This article examines the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish education debates in the context of intra-Presbyterian relations in the aftermath of the 1843 ‘Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland. The debates of this period have been characterized as an attempt to wrest control of Scottish education from the Church of Scotland, with most opponents of the existing scheme critical of the established kirk's monopoly over the supervision of parish schools. However, the debate was not simply between those within and outside the religious establishment. Those advocating change, particularly within non-established Presbyterian denominations, were not unified in their proposals for a solution to Scotland's education problem. Disputes between Scotland's largest non-established churches, the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church, and within the Free Church itself over the type of national education scheme that should replace the parish schools severely hampered their ability to express common opposition to the existing system. These divisions also placed increasing strain on the developing cooperation in Scottish Dissent on ecclesiastical, political and social matters after the Disruption. This article places the issue of education in this period within this distinctly Dissenting context of cooperation, and examines the extent of the impact these debates had on Dissenting Presbyterian relations.

This article discusses the impact of the educational method pioneered in the English public schools on the development of education in Anglican schools in the British empire, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of the First World War. It discusses how the focus of missionary activity changed from a desire for overt evangelism into a sense of the transmission of moral and ethical values though a system of education in the Christian virtues. An educational understanding of salvation began to supplant the doctrinal. This is connected with the thinking on ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ civilizations of the period. A central focus is on the preparatory work for, and discussions around, the Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908 and the role played by Bishop H. H. Montgomery.

This article examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionary societies worked hand in hand with the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide them with pedagogic training in the British System and BFSS teaching manuals and resources, as part of their evangelical mission of conversion in the British West Indies, Africa and India in the nineteenth century. The BFSS appealed to Nonconformist missionaries because it was based on unsectarian pedagogy, pioneered by the educationalist Joseph Lancaster. The article explores the various obstacles these missionaries faced, including the religious persecution they experienced in teaching an unsectarian system and the educational difficulties they experienced in persuading parents and local governments of the value of elementary education. It also draws attention to the ways in which they fought race and sex prejudice in the teaching of Africans, slaves and young girls. The current literature on missionary activities in the early nineteenth century pays scant attention to their role as educators: the article reveals the degree of their educational ambition and zeal and the lengths they went to in order to implement a progressive system of unsectarian elementary instruction in key parts of the British empire during the nineteenth century.

Anglican missionaries, serving under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), were the first Europeans to settle in New Zealand. Within months of arriving in the country in 1814, they began to convert the language of the indigenous Māori into a written form in order to produce religious texts that would assist with Māori education and conversion. The CMS missionaries also established schools for Māori which later grew into a de facto state education system until the colonial government accelerated its plans for a secular school regime from the mid-1840s. Despite the sometimes awkward religious and cultural entanglements that accompanied missionary proselytizing in this era, the mission schools established by the CMS flourished in the succeeding decades, elevating Māori literacy levels and serving as a highly effective tool of Anglican evangelization. This article traces the arc of the CMS mission schools from their inception in 1814 to their demise in the early 1860s, a period during which the British, and later New Zealand, government's stance towards the mission schools went from ambivalence, through assistance, to antipathy.

This article explores the role of Chinese Christian women in the internationalization of Chinese education in the early twentieth Century. In particular, it examines the changing relationship between Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary Louise Barnes, and Zeng Baosun, the great granddaughter of Zeng Guofan. Zeng Baosun was born in 1893 in Changsha, educated at the CMS's Mary Vaughan School in Hangzhou, and became the first Chinese woman to graduate from the University of London, before returning to China to establish a Christian school for girls in Changsha (Yifang) in 1918. Although an extraordinary example because of her elite family background, Zeng's story highlights how Chinese women used the networks to which their Christian education exposed them on a local, national and international scale to play an important role in the exchange of educational ideas between China and the West during the early twentieth century. The story of the relationship between Zeng and Barnes also reveals the changing power dynamics between foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians in the process of indigenizing the church in China: the roles of teacher and pupil were reversed upon their return to Changsha, with Zeng serving as headmistress of her own school and Barnes as a teacher.

This article considers the evolving relationship between Protestant children, pedagogy and the missionary movement across the British world. From the 1840s, children were a central focus of missionary society philanthropy. By the time of the 1910 World Missionary Conference, missionary and denominational thinkers were consistently highlighting their strategic importance and the need for clear policy that was focused on children's education. This article traces the ways in which this emphasis developed, and the impact that it had among the children involved. It argues that the children's missionary movement was educational at heart, wherein philanthropy and pedagogy went hand in hand. In particular, over the long nineteenth century all the players consistently emphasized the importance of nurturing a ‘missionary spirit’, a notion that was primarily religious in intent but which in practice moved from pragmatic philanthropy to a more formalized emphasis on education and identity formation. The article introduces representative ways by which this was articulated, drawing on examples from a range of British world contexts in which different communities of Protestant children were engaged educationally and philanthropically in very similar ways.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, educational opportunities at the older English universities were gradually extended beyond the limits of the Church of England, first with the abolition of the university tests and then with the opening of higher degrees to Nonconformists. Wesleyan Methodists were keen to take advantage of this new situation, and also to safeguard their young people from non-Methodist influences. A student organization was established in Oxford in 1883, closely linked to the city centre chapel and its ministers, and this Wesley Guild (later the Wesley Society, and then the John Wesley Society) formed the heart of Methodist involvement with the university's undergraduates for the next century. The article explores the background to the guild and its development in the years up to the First World War, using it as a case study for the engagement of Methodism with higher education in this period.

