There are lands such as large sections of Africa and many of the Pacific Islands where no education whatever existed, where the language was not even reduced to writing, until Christian missionaries began their work. Other countries gave a certain so-called education to their boys or to the sons of certain privileged classes, leaving the girls absolutely illiterate. They agreed in principle if not in expression with that man in the mountains of Kurdistan who was asked by a missionary to send his bright little daughter down to the mission school at the beginning of the fall term. “Do you want my girl?” questioned the man in amazement and disgust. “Why don’t you take my cow?”

Again in other sections girls have a brief chance to learn, but are not expected to keep pace with their brothers or to attain to anything beyond the rudiments of book learning.

A missionary educator from Turkey says that one of the greatest difficulties in school work arises from the fact that the children have no power of concentration, no idea of how to think and study on one line for any length of time. It often takes five or six years for a child really to learn how to study. Obviously, the earlier these preparatory years occur in a child’s life, the more benefit may he hope to derive from his education.

Then again, if children learn their first lessons in the native schools of Turkey, Persia, Korea, and various other countries, they will become fixed in the habit of memorizing without giving any intelligent thought to what they learn. Dr. S. M. Zwemer says:

“A Moslem lad is not supposed to know what the words and sentences mean which he must recite every day; to ask a question regarding the thought of the Koran would only result in a rebuke or something more painful. Even grammar, logic, history, and theology are taught by rote in the higher Mohammedan schools.... Thousands of Moslem lads, who know the whole Koran nearly by heart, cannot explain the meaning of the first chapter in every-day language. Tens of thousands can ‘read’ the Koran at random in the Moslem sense of reading, who cannot read an Arabic newspaper intelligently.”[64]

How utterly this differs from the theory and practice of Dr. Montessori, who “calls a child disciplined who is master of himself, and therefore able to dispose of or control himself whenever he needs to follow a rule of life. The liberty of the child must have as its limit only the collective interest. To interfere with this spontaneity is, in Dr. Montessori’s view, perhaps to repress the very essential of life itself.”[65] How can a child be master of himself who is not even allowed to inquire into the meaning of what he reads and studies?

It is not always easy for the missionary suddenly to introduce changes of method and practice, and many a missionary school which is infinitely superior to the native institution might shock an American school superintendent beyond recovery. A missionary from China wrote,—“I found I must still keep many old methods or the Chinese would not send their children. I have found it necessary to let them learn portions of Scripture and classics and shout them at the tops of their voices, then gradually work in music, geography, and arithmetic.” Another argument for beginning as early as possible with the children who can so easily adapt themselves to ideas of a quiet, orderly school if they have never enjoyed exercising their lungs in one of the other kind!

In speaking of primitive education among backward nations, mention was made of the scant attention given to girls as compared to boys. The London Times not long ago stated in commenting on the women of Persia, “As a matter of fact, probably not one girl in a thousand twenty years ago ever received any education. When the parents were rich enough, tuition of a sort was given at home, but in the case of poorer persons it was enough if their sons were taught to read and write.”

In contrast we learn that in the spring of 1913 about one thousand children from Moslem homes were in attendance at Protestant missionary schools in Persia, over two hundred of them being girls.

In Mohammedan and other lands the custom of early marriage is an almost insuperable barrier to an adequate education for a girl. That this custom must be changed, if men are to have worthy wives and if children are to be properly trained, is a truth that is beginning to be realized. The recent great awakening and desire for education is creating a marvelous change in age-long customs.

Lord Cromer says: “The position of women in Egypt, and in Mohammedan countries generally, is a fatal obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of European civilization, if that civilization is to produce its full measure of beneficial effect. The obvious remedy would appear to be to educate the women.... When the first efforts to promote female education were made, they met with little sympathy from the population in general.... Most of the upper-class Egyptians were not merely indifferent to female education; they were absolutely opposed to it....

“All this has now been changed. The reluctance of parents to send their daughters to school has been largely overcome.... The younger generation are beginning to demand that their wives shall possess some qualifications other than those which can be secured in the seclusion of the harem.”

In 1912 Lord Kitchener states that “There is probably nothing more remarkable in the social history of Egypt during the last dozen years than the growth of public opinion among all classes of Egyptians in favor of the education of their daughters. The girls’ schools belonging to the Ministry of Education are crowded, and to meet the growing demand sites have been acquired and fresh schools are to be constructed, one at Alexandria and two in Cairo. Very many applications have, however, to be refused.”[66]

To these quotations Dr. Sailer adds the significant words,—“The missionary schools for girls are yet in the lead in their moral atmosphere. The government officials were prompt in acknowledging that missionary teachers brought to their work a spirit which money could not buy.”

