Education and Obligation: Compulsory Schooling, Childhood and the Family

Swartz, Rebecca

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_7

Rebecca Swartz⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter examines changing ideas about government education in metropolitan Britain, Western Australia and Natal between 1857 and 1880. I first discuss the 1857 Industrial Schools Act and then the 1870 Elementary Education Act. This legislation shifted thinking about the government’s right to intervene in education in metropolitan and colonial contexts. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on legislative change in Western Australia. I approach the 1874 Industrial Schools Act as a way into understanding changing conceptions of race, government responsibility, childhood and the family there. The final part of the chapter deals with government education in Natal, showing how ideas about race, childhood and education were articulated in relation to white children’s education in that context.

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Notes

1.
Frank Chesson, ‘The Education of Native Races in British Colonies’, Colonial Intelligencer (January 1877), 345–355, 345–346. See Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1877), 470–471 for a summary of the paper.
2.
Ibid., 352.
3.
Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon write of the compulsory education legislation having the most effect in the ‘white colonies’ (sic) of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. However, their overview of the impact of this legislation overlooks the ways in which, even in these places with large settler populations, race was implicated in discussions about education. Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon, Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 251.
4.
See Kaffir Express, 04.08.1873, 2.
5.
‘An Act to promote the efficiency of certain Charitable Institutions’—Western Australia (38 Vict. No. 11 1874) [hereafter Industrial Schools Act].
6.
Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous Peoples in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 10.
7.
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (London: University of California Press, 2002), 120.
8.
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd edn (London and New York: Free Association Books, 1999), 123.
9.
Brian Simon, ‘Education and Citizenship in England’, Paedagogica Historica, 29 (1993), 689–697, 691.
10.
Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 150.
11.
The Industrial Schools Act—England (20 & 21 Vict., c. 48 1857).
12.
Marianne Moore, ‘Social Control or Protection of the Child? The Debates on the Industrial Schools Acts 1857–1894’, Journal of Family History, 33 (2008), 359–387, 360.
13.
John Stack, ‘Reformatory and Industrial Schools and the Decline of Child Imprisonment in Mid-Victorian England and Wales’, History Compass, 23 (1994), 59–73, 65.
14.
Moore, ‘Social Control or Protection’, 363.
15.
Ibid., 368. These functioned on different lines to industrial schools in the colonies. For example, Sir George Grey’s industrial schools in the Cape and New Zealand had similar aims around reform, but were not associated with criminality in the same way as metropolitan schools. While Grey and others also preferred boarding schools, there was often insufficient funding for these facilities in the colonies.
16.
Laurence Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 146.
17.
Margaret May, ‘Innocence and Experience: The Evolution of the Concept of Juvenile Delinquency in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, 17 (1973), 7–29, 27.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Pamela Horne, The Victorian Town Child (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 207.
20.
According to Murdoch, in 1898, only 649, or 27 per cent, of the 2406 children in Barnado’s homes were actually orphans. Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 72.
21.
Harry Hendrick, ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present’, in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. by Allison James and Alan Prout (London: UK Falmer Press, 2005), 33–60, 49.
22.
Evidence, Index to the report from the Select Committee on the Education of Destitute Children, HC 460 and 460-I (1861), 16, 20, 94.
23.
Moore, ‘Social Control or Protection’, 382.
24.
Catherine Hall, ‘Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century’, in Gender and Empire, ed. by Philippa Levine (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46–76, 51.
25.
Shurlee Swain, ‘But the children… Indigenous Child Removal Policies Compared’, in Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Julie Evans (Victoria: University of Melbourne, Department of History, 2002), 133–143, 136.
26.
William Brewer Stephens, Education in Britain, 1750–1914 (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998), 1.
27.
Ibid., 78; Linda McCoy, ‘Education for Labour: Social Problems of Nationhood’, in Forming Nation, Framing Welfare, ed. by Gail Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 93–138, 111.
28.
The Committee of Council on Education described the German education system as ‘complete’, Report of the Committee of Council on Education; with Appendix, HC 4139 (1868–69), 202.
29.
Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003), 20.
30.
Committee of Council on Education, x.
31.
Michael Sanderson, Education, Economic Change and Society in England, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12.
32.
Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Missions and Empire, ed. by Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–284, 269.
33.
