For the first half-century of European settlement in New Zealand, the CMS played a central part in Māori education. However, far from this role simply existing as an extension of the colonizing state, Anglican-led Māori schools experienced a rise and descent during this period, with teachers and leaders often finding themselves at odds with government policies in this area. This article traces the ascent and decline of the CMS Māori schools during this period, with a focus on the relationship between church and state, and the evolving educational and colonizing imperatives of these entities in this era.
It has been commonplace in recent historiography of nineteenth-century New Zealand to depict Anglican missionaries as agents of the British imperial state. Ballantyne makes this point explicitly, arguing that ‘[t]he Protestant tradition was a central element in British empire-building during the nineteenth century’, and showing how the Protestantism of the era influenced official attitudes towards the providential nature of the British empire and its trusteeship role over colonies. Protestant evangelization (together with gender and race) was ‘at the heart of imperial culture’.Footnote 1 This view is shared by a consensus of historians,Footnote 2 notwithstanding concessions to the contested relationships that sometimes existed between missionaries and colonial officials.
The self-imposed civilizing obligation of the British empire coincided with the conviction of some CMS missionaries (including, initially, Samuel Marsden, who founded the New Zealand mission) that British civilization ought to precede conversion.Footnote 3 Although British missionaries in this period were generally more concerned with securing souls than achieving the temporal objectives of colonial officials, the shared goal of spreading civilization has tended to be depicted as a facet of the overall process of British imperial expansion.Footnote 4 However, in New Zealand's case, the situation was in many cases more nuanced. While the CMS and colonial officials shared the desire for Māori to be ‘civilized’ throughout this period, the work of the CMS as the principal provider of schooling to Māori in the colony was initially independent of any direct British imperial control, and did not adhere to any imperial policy on the education of indigenous peoples outside the empire's administrative orbit. Indeed, far from being accomplices of British imperial expansion, the mission schools established by CMS missionaries were progressively undermined (among other circumstances) by New Zealand's colonial administration in favour of a secular educational system, which by the early 1860s had brought to an end the predominance of these schools.
The first half-century of the history of the CMS mission schools in New Zealand is surveyed here against the backdrop of an evolving and unequal relationship between church and state in the colony during this period, in which the work of the former eventually succumbed to the political preferences of the latter, and in which there were disparate objectives that increasingly overrode the common desire for Māori to become culturally, socially and religiously more like their European colonizers. From the arrival of the first European settlers in 1814 until 1832, there was no official British presence in the country. In 1833, New Zealand became a British residency, which was followed by the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), through which Britain claimed full sovereignty over the country. New Zealand's first parliament opened in 1854, and between 1860 and 1872 a series of wars were fought between some Māori tribes and the crown.
One of the axiomatic differences between the CMS and colony's government was the missionaries’ insistence that all instruction in, and all reading materials provided for, the country's mission schools be in the Māori language. At the commencement of the mission in 1814 this was hardly of concern to British authorities, who had no presence in, nor authority over, New Zealand. However, by the mid-1850s the number of settlers exceeded that of Māori, and was growing rapidly, while the Māori population was in serious decline.Footnote 5 By that time, the colonial government (as well as many settlers) was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with aspects of CMS schooling in the colony, and particularly the continued emphasis on teaching in Māori in what was by then a majority-British country.
This article explores the ambivalent role of the CMS in Māori education in this era.Footnote 6 It also considers how the ‘humanitarian narratives’ of missionaries and officials, which Ballantyne has identified as a central influence on British colonial policy,Footnote 7 diverged increasingly from government policy. Māori Anglican mission schools went through four phases from 1814 to 1864: being set up, expanding, being cut back and then being discontinued. The transitions from each phase to the next tended to be more evolutionary than abrupt, and occurred at various rates in different parts of the country. Within each phase, consideration is given to the increasing role of officials in determining the fate of these schools, at the expense of the CMS objectives for them.