Scant justice can be done in these few pages to the whole vast subject of the education of girls in the East, and the rapid changes that are taking place in regard to it. A careful study of the subject will well repay the thoughtful woman. Now is the time to educate the future mothers. As all roads lead to Rome, so all reading and observation along this line will lead the candid student to one conclusion:—Now is the time to determine the character of the mothers of the next generation of children in non-Christian lands. What those little bright-eyed baby girls of Africa and India, Turkey and Korea are to be and do, what their homes are to be like, what start in life their children are to have, will be largely determined by what we Christian women do or fail to do for them today. If it is too late to do much for their mothers before these children have left their homes, why not gather the children into kindergartens and primary schools, why not teach the little ones now while their minds are plastic and impressionable? Why not do our share toward bringing Christian civilization into darkened lands by educating in Christian schools today the mothers of tomorrow?

In the preceding chapter great emphasis was laid on the necessity for teaching the children of many mission lands how to play, not only for the benefit of their health and to bring joy and brightness into their lives, but also in order to teach them what “fair play” and co-operation mean. It is the missionary school, from kindergarten up to university, that gives the golden opportunity for this teaching, as is shown by the testimony of a missionary from Tientsin, China:—“We believe that such games teach them to be honest in business dealings later, to be truthful, unselfish, quick-witted, and self-controlled. The change which I have seen in these little, un-taught, ill-cared-for children after five years in the mission school is due in part, I believe, to the lessons of ‘fair play’ learned in their games.”

But the school must go even further than this and include in its curriculum physical education of a very definite kind if it is to meet all the needs of the children it is serving. Taking as an example of all mission lands, China, whose system of education antedates by many centuries all our western civilization, let us observe through the eyes of the former physical director of the Shanghai Y. M. C. A. what the real situation is.

Physical training should be dignified by giving it an equal place with the sciences, philosophies, and languages in the curriculum, and the same careful provision of means and trained men to direct it. No educational system is adequate which does not aim at the whole man, which does not recognize the physical basis of intellectual and spiritual efficiency. Professor Tyler of Amherst says, “Brain and muscle are never divorced in the action of healthy higher animals and in healthy men. They should not be divorced in the education of the child.”...

It is clear that physical training, in the largest sense, must play an important part in the making of the “New China.” The questions involved in her uplift are most largely physical questions. The personal, domestic, and public observance of the laws of health and life is a physical question; the combating of that terrible scourge, tuberculosis, is a physical question; the checking of the fearful infant mortality is a physical question; etc....

The progress which has been made in physical training in China must be viewed in the light of the fact that physical exercise for its own sake has had no part in the national life of China for centuries. It has been considered improper for a Chinese gentleman to indulge in it. The popular conception of a Chinese scholar has been that of a man with a great head, emaciated body, and hollow chest, sitting and contemplating the problem of life by thinking dissociated from doing. Until ten years ago athletics were almost unknown. When foreigners were seen playing football the Chinese were greatly puzzled, and wanted to know how much these men were being paid for cutting up such foolish antics, conceiving it as out of the question that any one would work so hard without being well paid for it. All that is rapidly being changed. Physical training is changing China’s conception of a gentleman. The ideal of all-round manhood, well-balanced in its physical, mental, and spiritual aspects, is rapidly gaining ground.[67]

Could all China’s children today be taught this ideal, the task would be far easier than it will be when they have reached adult life.

The story of the Missionary School for Boys in Srinagar, Kashmir, is as thrilling as a novel, and illustrates to a remarkable degree how body, mind, and soul must be trained and disciplined and developed in order to realize the ideal of the Principal, the Rev. C. E. Tyndale-Biscoe, who says, “We are making citizens, of what sort remains to be seen. But we hope without wavering that these citizens will be Christian citizens, for Christ is our ideal.” Some of the difficulties are thus described:

“To teach the three R’s in Kashmir is easy work. The boys are willing to squat over their books and grind away for as many hours a day as nature makes possible. To get an education means sedentary employment cum rupees. And that to the Kashmiri is living.

“But to educate is a very different matter. To make men of a thousand or more boys who care nothing for manliness; among whose ancestors for hundreds of years, chicanery, deceit, and cruelty had been the recognized and honored paths to success, while generosity and honesty had been the mark of a fool; to try to quicken and develop the good in such boys,—boys coming from impure homes, squatting in unclean rows, with bent backs and open mouths—was flatly pronounced folly by many a visitor to Kashmir.”[68]

The story tells how boxing, swimming, rowing, and gymnastics are required of the students as a most necessary and vital part of their education, and how they are trained to be proud of using these accomplishments in helping others. By the time a Brahmin boy,—they are almost all Brahmins in this school,—has saved a child from drowning, rescued a family of despised sweepers from the roof of their flood-swept house, delivered a poor woman from being beaten, and helped clean up the streets and alleys of a city during a cholera epidemic, he has received an education such as no books in the world can give him, and Kashmir is one step nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven.

