill into public confrontation (and even when they did, as Hatfield shows us, authorities turned a blind eye). But boarding schools were never frictionless exercises. This volume shows us their history was as much about impediments, flaws, and miscalculations as it was about grandiose ambitions. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that even when young people encountered boarding in its most repressive forms they could still experience aspects of school life as transformative. Some former students offered surprisingly positive reflections in memoirs and autobiographical writings, and preferred to recall institutional settings as sites of their own agentive interventions. Students were deeply implicated in the working of these institutions and their rites of passage. For all their abusive aspects, it is

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possible to see practices such as ‘homoing’ and ‘fagging’, discussed by DeValera N.Y.M. Botchway and Baffour Boaten Boahen-Boaten, as aspects of youth subculture reproduced by generations of students, even under close adult surveillance. For all of its conservatism, the boarding experience for girls overseen by Roman Catholic missionary orders in India and the Dutch East Indies provided opportunities that did not exist elsewhere. It stimulated aspirations, and could translate into higher social status by enhancing girls’ chances of marrying up. Boarders were not merely victims of their situation but could also take ownership of it and make the space their own.5 The new research agenda staked out in this volume suggests that by reading these histories against the grain we can gain new insights into the lives of young people that were previously hidden from view. In doing so we can shed new light upon the history of boarding, revealing it to be more than a history of institutional intent or of the cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples in white settler contexts. An approach foregrounding the young can also begin to identify how boarding unsettled the larger structures these projects were supposed to support. Sometimes, experiences of abuse burned slowly, but produced conflagrations years after the fact. This was notable in the case of anticolonial upheaval. Boarding schools generated youth subcultures and graduate networks that could, and did, translate into anti-colonial action, for example in the case of the KCL strike in Nigeria discussed by Edeagu. However, by steering away from the limits of retrospective readings of boarding institutions as inevitably sowing seeds of anti-colonial nationalism, the contributors to this volume allow us to revisit and productively reassess foundational narratives of post-colonial nation building. Overall, the inclusion of quotidian stories does more than just complexity to the volume, it helps us to rethink histories of boarding as coercion and remind us just how anxiously authorities viewed alternative systems of authority and the support that persisted for them outside schools. This approach potentially allows a new type of post-colonial history of failed ethnocide to emerge. Together the chapters collected here also show how much is to be gained from bringing the history of boarding schools into conversation with scholarship recently generated from wider historiographical trends. To date, the history of boarding schools has had rather little visibility in histories of empire, for example, or the political struggles of twentieth century Europe. Scholars have criticised a ‘myopia’ that has left these institutions and experiences of them less visible in the scholarship.6 This

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neglect seems to correlate, suspiciously, with the schools’ own historical tendency to operate at one remove, or to stand hidden in plain sight. Claims of ‘absence’ may be somewhat exaggerated. After all, historians of education have contributed important studies of boarding schools in recent years, especially in contexts of white settlement.7 But these histories mostly refer to boarding in specific national contexts, rather than exploring it as part of a global phenomenon or shared episteme. This volume flags an important new agenda in research by bringing to light contemporary entanglements and potential connections between the history of boarding schools and larger fields of historiographical enquiry, such as migration, colonialism, imperialism, law, and medicine. The importance of this agenda is underlined by the continued significance of boarding as it persists, and indeed flourishes, today. There is a need to begin to further disambiguate and reclaim from obscurity the people and processes behind the historical development of these institutions. Doing so can enable us to question the forms of social stratification that continue to operate through boarding schools, and to ask who benefits from them. Historicising boarding schools can provide the deeper context against which to understand how elite schools, in particular, have managed to avoid being pulled into public debates around education. And above all it can help us to re-read the history of boarding schools as sites for the reproduction of power not only in terms of trauma, abuse and estrangement but also of bonds of friendship, networks and shared transformative struggles.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Cheng (2009, p. 11). Latour (1983). Dawson (2012, p. 83). Sen (2005). Elby (2021). Gaztambide-Fernandez (2009). Graham (2012).