Setting up
Marsden, as the senior Anglican minister in New South Wales from 1800 to 1838, initially developed the plans to establish a mission in New Zealand in 1805.Footnote 8 After numerous delays, in 1814 the first three CMS missionaries, Thomas Kendall, William Hall and John King, arrived in the Bay of Islands, in the far north of New Zealand, to establish a mission there. Kendall was intent on learning the Māori language as a prelude to starting a school to teach Māori to read,Footnote 9 in accordance with instructions he had received from the CMS in LondonFootnote 10 and with practice in other CMS mission fields, particularly India.Footnote 11
Within a year of arriving in the country, Kendall had written A Korao no New Zealand, or, The New Zealander's First Book, which contained in its fifty-four pages an alphabet, numbers, a basic vocabulary, some pronunciation suggestions and a few essential sentences. The work was deficient in many areas,Footnote 12 but in the absence of any alternative it became the main instructional text for the missionaries teaching the Māori people to read in the Māori language.Footnote 13 The issue of persuading Māori to conform to British ideals of civilization was also to some extent a consideration when the CMS began establishing schools for Māori, although the honorary secretary of the CMS, Revd Henry Venn, later warned that ‘the European element in a native church’ could be a ‘great snare and hindrance to its growth’, and could even lead to a ‘collision of the races’ in the mission field.Footnote 14 The approach taken by Venn and the CMS was in contrast to the more assimilationist approach to civilizing held by British officials.Footnote 15
In August 1816, the first CMS school opened in New Zealand, with a roll of thirty-three. Within a decade, the size and number of these mission schools increased, and literacy soon began to expand into areas where no missionaries had been, a process that was made possible by Māori students in the CMS schools taking on the role of teachers in places where there were no European teachers.Footnote 16 By the late 1820s, the syllabus of the mission schools had become more standardized, by virtue of the circulation of a narrow range of standard texts on which literacy teaching was based. Māori parents were generally favourably disposed to their children attending these schools, often because they saw temporal as much as spiritual benefit in literacy.Footnote 17 As Christianity spread hand-in-hand with literacy in Māori communities at an accelerating pace from the 1830s (thanks to Māori as much as CMS missionaries)Footnote 18 two themes were becoming evident for the missionaries. Firstly, the preference of some missionaries for ‘civilizing’ Māori prior to converting them was regarded either as a slightly lower priority or as something that could occur simultaneously with conversion, as long as the current rate of conversions continued.Footnote 19 Secondly, from the missionaries’ point of view, the decision to teach and publish only in the Māori language was clearly being vindicated.Footnote 20
Expansion
Throughout the 1830s, the CMS continued to expand the number of mission schools in New Zealand. This expansion resulted in part from the peace-making roles played by many CMS missionaries during the period of social turbulence in much of Māori society brought about by the inter-tribal Musket Wars.Footnote 21 However, during this period, in contrast to the previous two decades, the British government was beginning to take an increasing interest in the fate of the country and its Māori population.
One of the incremental steps towards Britain's securing the sovereignty of New Zealand was the appointment of a resident – James Busby – to the country in 1833. As New Zealand's British settler population increased after this, a growing confidence emerged among colonial officials that this European presence would civilize the indigenous population.Footnote 22 This process was assumed to include the Māori acquiring the language of the colonizer, as had been the case with indigenous peoples in other parts of the empire.Footnote 23 Missionaries in New Zealand were seen as fulfilling this civilizing role through their provision of education, albeit with the crucial exception that schooling was almost entirely in Māori. Nonetheless, Joel Polack, a Bay of Islands trader in the 1830s, noted a rapid increase in the number of Māori learning English at this time, and concluded that ‘in the course of two or three generations, the native language will become obsolete, in favour of English’.Footnote 24 Despite this trend, CMS missionaries continued to adhere to their policy of teaching and publishing teaching resources only in Māori, and by 1840, the CMS had printed thousands of copies of the New Testament and other religious texts in Māori,Footnote 25 with demand for these texts continuing to outstrip supply.Footnote 26
As British settlement in the country gradually increased to a white population of around two thousand by 1840,Footnote 27 the House of Lords convened a Select Committee on New Zealand, which reported back in 1838.Footnote 28 It considered that while all the schooling was presently undertaken in Māori, this was likely to be only a temporary arrangement. Nonetheless, in the first tangible indication of the intersection of imperial policy with the CMS mission schools in New Zealand, the committee resolved that the government should support the work of the missionaries in the hope of fostering civilization in the country.Footnote 29
Cutting back
