ABSTRACT
Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods makes visible a little known story of education, schooling, and missionary endeavour between the 1820s and the 1850s, with its focus on very young ‘native’ Indigenous children, its parallel stories across three British colonies, and its construction from a myriad of archival sources and publications of the early nineteenth century. Glimpses of these missionary infant schools provide a window to gaze afresh and consider the momentous impact of the collision of ideas and consequences that resulted from missionary teaching and colonial conquest. New ideas concerning the role and nature of education, legacies of the eighteenth-century ‘Age of Enlightenment,’ were, in the nineteenth century, transported from their place of origin and transformed as frontier tools in the quest to civilize the Indigenous child and convert his or her peoples to Christianity. The infant school itself, in its missionary version, can only be a speck on the panorama of colonial endeavour, but its crucial focus on the very young child was intended to hasten the advent of Christian Indigenous communities that hitherto had not delivered significant numbers of converts through either schooling or preaching.