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Bibliography Cheng, Yinghong. 2009. Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Dawson, Alexander S. 2012. Histories and Memories of the Indian Boarding Schools in Mexico, Canada and the United States. Latin American Perspectives 39 (5): 80–99. Elby, Beth. 2021. Playing the Game: Sport, Gender and the Haskell Indian Boarding School, 1890–1930. Journal of Women’s History 33 (3): 86–109. Gaztambide-Fernandez, Rubén. 2009. What Is an Elite Boarding School. Review of Educational Research 79: 1090–1128. Graham, Gundlach, and Abigail. 2012. The Power of Boarding Schools: A Historiographical Review. American Educational History Journal 39 (1/2): 467–481. Latour, Bruno. 1983. Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World. In Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, ed. Karin KnorrCetina and Michael Mulkay, 141–170. London: Sage. Sen, Satadru. 2005. Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850– 1945. London: Anthem.

Correction to: Subverting Exclusion and Oppression: Historical Perspectives of Student Experiences at Boarding Schools for the Deaf in German-Speaking Countries Anja Werner

Correction to: Chapter 14 in: D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_14 The original version of this book was inadvertently published with a misspelled word in the title of Chapter 14. The correction to the chapter has been updated with the changes.

The updated original version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_14

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1_17

C1

Index

A Abbott, Lyman, 219, 222, 229, 230 Abuse, 6, 11–13, 168, 175, 179, 182, 216, 220, 221, 271, 294, 307, 311–314, 317, 341, 358, 359 Adolf-Hitler-Schools, 87, 88, 95 Advertising, 49, 73, 104, 111, 115, 200 Agbodeka, Francis, 337, 344 Alberti, Rafael, 116, 117 Alienation, 178 Anti-colonial movement, 245 Apaches (Chiricahuas), 21, 123, 124, 129, 136 Apcar family, 2, 3 Calcutta, British India, 2 Harrow, England, 2 Appiah, Joe, 336, 337, 343, 344 Architecture, 196, 353 Arizona, United States, 21, 124, 125, 128, 134 Armagh, Northern Ireland, 291, 294–297

Armand, Pierre, marquis de Gouvello, 51 Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, 214, 223 Arnold, Thomas, 9, 27, 289 Artisans, 60, 67, 138, 156 Assimilation, 124, 130, 202, 217, 221, 317, 352–354, 358 Asylum, 5, 42, 200–202, 204 Attitudinal, 330, 336–340 Ayala, Ángel, 112, 116 Azikiwe, Nnamdi, 244, 245, 247, 249, 254

B Barcelona, Spain, 105, 112 Baring Boarding High School, British India, 2 Barring out, 295–297, 299 Basel Mission, 147, 151, 152 boarding schools, 153 Basque Country, Spain, 104

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99041-1

361

362

INDEX

Bassegli, Tommaso di (a.k.a. Basiljevi´c-Baselji, Tomo), 39, 50 Bell, Andrew, 10, 201, 209 Betzinez, Jason, 11, 21, 123–141, 357 Blacker, William, 294, 296 Blage, Achim, 312, 313 Boahen, Adu, 337, 344 Boarding schools for the deaf, 19, 24, 306, 309, 311, 312, 314, 317–319 Bollag, Fiona, 308, 320 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 27 Boy scouts (Catholic), 109 Bradford, William, 49 Brent, Charles Henry, 225 Brevost, Antoinette, 42, 53, 54 Brevost family, 42 Brevost, Jean, 41, 50 British and Foreign School Society (BFSS), 10 British colonies, 14 Bullying, 2, 6, 13, 24, 175, 290, 294, 297, 325–332, 336, 337, 340–342, 344 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron of, 46

