Our member, Dr Felicity Jensz (University of Münster, Germany), talks about her collection, co-edited with Daniel Gerster (Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg, Germany), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of pupils attended boarding schools in various places across the globe. Their experiences were vastly different, yet what they all had in common was that they were separated from their families and childhood friends for a period of time in order to sleep, eat, learn and move within the limited spatial sites of the boarding school.
This edited collection frames these ‘boarding schools’ as a global and transcultural phenomenon that is part of larger political and social developments of European imperialism, the Cold War, and independence movements. Drawing together case studies from colonial South Africa, colonial India, Dutch Indonesia, early twentieth century Nigeria, Fascist Spain, Ghana, Nazi Germany, nineteenth century Ireland, North America and the Soviet Union, the collection examines the ways in which boarding schools extracted pupils from their original social background in order to train, mold and shape them so that they could fit into the perceived position in broader society.
The collection makes the broader argument that framing boarding schools as a global phenomenon is imperative for a deepened understanding of the global and transnational networks that linked people as well as ideas and practices of education and childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
My colleague Daniel Gerster and I were both working on different aspect of schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Daniel was working on boarding schools, primarily in Britian and Germany, and I was working on missionary education to non-Europeans in the British Empire, but not necessarily boarding schools. We saw the potential for our own work in examining boarding schools in a broader, global context through case studies.
Many other people also saw the potential in the topic too and at our virtual workshop for the publication we observed many similarities in the ways in which boarding schools functioned in various spaces, but also how the specific localities shaped the boarding schools. That to me was one of the exciting aspects of the editing process, seeing the ways in which new insights emerged when reading across the various case studies.
Within the collection, we were particularly interested in focusing on the experiences of people either at boarding schools or those affected by these institutions, the global networks which they form, as well as the processes and practices that boarding schools both engage in and help to create.
In editing the book, we had the privilege of including some of the exciting work being undertaken globally on the role of boarding schools for shaping expectations, education and the lives of young people in many various parts of the globe.
One innovative contribution of our volume to expanding the history of boarding schools is to bring together various case studies that examine institutions in a transnational and global history framework. We do this by focusing on two key aspects: people and networks, as well as practices and processes. Our case studies concentrate on people who participated in experiences of exclusion and the inclusion of children from broader society. A second area of interest is connected to the processes and practices of boarding schools, particularly in contrast and in relation to ideas and ideology. As the nineteenth century progressed, the formalisation and professionalisation of teaching resulted in increasing amounts of material that was subsequently archived.
The case studies here draw on traditional sources such as school registers and ‘official’ publications such as school magazines and yearbooks. However, they also use archival sources in innovative ways to uncover personal histories beyond the official register. Beyond traditional sources, the authors in this collection also use non-traditional sources such as student writings, autobiographies, oral histories, photographs, and sources external to the schools to elucidate the experiences of exclusion and inclusion of children from broader society within the global boarding-school context.
People involved in the boarding-school experience included the pupils themselves, both girls and boys, who came from various social, religious, national, and ethnic backgrounds. Such heterogeneous backgrounds present their own challenges when examining the history of boarding schools in a global perspective. Teachers, educators and founders of boarding schools were also involved in creating pupil’s experiences as well as their own, as too were missionaries and civil servants in the colonial context, who themselves often worked within a boarding-school setting. In most cases, non-teaching staff such as nurses, cooks, groundsmen and service staff were also engaged in processes of inclusion and exclusion. In the case of elite boarding schools, the non-teaching staff had different social backgrounds from the pupils, underscoring social differences.[i] Unfortunately, the voices of these people are often unrecorded.
In examining the personal life stories of different actors and the ways in which they were involved in facilitating inclusion and exclusion in the experiences of boarding schools, we are interested in examining the social, ethical, religious and gendered backgrounds of the participants in the boarding school experience, and how these affected the ways that various people operated within the confines of the schools. For example, Edmund F.E. Wigram, who was born into a family of Anglican missionaries, had an upper-middle-class background and was raised in the tradition of the English gentleman at the public school of Harrow. He went to the colonies, convinced that he would ‘bring light’ to the people there. In doing so, the differing background and different intentions and reasons which led boys such as Khair Ullah and Bhagwan Dass to attend boarding schools were mostly irrelevant to Wigram’s aim of ‘enlightening’ people, reflecting broader notions of contemptuousness for non-Europeans embedded in late nineteenth century European imperialism.[ii] Our case studies are interested in analysing similar encounters between people of different backgrounds in boarding schools around the globe, particularly those of a transnational character.
People’s encounters took place through different processes. In the case of boarding schools, processes were aimed to exclude the pupils from their primary social environment in order that they might later be included into society more broadly. Although the processes may have been similar, individuals experienced their time at boarding school in different ways, with some of them gaining larger networks through their participation, and others being isolated from many aspects of society through their attending such schools. Our case studies thus use the concept of exclusion and inclusion not in a normative way, but rather to describe processes underlying the history of boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These included the creation and maintenance of networks in the larger spheres around boarding schools. These networks included, for example, community groups, colonial officers, military personnel, missionary personnel, and civil servants, who in turn linked the schools and their participants into broader religious, secular, governmental, community, and imperial networks. As such, the people involved outside the immediate boarding school setting helped to shape and form the context in which the boarding schools were able to perform (or not).
Through focusing upon people, and the broader networks and communities with which they were engaged, we demonstrate that boarding schools in their capacity to exclude children from society were more porous than some scholars have suggested.[iii] Regardless of how geographically and socially isolated a boarding school may have been from society, it was always embedded in some local networks—and through its ideologies, histories, and political structures and funding arrangements, into facets of the broader community. The latter allowed, or hindered, the reintegration of children after they left the school.
Once pupils left the boarding school, however, it was not always possible for their schools to know what had happened to them. Whilst elite boarding schools in England and elsewhere create registers of ‘old boys’ in later years as a means to maintain contact and facilitate old boys’ networks, allowing historians to reconstruct the lives of graduates such as Edmund F.E. Wigram, not all boarding schools had the funding or the impetus to track former pupils.[iv] Although our case studies focus mostly upon the experiences of the child in the boarding schools, the focus upon the broader networks of the schools help us better to contextualise and understand the processes that lead to inclusion and exclusion from broader society.
[i] See Goffman, (1970, orig. 1961), p. 107.
[ii] See Stogdon (1925); The Church Missionary Gleaner, vol. 14-5 (December 1888), p. 183.
[iii] Goffman (1970, orig. 1961), p. 16.
[iv] Stogdon (1925), p. 359.