‘Keeping the Infants of Coolies out of

ABSTRACT Contrary to the widely accepted belief that no early childhood education provision was evident until the twentieth century, archives date the advent of infant schools in India to the 1830s in Bengal, contemporaneous with developments in England. The Church Missionary Society’s infant schools aimed to educate children (and women) from the lower castes and classes or those in dire circumstances. The main objective was their moral rescue through the spread of Christianity along the lines suggested by Wilderspin. However, the Hooghly Infant School, started with Government backing after much debate, attracted boys from more privileged backgrounds. Despite continued social resistance in India well into the twentieth century to the institutional education of young children, the idea appealed to educated and wealthy Indians, who willingly sent their boys to infant school. This article, drawing on hitherto undocumented sources, tells the story of infant education in India between 1830 and 1851. The use of such institutions is to provide a place where the children of the poor may be safe, cheerful and harmlessly, if not profitably, employed – while their parents are at work. What they learn, I imagine, is not much. But instead of being locked up in close rooms or abandoned to the society of all the idle boys in the street, they play, and pick up a little smattering of knowledge, under a very gentle discipline, which is yet sufficient to keep them out of harm’s way. This is, I believe, a correct account of the Infant Schools of England. We do not at present aim at giving education directly to the lower classes of the people of this country. We have not funds for such an undertaking... I should consider it therefore as quite inconsistent with ou