Chiefs, 60, 68–70, 72 Childism, 17, 239 Christianity, 2, 3, 59, 64, 68, 113, 136, 149, 159, 161, 198, 209, 225, 289, 335 Christian missions/missionaries, 202, 241 Church Missionary Society (CMS), 2, 26, 198, 202, 203, 209, 242, 248 Church of Ireland, 291 Classical education, 291 Clerc, Laurent, 310, 320 Colonialism, 147, 215, 221, 238, 265, 268, 341, 359 settler, 72, 124, 126, 132, 139 Colonial paradox, 240 Cricket, 192, 193, 243, 290 Cultural-social, 330, 336–340 Culture, 2, 6, 11, 20, 38, 51, 90, 101, 102, 107, 125, 127, 129, 130, 136, 139, 146, 175–177, 179, 192, 202, 206, 217, 220, 222, 226, 246, 277, 288, 297, 306, 311, 317, 319, 326, 328, 338, 340, 341, 353, 357 Curriculum, 38, 66, 70, 85, 90, 111, 130, 146, 178, 204, 226, 288

C Canada’s Residential Schools, 11 Cape Coast, 334, 344 Cape colony, 62, 67, 73, 355 Care leaver, 177, 179 Carey, Matthew, 49 Caribbean, 22, 41, 42, 50, 52, 221, 222, 224, 226 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, USA, 21, 123, 124, 130, 138 Catalonia, Spain, 104 Catholic Action, 108 Catholic Church, 21, 103

D Day school, 7, 64, 72, 153, 219, 224, 226, 264, 306, 311, 315 Deaf-Blind, 305, 308 Dedovshchina, 175 Defectology, 178 Delinquent, (juvenile), 177 Dennie, Joseph, 49, 54 Dennis Memorial Grammar School (DGMS), Nigeria, 240, 242, 245 de Staël, Madame (Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein), 46 Deviance, 22, 169

INDEX

Diet, 46, 157 Disability, 169, 171, 173, 178, 308 Disciplinary regimes, 6, 23, 24, 146, 155, 264, 265, 279, 352 Divine Word Missionaries (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD), 266 Dormitories, 65, 107, 196, 198, 250, 271, 296, 310–312, 331, 336, 337 Duels/duelling, 295 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 293 Duponceau, Pierre, 47 Du Pont family, 51 Dutch East Indies, 23, 263, 265–267, 270, 274, 358

E Edgeworth, Maria, and Richard, 288 Education boys’, 2, 8, 24, 62, 128, 147, 159, 203, 204, 218, 266, 267, 288–292, 331, 354 girls’, 23, 45, 62, 71, 73, 147, 197, 204, 218, 264, 267, 331, 354 industrial, 62, 218, 223, 225, 227 practical, 40, 60, 61, 70 Ekukhanyeni, 60–63, 66–70, 72, 73, 75 Elites, 3, 4, 7, 11, 19, 20, 39, 46, 48, 51, 52, 60, 62, 67, 71, 73, 191, 192, 195, 196, 199, 205, 208, 223, 226, 265, 291, 352–354 Émigrés, 20, 38, 46, 47, 51, 52 Enahoro, Anthony, 238, 239, 245, 248, 251, 253–255 Enlightenment (European), 8–10, 25 Eurasian, 191, 192, 194, 197, 198, 200, 201, 203–207, 210 Evangelical, 146, 147, 149–152, 157, 160

