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Title:
"There Is No Necessity Constraining Us to Teach English to Those Native Youth": The ABCFM and the Controversy of English Education in the 1840s China's Mission School"
Abstract:
Before the establishment of Tongwen Guan by the Qing government in 1862, which symbolized that China officially recognized the study of European languages as essential to the country, missionaries were one of the significant groups that taught the Chinese study of European languages. As early as 1839, since Samul R. Brown (1810-1880), an American missionary, took charge of the school of the Morrison Education Society, English had become an important part of missionaries to teach Chinese students. After that, the teaching of English was adopted by American missionaries and became one of the common lessons of the American Mission Schools in China. Nevertheless, not all the missionaries and home boards agreed that teaching English in the Mission schools was appropriate. For example, in terms of the ABCFM, the earliest American Mission Board which sent missionaries to China, it had a determined will to object teaching English in the Mission schools. In their consideration, the Mission schools were not a place to improve the Chinese to study Western language and knowledge but an institution to grow the native ministers and ultimately convert all the Chinese to Christianity. In the former research, however, some theories, such as J. K. Fairbank's "Impact-response" and Paul A. Cohen's "Self-reflection," tried to focus on the Chinese side and discussed how the Chinese adopted and rejected Western knowledge. There was insufficient attention to the attitude of the Westerners, especially how and why some of the Westerners were against the Chinese studying Western knowledge, which also affected the Chinese, besides the factors of the Chinese side. This article is going to elucidate the controversy of English education in the 1840s China's Mission School, by using the manuscript from the archives of the ABCFM. It indicates how the study of foreign languages, especially English, in China was disturbed by the Westerner side, and reconsiders the outer influence towards the modernization (or Westernization) of China.
