A Pedagogical Testament

Chapter 5 describes the efforts of American missionaries in putting together a philosophy of education for the new institution they intended to create in India. Since their views, materials, and organizational model were borrowed from the American experience, the chapter first reviews the functioning of the Sunday school in America. Between 1827 and 1838, beginning in Massachusetts, public schools came to be secularized. With the teaching of the Bible effectively proscribed in public schools, the American Sunday School Union, organized in 1824 and supported by several Protestant denominations, found that by 1838, it was obliged to work outside of the public-school system. As an institution dedicated to Christian and moral education, and, around the time of the Civil War as a public counseling center, it enjoyed broad support. By 1872, American Sunday school leaders had created a bureaucratized organization patterned after the very secular forces they had fought, as well as an elaborate seven-year curriculum, the Uniform International Lesson System. American missionaries imported these into India. They soon found, however, that their system could not be implemented in toto in the Indian context given the “heathen” home backgrounds of Indian children and the absence of suitably trained teachers. The chapter discusses missionary thinking on reaching out to the youngest children, using the latest “universal,” “scientific,” child-education and teacher-training methods, and locating all that was “modern” in the Bible itself. Creating a “philosophy of childhood,” and an institution with “form and system,” Sunday school missionaries transformed themselves into professional educators.