363

Examinations, 7, 14, 20, 41, 48, 82, 89, 103, 153, 159, 194, 241, 246, 299 F Fagging, 2, 6, 13, 24, 25, 294, 295, 297, 299, 329–331, 336, 342, 358 Farming, 85, 135, 138, 176, 292 Finance, 50, 107, 225 First Nations, 11, 14, 18, 25 Flores, Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, 23, 263, 265–267 Foucault, Michel, 7, 26, 27, 161 Franciscan sisters, 264, 267 Francke, August Hermann, 7 Franckesche Stiftung, Halle, Germany, 7 Franco dictatorship, Spain, 110, 114 Franco, Francisco, 102, 109, 112 French, 8, 38–48, 50–52, 54, 55, 309 culture, 50 language, 39–41, 51 Revolution, 39, 103, 295 G Gaelic Athletic Association, 290 Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins, 310, 311 Gender, 11, 13, 16, 23, 25, 39, 71, 133, 134, 145, 147, 192, 203–207, 216, 264, 265, 267, 270, 273, 290, 354, 357 German national association of the deaf (Deutscher Gehörlosenbund, DGB), 307 Germantown, Pennsylvania, 49, 50 Germany, 9, 80, 90, 147, 150, 153, 271, 305–307, 309, 320, 321, 357 Glori, Esteban, 225 Goffman, Erving, 5, 26–28, 182

364

INDEX

total institution, 5, 7, 171, 175, 179 Gold Coast, 242, 326, 329, 331–333, 341 Goldsmith, Oliver, 46 Government College Umuahia (GCU), Nigeria, 240, 243, 245, 246, 249–251 Grey, Sir George, 59–61, 73, 74 Gundert, Hermann, 149–153, 162

H Hagspiel, Bruno, 270, 271, 274, 280, 281 Hampton Institute, USA, 214, 218 Harrow (boarding school), UK, 1, 2, 16, 26, 69, 72, 299 Haupt, Joachim, 82, 95 Heald Town, Cape Colony, 62–64, 66, 73 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 309 Heißmeyer, August, 81, 84, 85, 89, 94, 96 Heidsiek, Johann, 311 Heinicke, Samuel, 309, 320 Helbig, Sabine, 308, 315, 320, 321 Hepp, Peter, 305, 306, 308, 316, 319, 320 Hindu, 193, 202, 203, 205, 206, 210 Hitler Youth, 84, 89, 91, 92 Holdau-Willems, Gisela, 308, 320 Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters (Servae Spiritus Sancti, SSpS), 267, 281, 282 Homo odwan, 332 Homosexual, 329, 330 Hope Waddell Training Institution (HWTI), Nigeria, 240, 242, 243, 247, 249, 250 Humanitarianism, 10

I Illegitimate children, 200 India Malabar, 21, 146–150, 152, 157, 159, 355 Malayalam, 150, 151, 162 Thalassery, 149–151, 153, 154, 156, 159 Tiyyar, 148, 150 Indigenous peoples, 11, 12, 15, 25, 27, 62, 63, 126, 130, 217, 277. See also First Nations Indonesia, 278, 280–282 Irion, Christian, 154–157, 162, 163 Islam, 265, 266, 335 Isolation, 22, 125, 172, 173, 220, 328 J Jarmer, Helene, 308, 315, 316, 320, 321 Jefferson, Thomas, 48, 53, 54 K Kant, Immanuel, 309 Kay-Shuttleworth, James, 9, 27 Khrushchev, Nikita, 168, 169 King’s College Lagos (KCL), Nigeria, 237, 238, 240–245, 247–250, 255, 358 Köslin. See Napola/Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (NPEA) Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy), 80 Kruse, Otto Friedrich, 310, 320 L Labor/work, 2, 7, 19, 23, 60, 63–66, 71, 72, 80, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 95, 126, 134, 135, 146, 148, 149, 151–154, 156, 159, 160,

