Protestant Children, Missions and Education in the British World

Abstract

The British Protestant children’s missionary movement of the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth century was an educational movement, wherein philanthropy and pedagogy went hand in hand. Bringing an educational lens to bear on this group provides a more cohesive interpretive framework by which to make sense of the various elements than hitherto has been considered. As such, the Protestant children’s missionary movement emerges historically as a much more complex entity than simply a means of raising money or cramming heads full of knowledge. Across a range of geographic settings it acted as: a key site of juvenile religious and identity formation; a defining vehicle for the creation and maintenance of various types or scales of community (local, denominational, emotional, regional, national or global); a movement within which civic and religious messages were emphatically conflated (especially with respect to nation and empire); and in which children both participated in imperial or quasi-global networks of information exchange (especially as consumers of missionary periodicals) and became informed, active and responsive agents of missionary support in their own right.