New Zealand became a British colony in 1840 through the conclusion of the Treaty of Waitangi. As settlers arrived in their tens of thousands during the two succeeding decades,Footnote 30 the colony's government became increasingly aware of, and responsive to, the attitudes of the immigrant population. Some colonists were openly hostile to the CMS mission schools, seeing them as a barrier to the country's advancement. In 1843, the Auckland journalist Charles Terry insisted that ‘the Government … should enforce education of the native children, in English, as well as in their vernacular language’.Footnote 31 Another journalist was even more caustic, claiming that ‘[t]he missionaries have hitherto, with a most extraordinary and ignorant pertinacity, set their face against every attempt at teaching English to the natives, vainly endeavouring … [to educate Māori] by lame translations of garbled extracts from the Scriptures’.Footnote 32
Between 1840 and 1846, such views were counteracted by the office of Protector of Aborigines, a government department established in the colony with the express intention of bringing Māori ‘within the pale of civilized life, and trained to the adoption of its habits’.Footnote 33 The protector was a CMS missionary, George Clarke, who worked to forestall the displacement of Māori by English in the mission schools. Until the disestablishment of the office in 1846, the CMS played a direct role in encouraging the state to retain Māori as the predominant language of instruction in schools for Māori.
During this period the CMS mission schools also became administratively more centralized and financially better coordinated.Footnote 34 However, shortages of funding and personnel from the mid-1840s led the government to begin assuming a degree of control over the provision and form of Māori education in the colony. Governor Robert FitzRoy's 1844 Education Ordinance was drafted explicitly to assimilate Māori by (among much else) creating schools ‘for the instruction of the Native people in the English language’.Footnote 35 FitzRoy's governorship ended the following year without this ordinance having taken full effect, but his successor, George Grey, furthered this assimilationist policy with the introduction of his Education Ordinance in 1847, through which the government undertook to fund and oversee a state education regime in which ‘instruction in the English language shall form a necessary part of the system’.Footnote 36 The stated intention of this ordinance was to improve the condition of Māori in the colony,Footnote 37 and it led to pressure on the CMS to begin training teachers, including Māori trainee teachers, to use only English as the language of instruction in their schools.Footnote 38 Importantly, the impetus for this shift to the use of English in mission schools came from colonial officials rather than the CMS, and Grey showed himself resolutely opposed to the CMS schools’ continuing to teach in Māori.Footnote 39 At least some in the Anglican Church in New Zealand were beginning to share the governor's view: George Selwyn, New Zealand's first Anglican bishop, contributed to Grey's Education Ordinance, which he believed was in keeping with his desire for the amalgamation of the races.Footnote 40 Selwyn's position contrasted with that of some Anglican missionaries who continued to favour a more autonomous Māori education system.Footnote 41
However, Māori were not merely passive participants in the mission school system.Footnote 42 By the 1850s the rate of growth in the number of Māori students had fallen, and there was no longer the willingness there had previously been among some Māori to travel long distances to attend the CMS schools.Footnote 43 One CMS missionary, Octavius Hadfield, implied that instruction solely in Māori was a policy with which Māori themselves were finding less favour,Footnote 44 although the political and land issues affecting Māori probably played a more significant role.Footnote 45 In addition, while many CMS mission schools continued to instruct solely in Māori well into the 1850s, in places in New Zealand where there was a sizeable settler population, English was making its way into these schools. This was part of a process of linguistic acclimatization which accelerated the displacement of the Māori language by English, and which was consistent with the government's desire for Māori to become civilized though speaking English.Footnote 46
Population shifts were also having a major bearing on the new policy of using English in all the country's schools, including the Māori mission schools. By 1858 the number of European settlers living in New Zealand had risen to 59,328 and was growing rapidly, while the Māori population had fallen to 55,336,Footnote 47 possibly less than half what it had been at the beginning of the century. The colonial government was becoming impatient with the slow pace at which the mission schools were supplanting Māori with English. ‘A great duty rests with the General Government’, an official, William Fitzherbert, wrote in 1858, ‘to promote the education of Native and Half-caste children’, and to this end, he concluded, ‘English Masters and Mistresses should be invariably employed, and the teaching of the English language made the prominent feature of instruction’.Footnote 48 In a similar vein, the mission schools were increasingly making civilization a central aspect of their curriculum. As Hadfield expressed it: ‘Native Schools…[are a] powerful and indispensable means for the true civilisation and advancement of the Maori population’.Footnote 49 By 1858, mission schools were regarded by one school inspector, William Russell, as ‘centres of civilization’.Footnote 50 Hugh Carleton, a member of the House of Representatives, emphasized to a receptive governor (Thomas Gore Browne):
too much stress cannot be laid upon the acquirement of the English language. I believe that civilization cannot be advanced, beyond a very short stage, through means of the aboriginal tongue … . The Maori tongue sufficed for the requirements of a barbarous race, but apparently would serve for little more … .Footnote 51
Language had come to be regarded as key to the emphasis on civilization.