INDEX

176, 179, 185, 216, 239, 268, 272, 276–279 Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples, 226 Lancaster, Joseph, 10 Land, 11, 51, 68, 85, 124–127, 130, 134, 138, 147, 148, 158, 159, 162, 218, 291, 293, 294, 298, 334, 354, 356 Language, 7, 11, 24, 39, 66, 127, 130, 132, 137, 150, 152, 155, 162, 194, 195, 197, 200, 205, 206, 208, 222–224, 226, 238, 239, 243, 246, 250, 253, 269, 272, 288, 289, 293, 295–297, 299, 306, 310, 314–319, 321, 341, 343 Larantuka, 266–269, 271–273, 275–277, 279, 280 Lela, 266–269, 272–276, 279 León, Pedro Ponce de, 309 l’Epée, Abbé Charles-Michel de, 309 Lever, Charles, 293 Ley, Robert, 84 Literary training, 66 Longwolf, Hattie, 219, 229 M Madame Rivardi’s Seminary for Young Women, 38 Madison, Dolley, 43, 54 Madrid, Spain, 109, 111, 113 Malabar, India, 21, 146, 148–150, 152, 157, 159, 355 Malayalam, India, 150, 151 Manual method (“French method”), 306 Masculinity, 19, 221, 289, 290, 297, 355 Maumere, 267, 282 McConnell, Matthew, 49, 50

365

McKean, Eliza, 47 McKean family, 47 McKean, J.B., 47 McKinley, William, 221, 222, 229 Methodist College Uzuakoli (MCU), Nigeria, 245, 246, 250 Mfantsipim, 334, 336, 337 Military, 14, 17, 39, 48, 50, 82, 102, 104, 109, 114, 131, 139, 146, 150, 200–204, 214, 217, 220, 223, 225–227, 237, 238, 291, 328, 338, 342 Mill Creek, Pennsylvania, 49 Mission, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72, 82, 85, 86, 89, 94, 104, 141, 147–149, 151, 157, 159, 202, 203, 205, 208, 214, 220, 221, 228, 264–271, 273–275, 277–279, 333, 334 schools, 47, 61, 63–65, 67, 70, 108, 146, 149, 150, 152, 156, 202, 241, 243, 245, 266, 269, 270, 278, 333 Missionaries, 16, 22, 60, 61, 63–68, 70, 72–74, 146–151, 153–155, 157–159, 162, 198, 202, 209, 214, 216, 219, 223, 241, 247, 249, 250, 264–266, 269, 271, 273, 275, 277, 278, 332–334, 351, 352, 355 Montezuma, Carlos, 220, 229 Morgan, Thomas Jefferson, 209, 217, 218, 229 Muslim, 3, 150, 202, 203, 205, 206, 223, 225, 252, 265, 266, 269, 271 N Napola/Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (NPEA) Köslin, 82 Oranienstein, 87, 96

366

INDEX

Plön, 82 Potsdam, 82 Rottweil, 83, 87 Schulpforta, 89, 91, 93 Natal colony, 60, 69 National Inquiry (Canada), 11 Nationalist movement, 73 Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), 81 Neblagopoluchnyi, 170 Neef, Sarah, 308 Neglect, 12, 168–171, 173, 178, 179, 181, 227, 241, 359 Netherlands, The, 265, 271, 273, 274, 276 Newspapers, 49, 61, 79, 103, 104, 131, 172, 200, 238, 240, 244, 246–251, 287, 293, 344 Nigeria, Calabar, 243 Nigeria, colonial, 17, 23, 238, 239, 242, 244 Nigeria, Lagos, 240, 242, 244, 245, 247 Nigeria, Onitsha, 242, 248 Nigeria, Secondary school Dennis Memorial Grammar School, 240, 242, 245 Government College Umuahia, 240, 243, 245, 246, 249–251 Hope Waddell Training Institution, 240, 242, 243, 248–250 King’s College Lagos, 237, 238, 240–245, 247–251, 358 Methodist College Uzuakoli, 245, 250 Queen’s College Lagos, 240 O Ojike, Mbonu, 239, 255 Oklahoma, United States, 124, 125, 131, 132, 135–137, 139 Okunnu, Femi, 243, 249, 251

Oralism/oral education (“German method”), 309, 311, 312, 314, 317 Oranienstein, NPEA, 87 Orphan, 7, 11, 22, 149–151, 159, 169, 181, 183, 192, 198, 200, 202, 203

