Christianity as an imperial religion amidst mass education: Religious education and Hongkong’s Grant-in-Aid Scheme 1873-1879

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Issues regarding imperialism, gender, as well as conventionalism in examination of religion, education, and society

Proposal

Introduction
The Grant-in-Aid Scheme's emergence can be traced to the broader imperial phenomena manifested by Elementary Education Act 1870, wherein colonial territories like Hong Kong sought subsidies for publicly funded education whilst encountering complex reactions from religious matters. This imperial context engendered tensions between the promotion of secular education, backed by the colonial and imperial governments, and the importance attached to religious education by various missionary groups operating in the colony. The scheme's inception marked a critical juncture in the colony's educational landscape, and revisions were made to address the evolving needs and challenges faced by the education system. This paper aims to delve into the historical trajectory of the Grant-in-Aid Scheme in Hong Kong, examining both its introduction and subsequent revisions.
Literature Review
Moving beyond being treated as mere imperial agents (Carnoy, 1974), missionaries’ significance cannot be understated since they provided rudimentary education to the public when the U.K. government had no formal legislation until 1870. Their significance became even more pronounced when focused upon their provision of education in colonial contexts (Jackson, 2022, p. 3), in some cases they were instrumental in laying down the foundation of mass education (Jensz, 2012, p. 299), often at odds against the secular intention of modern mass educational movement (A. Porter, 2004).
Empire, Missionaries, and Mass Education
The 1870 Elementary Education Act has often been extolled as a token of educational equality. With renewed interests in this act (Mitch, 2020), it has rarely been discussed in imperial contexts (McCulloch, 2020). Even the famous scholarly differences between John MacKenzie and Bernard Porter (MacKenzie, 1984, 2011; B. Porter, 2006), which centred upon The British empire, is firmly rooted in the English (i.e., non-imperial) context (Barczewski & Farr, 2019).
Stephen Jackson (2020) suggests that one of the key features in colonial education is that missionaries, religious actors, and sympathetic stakeholders often resorted to conflict, circumvention, and compromise over government’s mandate of secular or non-denonimational religious education, which was deemed controversial by many who favoured denominational teaching in schools. Nevertheless, legislative development itself signals a new period in the history of education across British empire, that the state could now be legally involved in education. Caught inbetween religious expansion and bureaucratic rationalism in colonial educational administration was the increasingly hardened racial attitude (Swartz, 2019, p. 8), with which the boundary between voluntary and mandate educational provisions began to blur.
Religious Education, Colonisation, and Grant-in-Aid Scheme
Unlike settler colonies and dominions, crown colonies, such as Hongkong, were much less likely to be given resources or to have the incentives to develop publicly subsidised mass education. Church actors were able to transfer their dominance from missionary education to educational administration by filling seats and appointments of the Education Commitee, which was given the right to dispense grants and inspect schools.
However, things began to change in the 1860s. Partly due to the fustration over the incompetence of the Chinese village schools in educating Chinese children, the then chief inspectorate Patrick Stewart perhaps saw this as an opportunity to further secularist educational agenda in response to growing criticism against Board of Education and submitted a Grant-in-Aid scheme in 1873, within which the most controversial clause was that for a school to receive grant must ensure four consecutive hours of secular instruction per day. However, due to the fierce battle between those who favour the scheme and those who oppose it, eventually the scheme was moderated in 1879, with both of the words “secular” and “consecutive” being striken out, and the whole clause altered into “the time devoted to instruction in the subjects of the standard is at least four”.
Research Questions
Having gone through relevant literature and historical background, this study hereby concentrates on 2 research questions:
1.Who are the most critical religious and non-religious actors that shaped Grant-in-Aid scheme in colonial Hongkong?
2.What was the process by which these religious and non-religious actors in colonial Hongkong received and moderated the idea and policy implementation of mass education?
Conceptual Perspectives
Intersecting between Christianity as an imperial religion and its context within the British Empire, C.A. Bayly (2004) introduces the term “imperial religions”, by which he refers to religious systems that played a crucial role in shaping and supporting the imperial projects of various empires from the end of the 18th century to the eve of the First World War. It is suggested that such terminology be juxtaposed with James Belich (2009)’s notion of “Anglo-World” from his analysis on the expansion and settlement of the British and European population across various parts of the world, because the complex interplay between secular education and religious education that this study explores is situated in a colony that was long been considered apolitical and peripheral.
Methodology and Source
Due to the nature of this study and its source material, this study deploys the method of document analysis. The source material of this study comes from 3 categories of historical material, the 1st category is biography and autobiography, which includes contemporary accounts on personal detail about important actors involved in the making and revising of Grant-In-Aid scheme; the 2nd category is government document, specifically, reports on educational policy and school inspection from the Commitee of Education and the subsequent Board of Education; and the 3rd category is contemporaneous reports from private individuals or other public sources, such as those from public agencies outside of colonial Hongkong.
Findings and Significance
1.Actors that shaped Grant-in-Aid scheme were not limited to missionaries, they were interwoven in an imperial context, the political and educational intricacies between England and colonial Hongkong, as well as those between European merchants and domestic population, were bestowed upon local actors that eventually formed the legislation.
2.Missionaries in colonial Hongkong had active agency in contesting imperial and colonial government's initiave in promoting secular education and downplaying the importance of religious education, which is contrary against the misconception that imperial peripheries were passive receptacle of imperial policies or policy trends.

Author

• Zifan Jiang, Institute of Curriculum & Instruction, East China Normal University