Through their enthusiastic embrace of the doctrine of the ‘institutional church’, late Victorian and Edwardian Congregationalists demonstrated their commitment to, inter alia, the intellectual development of church members and adherents. Many churches, large and small, sponsored mutual improvement societies, literary and debating societies and programmes of public lectures, as well as ad hoc talks, covering every conceivable subject from the natural sciences to contemporary social and political issues. What motivated Congregationalists to engage in activities of this kind, and to what extent were they seen as an integral part of their religious vocation? In considering these questions, evidence is drawn from initiatives of two Congregational churches in Edwardian Hampshire: London Street, Basingstoke's Mutual Improvement Society and Avenue, Southampton's annual programme of lectures. What emerges is an approach to ministry that blurred the boundary between the sacred and the secular and a gradual weakening of commitment as churches were superseded by secular providers. In reviewing an under-explored aspect of the relationship between religion and education, the article serves as an addition to the limited literature on this subject.

Compulsory public education in Italy came into being almost simultaneously with the process of national unification. From the outset, the liberal ruling class was faced with the old-established educational tradition of the church, and historians of education have explored the process of the secularization of education. This article sheds light on how decisions of the hierarchy and the pope, especially during the early twentieth century, were translated into practical pastoral action, noteworthy in some cases for a surprising modernity in the means used. The article focuses on the dioceses of northern Italy and in particular that of Bergamo, a populous agricultural centre then undergoing rapid industrialization. Using diocesan archive materials and the press of the period, it focuses on new forms of pastoral work, particularly those directed at teaching the catechism by means of societies for children and young people, catechism competitions and slide shows. The results obtained using this approach challenge the perception of Catholicism as intransigent on this issue.

In 1918 Charles Gore, the bishop of Oxford, issued queries preparatory to an episcopal visitation, including a series of questions about the future of church schools and religious education more generally. Coming some sixteen years after the restructuring of the dual system of state- and church-supported education by the Balfour Education Act of 1902, this material yields valuable insights into the views of approximately six hundred clergy regarding the successes and dysfunctions of the system at parish level. Set within the context of recent historiography on the trajectory of English Christianity in the1920s, this article uses this material to discuss the clergy's views on the value and purposes of school-based religious education, the prospects for sustaining these after almost four years of war and the compromises that might be required in order to preserve them.

In 1902 elementary school provision in Oxford diocese – England's largest – reflected the national picture: 72 per cent were church schools, with total rolls of 54 per cent of school-age children. The bitterly contested 1902 Education Act apparently protected the future of church schools, but in practice its provisions severely undermined them, particularly in growing areas of the country. By 1929, Oxford's assistant bishop reported the schools’ situation as ‘critical’. This article examines the impact on the church schools of one rural deanery in South Buckinghamshire, between the 1902 and 1944 Education Acts. Several schools found themselves under threat of closure, while rapid population increase and a rising school leaving age more than quadrupled the number of school-age children in the area. Closer working with the local education authority and other denominations was one option to optimize scarce resources and protect the Church of England's influence on religious education in day schools: but many churchmen fought to keep church schools open at all costs. This strategy met with limited success: by 1939 the proportion of children in church schools had decreased to 10 per cent, with potential consequences for how religion was taught to the other 90 per cent of children.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Sunday schools in Britain played a significant role, both disseminating and forming Christian faith. There was near universal attendance at the schools, and as a result there was widespread exposure to Christian teaching and hymnody. Despite this, their role as an educational arm of the churches is under-researched. This article considers the experience of the schools from the beginning of the century until the outbreak of the Second World War. It examines how and what Sunday schools taught during this time, and the extent to which they adopted pedagogical developments. The article also considers the responses of the schools to the various education acts passed in this period. In addition, it examines what the schools themselves, their scholars and the churches thought of their effectiveness, and reflects upon the tensions that arose between the schools and the churches. The article concludes that Sunday schools were an integral part of the churches’ educational reach in society and therefore deserve much more thorough examination by historians.

The 1920s were a vital period for the evolution of Christianity in China, during which the Anti-Christian Movement of 1922–7 brought Christianity under serious attack. A new conception of nationalism, influenced by Lenin's theory of imperialism, dramatically changed the way in which Christianity (and especially mission schools) was regarded, from being viewed as a positive factor in China's modernization to being seen as a hated cultural imperialist invasion. The period from 1924 to 1927 featured the demand for the restoration of educational rights, during which the identity of mission schools was used to stir up nationalist hatred. This article takes Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College (TACC) of the London Missionary Society (LMS) as a case study. It examines how the TACC missionary authorities responded to nationalistic sentiments emerging within the college and in society, and how they reacted towards the compulsory registration and consequent abolition of compulsory school religious education. It explores key issues behind the interaction between mission schools and the socio-political context, such as how TACC reconstructed its identity during the process of school registration, and how it negotiated with the Ministry of Education under the tension between two divergent approaches of Christianizing and nationalizing mission schools, a tension which became acute as a consequence of the application of regulations making school religious education and practice optional.

It is widely accepted that during the later 1960s, Religious Education (RE) in English state-maintained schools underwent a significant transition, moving from a Christian ‘confessional’ approach to an academic study of world religions. A detailed examination of the activities of the British Council of Churches’ Education Department during the period reveals examples of an active promotion of this study of world religions, something that hitherto has been absent from the historiography of RE. For example, the department organized key conferences, meetings and consultations, at which future directions for RE were considered and discussed. A research project undertaken for the department in the later 1960s, which led to the 1968 report Religion and the Secondary School, was prompted by the identification that ‘[t]oday the needs of children and young people demand a radical rethinking and reshaping of the purpose and method of religious education’. This report included a statement specifically encouraging the study of non-Christian religions, which was repeated in later key documents. This article shows how the British Council of Churches’ Education Department played a role in the development of the ‘non-confessional’ study of world religions in English state-maintained schools from as early as the late 1940s.