P Pageot des Noutières, Louise (a.k.a Estelle Pageot), 51 Parents, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 20, 22, 25, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 81, 83, 84, 90, 91, 93, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 124, 146, 150, 153, 154, 169–171, 174, 177, 181, 192, 193, 196, 198, 200, 202, 204, 205, 264, 268–272, 279, 288, 290, 309, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316, 318, 332, 335, 340 Pennsylvania, United States, 21, 41, 47, 48, 123–125, 128, 135, 136, 141, 225 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 20, 38, 39, 41–47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 219, 355 Philanthropic kidnapping, 10 Philippine-American War, 124, 125 Philippines, 214, 215, 221–226, 228, 354 Piwko, Benjamin, 308, 315, 316, 320, 321 Plön, NPEA, 82 Port Folio, The, newspaper, 49, 54, 55 Portugal, 108, 116, 265 Postcolonial, 326–328, 332, 334–336, 338, 341, 343 Potsdam, NPEA, 82 Potts Smith, Anna, 51, 53, 54

INDEX

Pratt, Richard Henry, 54, 123, 124, 130, 132–134, 136, 138, 140, 214, 217, 219, 220, 224, 225, 229, 354 Prefects, 2, 6, 25, 330, 331, 337 Prisoners, 21, 123, 124, 126, 128, 134–136, 139, 179 Protestant, 7, 9, 10, 146, 149, 193, 194, 202, 208, 214, 216, 218, 219, 223, 227, 264, 267, 271, 272, 274, 276, 278, 280, 290–292, 296–298, 309 Punishment, 5, 6, 13, 19, 24, 134, 149, 153–156, 158, 180, 295, 297, 311–315, 317, 318, 320, 329, 331, 332, 335, 336, 341

Q Queen’s College Lagos, Nigeria, 240

R Race, 10–12, 59, 60, 72, 93, 127, 129, 134, 145, 147, 149, 194, 196, 206, 214, 216, 217, 219, 221, 224–227, 230, 265, 278, 279, 296, 356 Ralston, Rebecca, 51, 54, 55 Ray de Chaumont, Theresa le, 51 Reform, 9, 10, 22, 23, 65, 103, 105, 108, 110, 112–115, 130, 161, 168–170, 172, 173, 176, 179, 208, 215–217, 220, 222, 227, 228, 265, 289, 334 Reich Labour Service, 92 Reichsstudentenwerk, 84 Religion/religious education, 7, 11, 25, 64, 108, 109, 112–114, 127, 130, 138, 145, 192, 194, 196, 197, 205, 241, 266, 268, 270, 290, 297, 309, 333

367

Reservation, 124, 125, 128, 130, 134, 140, 215–217, 219, 225–227 Rezhim, 173, 183 Ria Rago (film), 270, 271, 275, 278, 281 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 85 Rights, students’, 295 Right-wing politics, 21, 103 Rite of passage, 327, 341 Rivardi, John Jacob Ulrich (a.k.a. Johann Jacob Ulrich Rivardi), 39, 47 Rivardi, Marie (a.k.a. Maria von Born/Countess Maria di Bassegli), 20, 38–55, 352, 355 Rivera, Miguel Primo de, 102 Roman Catholic Church, 247, 265, 266 Rottweil, NPEA, 83, 87 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 9, 27 Royal School Armagh, 291, 294–297 Dungannon, 291 Raphoe, 291, 293 Royalty, 67 Rugby, England, UK, 9, 69, 289 Rush, Benjamin, 47 Rush family, 47 Rush, Julia, 47 Rust, Bernhard, 82, 89, 95

S Salem, Cape Colony, 62, 64, 65, 74 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 8 Schnepfenthal, Germany, 8 School subjects, 5, 6, 11, 82, 289, 328 Schulpforta, NPEA, 89, 91, 93 Schutzstaffel (SS), 86 Scottish Presbyterian, 241 Scott, Sir Walter, 46