At the same time, those mission schools which maintained instruction primarily in Māori were starting to see signs of decline. They faced many challenges, including difficulty in finding teachers, epidemics such as measles (which reduced student attendances for long periods), the decision by a growing number of Māori parents that their children were more productive working on farms than in classrooms, and a growing uncertainty among Māori parents at the purported benefits of schooling for their children.Footnote 52 Moreover, the demographic, cultural and social evolution of the country was encouraging the government to pursue a more assimilationist, English-based education system in the colony, and the CMS reluctantly acceded to these changes. However, the CMS could hardly be described as being ‘to the fore’ of British imperialism in the colony: its mission schools experienced setbacks in attendance, and its Māori-only language policy was steadily eroding in the face not only of government policy and but also of the evolving demands of Māori themselves.
Demise
The CMS mission schools were dealt a fatal blow in the early 1860s, when they fell victim to a drastically changing political environment. In March 1860, war broke out between the colonial government and Māori in Taranaki, a conflict which spread in 1863 to the Waikato region and then elsewhere. Within a few months of the commencement of the Taranaki conflict, Governor Gore Browne delivered a speech in which he linked the war with the challenges of a nation which was divided linguistically. This was another strident assertion of the government's assimilationist intent in the education field.Footnote 53
By the mid-1860s, mission schools were increasingly complying with the government's wishes to teach either primarily or exclusively in English, partly as a response to the colony's changing demographics, but more directly in response to the fact that government funding for schools was based on English being the predominant language used in classes. Schools were also faced with declining Māori interest in schools which instructed only in the Māori language. The government's growing commitment to the removal of instruction in Māori from all schools encountered resistance from the early 1860s, with many Māori parents withdrawing their children from schools altogether. In some cases, the entire Māori student population of schools left; this was as much a sign of their dissatisfaction with the European world more generally as an indication of their views on the change in the language of instruction.Footnote 54 In addition, finding teachers prepared to work in mission schools where there was hostility between Māori and settlers was becoming increasingly challenging for the CMS.Footnote 55
Moreover, the Kingitanga movement, a pan-tribal response to the incursions into Māori land by the colonial government, was inclined to cast the mission schools as obstacles to Māori self-determination.Footnote 56 As a consequence, by 1862 the education of Māori in those parts of the Waikato region under Kingitanga control was ‘totally neglected’, with mission school attendance overall having halved.Footnote 57 Ironically, many of these mission schools had been bastions of the Māori language in a country where English had become the dominant language. Yet, although they received very little state funding, they were perceived as being state schools, and groups like Kingitanga viewed them with suspicion. The decline in mission school attendance was not limited to areas where Kingitanga had an influence, however. In other parts of the country, officials reported that ‘with rare exceptions … [Māori] children are growing up unable to read and write, presenting in this respect a marked contrast to their parents, who almost without exception can read, write, and cypher with fluency’.Footnote 58 By the mid-1860s, most of the country's mission schools had ceased to operate, and even after the wars had ended, the majority of these schools remained closed, signalling the end of the era of the mission school in New Zealand.Footnote 59
While the few remaining mission schools and the state education system remained divided by their language of instruction, the perception among some Māori was the exact opposite: that these schools were more obviously an agent of state in the 1860s than they had been at any previous time. Yet as early as 1844 the colonial government had initiated policies designed to marginalize the CMS schools especially, in favour of a more secular schooling system. Moreover, while it was the legislative actions of the colonial state which resulted in the loss of land in many Māori communities from the 1850s, and the loss of Māori lives as well during a succession of wars in the 1860s, it was the mission schools that suffered the backlash of boycotts and abandonment by Māori. This was despite the fact that the CMS missionaries (along with those of other denominations such as the Catholics and the Wesleyans) often spoke out in favour of their local Māori communities and against the actions of the New Zealand government.Footnote 60 The near-collapse of the country's Anglican-led Māori education system was the result, although in a few cases the CMS was able to maintain its support of Māori secondary education, notably Hukarere Native School for Girls, St Stephen's School, and Te Aute College, the last of which provided much of the leadership for the early twentieth-century Māori renaissance.