Stephens, Education in Britain, 87. I have not been able to find statistics of parents who actively objected to this education. One factor was likely to do with the fact that parents had, unless in extreme poverty, to pay school fees. Horne, The Victorian Town Child, 87.
34.
Anne Digby and Peter Searby, Children, School and Society in Nineteenth Century England (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 14.
35.
W.E. Forster, HC Deb 17.02.1870, vol. 199 cc438–98.
36.
See Keith McClelland, ‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man’, in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, ed. by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71–118.
37.
Catherine Hall, ‘The Nation Within and Without’, in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, ed. by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179–233, 179.
38.
McCoy, ‘Education for Labour’, 113.
39.
Forster, HC Deb 17.02.1870.
40.
Shurlee Swain and Margaret Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire: Child Rescue Discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010).
41.
Russell Smandych and Anne McGillivray, ‘Images of Aboriginal Childhood: Contested Governance in the Canadian West to 1850’, in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. by Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (London: UCL Press, 1997), 238–259, 238.
42.
Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 126.
43.
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 49.
44.
Ibid., 97.
45.
Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2012), 204.
46.
Henry Callaway in Robert James Mann and G.H. Wathen, ‘Report from the Church of England committee of conference on Native representation in assemblies of the Church of England, in the Diocese of Natal’, Natal Witness, 16.07.1858, 2.
47.
Camfield to Nightingale, 26.12.1863, Encl. 2 in Hampton to Newcastle, 24.03.1864, TNA CO 18/135, No. 34.
48.
Sally Crawford, ‘“Our Race had its Childhood”: The Use of Childhood as a Metaphor in Post-Darwinian Explanations for Prehistory’, Childhood in the Past, 3 (2010), 107–122.
49.
Alan Prout and Allison James, ‘A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems’, in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. by Allison James and Alan Prout (London: UK Falmer Press, 2005), 7–32, 10.
50.
John Barrington and Tim Beaglehole, Maori Schools in a Changing Society: An Historical Review (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Education Research, 1974), 175.
51.
Diocesan Church Society, from the Church of England Magazine Newspaper, reprinted in The Inquirer and Commercial News, 02.11.1870.
52.
Neville Green, ‘Access, Equality and Opportunity? The Education of Aboriginal Children in Western Australia, 1840–1978’ (PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2004), 94.
53.
Western Australian Hansard, 06.12.1870, 9. Available online at http://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/hansard/hansard1870to1995.nsf/vwWeb1870Main. Last accessed 09.07.2015.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-century Western Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), 54.
56.
Weld to Salvado, 30.07.1871, SLWA ACC1732A [Hereafter all correspondence between the two is from this source].
57.
Hetherington, Settlers, Servants, 56–57.
58.
Bob White, ‘Talk about School: Education and the Colonial Project in French and British Africa (1860–1960)’, Comparative Education, 32 (1996), 9–25.
59.
Sarah Duff, ‘Education for Every Son and Daughter of South Africa: Race, Class, and the Compulsory Education Debate in the Cape Colony’, in Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.1870–1930, ed. by Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 261–282, 266.
60.
Sarah Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860–1895 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 89.
61.
Ibid., 269.
62.
Marimutu Ponnusamy, ‘The Working Conditions and Careers of KwaZulu-Natal Women Teachers’ (PhD thesis, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa, 2002), 58.
63.
Report of the Commission Appointed by His Excellency RW Keate, Esq., Lieut-Governor of Natal to Enquire into the Adequacy of the Existing Establishments of the Colony (Pietermaritzburg: Keith & Co., Government Printers, 1871), TNA CO 181/10.
64.
J.R. to the Editor of the Natal Witness, 01.03.1870.
65.
Ibid.
66.
Editorial, Natal Witness, 07.01.1870.
67.
Meeting of Legislative Council, 21.11.1872, printed in Natal Witness, 26.11.1872, 3.
68.
For a summary of the Natal education system, focusing in particular on education for white children see Board of Education. Special reports on educational subjects. Volume 5. Educational systems of the chief colonies of the British Empire. (Cape Colony: Natal: Commonwealth of Australia: New Zealand: Ceylon: Malta.), HC 417 (1900), 199.
69.
Fitzgerald to Earl Grey, 10.02.1849, Western Australia State Records Office (SROWA), Con.390, Governor’s Despatches.
70.
Brian K. De Garis, ‘Self-Government and the Evolution of Party Politics 1871–1911’, in A New History of Western Australia, ed. by Tom Stannage (Redlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1981), 326–351, 327.
71.
Ibid., 331.
72.
Ibid., 372.
73.
Weld to Salvado, 08.07.1872.
74.
George H. Russo, ‘Religion, Politics and W.A. Aborigines in the 1870’s: Bishop Salvado and Governor Weld’, Twentieth Century (October 1974), 5–19, 6.
75.
Weld to Grey, 19.07.1865 GL W26.7.
76.
Proclamation, Western Australia Government Gazette, 17.06.1873.
77.
Pearl Shell Fishery Regulation Act (37 Vict., No. 11 1873); Russo, ‘Religion, Politics’, 8.
78.
Weld to Salvado, 19.11.1870.
79.
John Brown, ‘Policies in Aboriginal Education in Western Australia, 1829–1897’ (M.Ed thesis, University of Western Australia, 1979), 139.
80.
He also corresponded with members of the Legislative Council. See SLWA ACC354A for Salvado’s correspondence with George Shenton about the 1875 Bastardy Act.