“Train not thy child,” says Emerson, “so that at the age of thirty or forty he shall have to say, ‘This great work could I have done but for the lack of a body.’” Elizabeth Harrison, after quoting Emerson, adds, “Is not this carelessness as to health one of the ways in which we are not conserving the forces that make for righteousness and truth, one of the ways in which we are neglecting to build up ‘a great personality’ in our children?”[69]

Up to this point our study of The Child in non-Christian lands has shown that the missionary must touch the home life, the customs and ideals handed down from remote ancestors, the play and work and education and physical development of the child, in order to give him his inalienable rights, while in the next chapter we shall dwell on his right to know of Jesus Christ, the children’s Friend. It may seem to the reader (as it does to the writer) that the chapters overlap one another in spite of the heroic effort to treat each subject by itself. But most of us find,—do we not?—that it is a bit difficult to attend to the spiritual culture of our boys when they are clamoring to go out and play ball, or to get our little girls to tell what they learned at school, when they are hungry for their dinner. The mother must train all parts of her child’s nature by attending to the need that is uppermost at the time,—the missionary must do the same for her foster children, and the woman at home, behind the missionary, has to recognize the same inseparable inter-relation of body, mind, and soul in the little ones of whom she is studying. Our divisions into “subjects” must be more or less artificial. However, to this particular subject of “The Child at School” belong naturally two more matters which must be touched on briefly.

When the Turkish girl has learned to read, when six thousand boys have annually been trained in that great chain of Anglo-Chinese schools started by the Methodists in Malaysia, when Korean children have acquired a taste for reading and study, where are they to find suitable, interesting books? The Cyclopedia of Education pays a wonderful tribute to what one Book has done for Korea, saying that “the translation of the Bible into Korean and its rapid distribution, and revivals marked with habitual study of the Bible, compelled many to learn the alphabet to master a sacred library so rich, and has constituted a national school of intelligence and culture.” But other books than the Bible must be translated and written in order to give clean, interesting, wholesome literature to the children of countless thousands who never had any use for a literature for themselves. As Miss Lilian Trotter of Algiers says,—“Those who have been patiently toiling over the schooling of Moslem girls and women begin to feel that the powers of reading gained in school days should be used as a means to an end, not left to lapse in the first years that ensue for want of following up. Letters from the whole reach of the Moslem world give the same refrain,—the girls drop their reading largely because there is nothing published that interests them. The few upper class women who read, read little but newspapers and French novels. Could not some one who understands child minds work out bright beginnings for the use of their waking powers in stories and pictures with colored lettering and borders? Easterns must have color to make them happy!”[70]

Here is a call to missionary work for some one who never dreamt that her particular literary and artistic talents are absolutely needed today by the children of the East.

The second matter mentioned above is the need for industrial training. Great progress has been made in this respect in recent years, but much more progress is needed, and trained teachers and suitable equipment are required. As a missionary in Persia says when urging that more industrial training be given the school girls,—“A woman may be able to read, but, if unable to bake or prepare a good meal, her husband will not care if she reads about the Bread of Life. She may play the organ, but, if she cannot wash, mend, make the children’s clothes, and make a happy home, he will have little interest in hearing her play or sing ‘The Home over there.’”

There is abundant testimony to prove that America is already doing great things in the line of missionary education. Here is the testimony of a traveler and newspaper man.

The number of mission schools and colleges supported by Americans with American money is nearly as large as that of all the schools conducted by the missionaries of all other countries combined. We have approximately 10,000 schools in lands that are not under our flag and from which we receive not a cent of revenue.

If a man in quest of material for an American educational exhibit were to sail out of San Francisco Bay with a phonograph recorder, he would come up on the other side of Sandy Hook with a polyglot collection of records that would give the people of the United States a new conception of their part in the world’s advance toward light. His audience might hear a spelling class recite in the tuneful Hawaiian tongue or listen to Moros, Tagalogs, and Igorrotes reading from the same “McGuffey’s Reader.” A change of records might bring the sound of little Japanese reciting geography, or of Chinese repeating the multiplication table in a dozen dialects. Another record would tell in quaint Siamese the difference between a transitive or an intransitive verb, or conjugate the verb “to be” in any one of the languages of India. One might hear a professor from Pennsylvania lecturing on anatomy to a class of young men in the ancient kingdom of Darius; or a young woman from Massachusetts explaining the mysteries of an eclipse to a group of girls in Constantinople; or a Princeton man telling in Arabic the relation between a major and a minor premise. And when the audience had listened to all this and to “My country, ’tis of thee” in Eskimo and in Spanish, the exhibit of American teaching would have only begun.[71]