Conclusion
While recent historiography has ascribed to Protestant missionaries, including CMS missionaries operating in New Zealand, a central role in British imperial expansion during the nineteenth century, such generalizations potentially mask what was a more intricate and at times ambiguous relationship. In New Zealand, this relationship evolved substantially from 1814 to 1864, making it even more difficult to characterize the CMS as an arm of British empire-building. On the one hand, CMS missionaries and British government officials pursued broadly similar objectives with respect to the perceived need to civilize Māori, through education and particularly religious instruction. In addition, until the mid-1830s CMS missionaries were one of the main sources of British intelligence on New Zealand, a role which unavoidably had an impact on the formation of British policy on the country. However, this analysis has shown that the relationship passed through various phases.
From 1814, when the CMS mission in New Zealand commenced, until the early 1830s, the work of the missionaries in the country was unobstructed by any direct official involvement, and took place with the tacit consent of colonial officials both in New South Wales and Britain. With the appointment of a resident to New Zealand in 1833, the country was drawn more closely into the orbit of the British empire, although it did not become a British colonial possession until 1840. From the early 1830s, the CMS mission schools grew dramatically in number, and spread throughout much of the country. By 1834, there were fifty-four of these schools north of Rotorua.Footnote 61 The consequence of this expansion was that the CMS mission schools emerged by the end of the decade as New Zealand's de facto state schooling system, a situation that was accomplished with no British government funding or administrative support. The objectives of the CMS in civilizing and educating Māori largely coincided with the findings of the 1838 House of Lords Select Committee on New Zealand, but the direct influence of the committee's recommendations on the mission schools was negligible.
However, within four years of New Zealand becoming a British colony, the goals of the CMS mission schools and those of the country's colonial administration began to diverge. Ordinances issued by Governors FitzRoy and Grey in 1844 and 1847 respectively advanced the principle (which became a tenet of state policy for Māori education for the remainder of the century) that instruction in schools ought to be predominantly in English.Footnote 62 By the 1850s New Zealand's colonial government had become more strident in its demands for an assimilationist policy based on schools teaching only in English, a demand which went against the long-held practice and preference of the CMS to maintain Māori as the language used in its schools. The weight of popular opinion in the country, amongst settlers but perhaps also amongst Māori, was also shifting increasingly towards the government's stance on this matter. Gradually, the CMS acquiesced to the requirement that its schools deliver lessons mainly in English. Thus, from being at the forefront of the empire-building process, it lagged behind the assimilationist policies of the colonial state, a trait that was echoed in other parts of the empire.Footnote 63
The outbreak of war in the colony in the 1860s effectively put the CMS mission schools in the position of fighting a metaphorical conflict on two fronts, facing on one side the government's insistence on assimilationist policies, and on the other contending with Māori communities which perceived the shift to an English-based curriculum as evidence that the mission schools were an agent of British colonial expansionism. By this time, though, the number of settlers in the country had exceeded that of the indigenous population, and the trajectory would see further growth of the former group and decline in the latter. Given these circumstances, missionaries themselves found it harder to justify maintaining the argument that Māori continue to be taught in their native language, and by the end of the century English had become the main or exclusive language of instruction in practically all the country's schools.