81.
Information Respecting the Habits and Customs of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of WA, Compiled from Various Sources: Presented to the Legislative Council by His Excellency’s Command (Perth: Richard Peter, Govt Printer, 1871), SROWA Con. 1067 1871/002.
82.
Salvado to the Colonial Secretary, 19.02.1864, ibid., 5.
83.
Ibid.
84.
Shirleene Robinson and Jessica Paten, ‘The Question of Genocide and Indigenous Child Removal: The Colonial Australian Context’, Journal of Genocide Research, 10 (2008), 501–518, 507.
85.
Queensland Reformatories. An Act to provide for the establishment of Industrial and Reformatory Schools. 29 vic. No. 8. Industrial Schools Act of 1865.
86.
Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), 78.
87.
The Western Australian Times, 08.12.1874, 3.
88.
Robinson and Paten, ‘The Question of Genocide’, 513.
89.
Susannah, Grant, ‘God’s Governor: George Grey and Racial Amalgamation in New Zealand 1845–1853’ (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2005), 110.
90.
Report from Legislative Council, 30.07.1874, The Western Australian Times, 07.08.1874.
91.
Industrial Schools Act.
92.
Hetherington, Settlers, Servants, 4.
93.
Industrial Schools Act.
94.
Ibid.
95.
Jamie Scott, ‘Penitential and Penitentiary: Native Canadians and Colonial Mission Education’, in Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions, ed. by Jamie Scott and Gareth Griffiths (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 111–133, 114, 117.
96.
Hale to SPG, 14.08.1871, SROWA CLR/209.
97.
Charitable Institutions Bill, Second Reading, Western Australia Parliamentary Debates, 7.07.1874. Also quoted in Hetherington, Settlers, Servants, 73.
98.
Ibid.
99.
Report from Legislative Council, 30.07.1874, The Western Australian Times, 7.08.1874.
100.
Cunningham, The Children of the Poor, 129.
101.
Laicus, ‘Thoughts about the Natives: Part 2’, Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 24.11.1865.
102.
Laicus, ‘Thoughts about the Natives: Part 1’, Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 17.11.1865.
103.
Rebecca Swartz, ‘Educating Emotions in Natal and Western Australia, 1854–65’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18 (2017), n.p.
104.
Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia, 2nd edn (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1992).
105.
Editorial, Natal Witness, 19.05.1874.
106.
Jeremy Martens, ‘Polygamy, Sexual Danger, and the Creation of Vagrancy Legislation in Colonial Natal’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (2003), 24–45, 25.
107.
Ann Curthoys and Jeremy Martens, ‘Serious Collisions: Settlers, Indigenous People, and Imperial Policy in Western Australia and Natal’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 15 (2013), 121–144, 124.
108.
Abraham Behr and Ronald Macmillan, Education in South Africa (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1971), 128.
109.
Ibid., 382.
110.
Ibid., 383.
111.
Rebecca Swartz and Johan Wassermann, ‘“Britishness”, Colonial Governance and Education: St Helenian Children in Colonial Natal in the 1870s’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 44 (2016), 881–899.
112.
Minute paper, T. W. Brooks, 14.02.1876, CSO 536 1876/270, Pietermaritzburg Archives [hereafter PAR]; Report, H. E. Bulwer to Lord Carnarvon, 26.01.1876, GH 1219, PAR.
113.
Swartz and Wassermann, ‘“Britishness”’, 892.
114.
J. Crowe to T. W. Brooks, 22.03.1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.
115.
Elizabeth Buettner, ‘Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races: Defining “Europeans” in Late Colonial India’, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), 277–298, 292; See also Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
116.
Charles Ballard, ‘Traders, Trekkers and Colonists’, in Natal and Zululand from Earliest Times to 1910: A New History, ed. by Andrew Duminy and Bill Guest (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989), 116–145, 119.
117.
Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 138.
118.
Letter from Sir Langham Dale to Brooks, 23.07.1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR.
119.
Ibid. Crain Soudien indicates that Dale was promoting an increasingly segregated education system in the nearby Cape colony, attempting to differentiate between class, race and gender in government schools. Crain Soudien, ‘The Making of White Schooling in the Cape Colony in the Late Nineteenth Century’, South African Review of Education, 19 (2013), 111–124.
120.
Swartz and Wassermann, ‘“Britishness”’, 14.
121.
Letter from Colenso to Frank Chesson, 26.11.1875, Anti-Slavery Society Papers, RHL, Br.Emp.s18 C130 and C131.
122.
John MacKenzie, The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press/Manchester University Press, 2007), 188.
123.
Report from Robert Russell on Government Aided Schools, 1875, PAR, Ed 5/1.
124.
Jeremy Martens, ‘“Civilised Domesticity”, Race and European Attempts to Regulate African Marriage Practices in Colonial Natal, 1868–1875’, The History of the Family, 14 (2009), 340–355, 342, 345.
125.
Memo from Clerk Malcolm, 30.3.1876, CO 179/120, No. 2575.
126.
Memo from F. Napier Broome, 16.12.1875, CSO 536 1876/270, PAR; Behr and Macmillan, Education in South Africa, 132.
127.
Chesson, ‘The Education of Native Races in British Colonies’, 346.

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Department of History, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Rebecca Swartz

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Swartz, R. (2019). Education and Obligation: Compulsory Schooling, Childhood and the Family. In: Education and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_7
Published: 10 January 2019
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