One American Mission Board alone (the Presbyterian) uses the following languages and dialects in its educational institutions:—Arabic, Armenian, Beng, Bulu, English, Fang, French, German, Hainanese, Hakka, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Laos, Mandarin (and many dialects in our eight China missions; the dialects of China are as diverse as the languages of Europe), Marathi, Mpongwe, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Sanscrit, Siamese, Spanish, Syriac, Tagalog, Turkish, Urdu, Visayan.[72]

But in spite of all that is being done, we continue to make our plea for the little children. Whatever emphasis may be laid on the need for boarding schools, colleges, normal, and industrial training schools, let us remember that those who are taught while small will make the most hopeful students in these more advanced schools, and the best workers in the future.

How quickly and easily and naturally the little ones learn of Jesus, the children’s Friend, and their relation to Him, we have already seen illustrated in the kindergarten work of Japan. A little six-year-old Greek boy in Syria, who had attended the missionary kindergarten, spent the summer in the mountains and became dreadfully wild and profane. On his return to school the teacher asked why he had been so naughty. He replied, “I didn’t pray during the summer. Now I’m going to pray and be a good boy.”

To Mrs. Pitcher of Amoy we owe the following incident:—

A scholar in one of our schools, whose relatives were all idol worshippers and very ignorant, was led to give her heart to Jesus, and became a most active little Christian; but one day she was taken very ill with plague, and during her last hours she was so happy singing hymns she had learned at school and telling her parents and old grandmother about the Home beyond, where she would soon be with the Lord, that all that heathen family were led by this dying child to believe in a God of love, who could so comfort His little child, and save her from the terror and dread of the many evil spirits in whom they had blindly trusted.[73]

This chapter cannot end before we follow into their later life some of the children whose early and perhaps whose only education was received in missionary schools.

“The home in Syria whose mother was taught in a school can always be distinguished at a glance, whether it belongs to the Protestant community or to one of the old Christian sects. Neatness and good taste prevail, the children are more carefully trained, the members of the family work for each other’s benefit. One of our school girls, who was married to an uneducated man, told us years after: ‘Letter by letter I taught him to read, figure by figure I taught him arithmetic, and then I drew him down upon his knees and word by word I taught him to pray.’”[74]

From the Spirit of Missions we quote the following about the boys at Cape Mount, West Africa:—

“These people can be reached by Christianity best in their childhood, before superstitions, belief in the Gregre, or the influence of the life of a Mohammedan has become grafted into their lives. If allowed to grow up in their native villages they often become leaders of tribal wars, and, unknowingly, men of the vilest character. In one tribe from which several boys are at the mission, the mother tattoos curious marks on the forehead of her babe, in order that if during war he is captured and in after years she becomes able to redeem him from slavery, she may be able to recognize her own child. With the influence and training of a Christian mission, even though the boys go back to native life, they do not go back to all of its vileness, and one can soon distinguish between them and the un-Christianized heathen.”

It takes faith and hope and love and a vision far into the future to teach boys like these. But it pays, and the “bread cast on the waters” is often found again in most unlikely places, such as those described in a letter from Mr. W. C. Johnson of West Africa:—

“Everywhere I find in the village schools sources of Christian influence. In one village where I stayed all night, all of the boys and all but two of the women were Christians. This was entirely the work of Christian school boys. In another place a young man told me that there were only two young men in the community who were not trying to lead Christian lives. This too was the work of the Christian school boys.”

A little Mohammedan girl attended for a very few months the mission day school in a near-by city street. Her cruel step-mother persecuted her bitterly, throwing her school books on the floor and trampling them under foot to show her contempt of Christian learning. Some kind friend at the school gave the child forty cents,—unheard-of wealth to the little one,—and the missionary suggested that a teacher should help the child spend it for something she greatly needed before the mother could take it away. “No,” said the little girl, “I don’t want to spend it in that way. I want to give it all to the Lord and then I shall have treasure in heaven. I learned that at school.” She was married,—without any choice in the matter,—to a man who had known Christians and was favorable to them, and the little wife lived a consistent Christian life and died trusting in Christ as her Saviour.

Only a few months at school for a few hours of each day, but they made all the difference for time and for eternity! How many children are having such an opportunity because of us and our missionary society? How many are deprived of the opportunity because it is “not our business” to help them realize the truth of what was said in days of old,—“Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”