The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.8

c4.8

After a short start, however, the Charity School movement became rather dormant. Around 1780, it was succeeded by the Sunday school movement.⁸ ‘Popular education’, even at this period, ‘was still approached as a missionary enterprise.’ The maxim was ‘that every child should learn to read the Bible.’⁹ The hope of securing a decent observance of Sunday'¹⁰ led to a concentrated effort on the promotion of Sunday schools. After some years, this attention focussed on the necessity of day schools. From then on, school education grew apace. Nevertheless, even as late as 1834, ‘the curriculum in the better class of national schools was limited in the main to religious instruction, reading, writing and arithmetic: in some country schools writing was excluded for fear of evil consequences.’¹¹