368

INDEX

Second Republic, Spain, 102, 105 Second World War, 168, 225, 246, 249 Secularisation, 103, 108, 241 Semiotics, 197, 206 Sérurier, Louis Barbe Charles de, 51 Settler Colonialism, 72, 125, 126, 132 Sign language, 24, 306–312, 314–319 Sikka, 268, 269 Silva, Don Andreas da, 269 Sirotprom, 168 Sisters of Charity, 267, 269 Smiley, Albert, 214, 215, 221, 224, 226 Smith, Robert, 47 Socialism/socialist, 81, 85, 87, 88, 94, 105, 110, 114, 170, 175, 179 Social problems, 132, 170, 172, 328 Soviet Union, 168, 176, 177, 181 Soyinka, Wole, 240, 247, 251, 252, 254 Space, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18–22, 25, 38, 44, 45, 60, 67, 69, 101, 109, 126, 127, 134, 135, 151, 152, 158, 192, 194, 196–202, 205, 206, 215, 240, 243, 246, 250, 306, 314–316, 318, 319, 326, 332, 341, 355, 357, 358 Spain Barcelona, 105, 112 Basque Country, 104 Catalonia, 104 Madrid, 109, 111, 113 Valladolid, 108, 112 Spanish-American War, 214 Sport, 19, 24, 89, 94, 111, 113, 192–194, 196, 225, 238, 243, 289, 290, 297, 298 Stigma, 42, 158, 170

Students, 1–6, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20–22, 24, 39–42, 45, 50, 51, 60–62, 64–67, 70–73, 102, 103, 106–114, 123–126, 128–136, 138, 139, 174, 175, 194, 195, 205, 206, 208, 215, 219, 220, 224–226, 228, 237–251, 255, 264, 267–269, 272, 273, 275–279, 287, 289–298, 305–307, 309–320, 325, 326, 329–342, 344, 352, 354, 355, 357, 358 SVD. See Divine Word Missionaries (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD) T Teachers, 2, 4–6, 9, 12, 13, 16, 20, 23, 24, 41, 60, 62–70, 72, 86, 89, 104, 106, 107, 109, 113, 133, 134, 138, 152–154, 159, 167, 171, 172, 174, 194, 195, 197, 203, 205, 206, 215, 219, 223, 224, 226, 227, 247–249, 266, 267, 270, 272, 279, 289, 293, 295, 297, 305–318, 329–332, 336, 343 Thalassery, India, 149–151, 153, 154, 156, 159 Thompson, John Norris, 293, 299 Thring, Edward, 9 Tiyyar, India, 148, 150 Total institution, 5, 7, 171, 175, 179. See also Goffman, Erving Travel, 14, 128, 151, 185, 193, 214, 220, 224, 244, 264, 273, 291, 306, 354, 359 Trench, William, 294–296, 299 U United States, 12, 13, 20, 26, 28, 37–39, 41, 42, 48, 50–52, 54,

INDEX

55, 125, 126, 130, 132, 134, 214–219, 221–229, 250, 270, 310, 351, 352 Army, 123, 128, 130, 135, 136, 217, 221, 222 government, 11, 123, 334 University, 8, 51, 91, 106, 178, 182, 194, 197, 199, 205, 226, 288, 291 Uppingham, Britain, 9 V Valladolid, Spain, 108, 112 Violence, 6, 12, 24, 69, 125, 127, 128, 139, 167, 168, 170, 174, 175, 220, 290, 314, 332, 335, 341, 357

369

Volksgemeinschaft , 81, 82, 92, 94 Volozan, Denis A., 41

W Washington D.C., USA, 48, 51 Wesley College, 287, 288 West African Pilot, newspaper, 238, 244, 251 West Indies, 242 Wigram, Edmund F.E., 1–3, 16–18

Z Zonnebloem, Cape Colony, 60–62, 66, 67, 70–73