Global Perspectives demonstrates the extent to which boarding schools have affected children around the world across race, ethnicity, gender, and age. The framework for this comparative volume of fourteen focused essays, mainly from scholars of history across the globe, is provided through the definition of boarding schools that editors Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz use: boarding schools are a “global and transcultural phenomenon” and “discrete sites where the school’s pupils are educated on the property, eat meals in a common space, and sleep exclusively on the school property during term time” (pp. 3, 4). This broad definition allows the volume to cover two centuries of boarding school education, prioritizing the experiences of the students and highlighting their voices when possible.
This volume is broken into four main parts, with the fifth serving as a conclusion. Part 1, “Elites,” focuses on students who were considered privileged in their communities within the United States in the early 1800s, mid-nineteenth-century South Africa, Nazi Germany, and pre-World War II Spain. For example,the purpose of boarding schools for elite students to create a standard of education in a post-Revolutionary United States and authoritarian regimes in Europe provides important insight into the role class played in students’ recruitment. To give readers an idea of what this meant for non-White students, Rebecca Swartz’s chapter on schools for elite children in South Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century provides crucial understanding of schools for elite Africans and demonstrates how colonial systems attempted to utilize existing hierarchies. Part 2, “Marginalized,” turns to students who were disconnected from their communities by the boarding schools based on their race or socioeconomic background in the United States, colonial Malabar in India, and the Soviet Union. The pieces in this section demonstrate that marginalization was not exclusive to non-White students, but it was certainly non-White students who faced it most acutely. For students such as Jason Betzinez (Chiricahua Apache) who attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the focus of Janne Lahti’s chapter, boarding schools for Native American students attempted to separate students from their identity and assimilate them. Lahti’s case study of Betzinez’s time at Carlisle and his relationship with the school also demonstrates the many ways the authority of boarding school was challenged by students, a key theme throughout the volume.
The essays in part 3, “People and Networks,” outlines the relationship between those perpetuating colonization through boarding schools and the students within schools in colonial India, the United States, and twentieth-century Nigeria. These essays by Tim Allender, Oli Charbonneau, and Ngozi Edeagu focus on the networks and motivations that led to the establishment of schools within specific contexts. An example of this is in Charbonneau’s account of the history of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, established in 1883, and the development of the US empire as illustrated through the annual conference’s influence on federal policies. Part 4, “Practices and Processes,” centers on the control boarding schools sought over the bodies of children and how students experienced the schools within colonial Indonesia, nineteenth-century Ireland, twentieth-century Germany, and twentieth-century Ghana. These essays also turn their attention to gendered education that occurred in these spaces, as is the case in, for example, Kirsten Kamphuis’s analysis of Roman Catholic schools for girls in Indonesia and Mary Hatfield’s study of masculinity in religious schools in Ireland. Yet, Anja Werner’s piece stands out in this section as it shifts to processes that created boarding schools for deaf students in German-speaking countries, significantly bringing Deaf History into the volume.
David M. Pomfret’s conclusion connects the book’s essays by expounding on the variety of boarding school studies within the work, noting that “such an expansive approach allows this collection to draw insights across local and national contexts” (p. 351). The push to modernize the world based on Eurocentric ideas is what linked these schools across two centuries, as each school sought to transform students and create a standard for them and their communities to follow. Boarding schools were a “concept and practice” applied in various ways, dependent on the objectives of administrators or colonial powers (p. 354). The large scope of this volume is a strength and, to some degree, a limitation. The large number of essays means each author is limited in exploring the context of the schools as well as student backgrounds. Despite the book’s broad geographical and chronological scope, it fails to include essays on residential schools in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which the editors themselves acknowledge, highlighting the importance of their inclusion in future comparative works. These are minor critiques for a valuable volume in the Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood Series. By including such a variety of schools and experiences, this work shows how education is linked to the process of colonization, the attempt to create model citizens, and the development of national identity not exclusive to one region or century.
As the editors acknowledge in their introduction, scholarship on boarding schools has expanded from memoirs of students and instructors to comparative studies and histories of schools. The University of Nebraska Press’s Indigenous Education Series is one example, and Gerster and Jensz’s historicization of the construction of boarding schools and processes that took place within them is another case of this continued growth and need for other comparative works. Despite their creation in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, boarding schools have had generational impacts into the present day that cannot be overstated. Within North America, the governments of Canada and the United States have begun to grapple with the longer legacy of boarding and residential schools for Indigenous Peoples as shown by government commissions and reports. While Global Perspectives does not include an analysis of recent national acknowledgments of the purpose and harm caused by government-controlled boarding schools, it shows how interconnected the institutions were around a common purpose. The connections between the creation of boarding schools to nation-building and assimilation also show how crucial it is to center the voices of affected communities.
This volume is not a comprehensive history of education within the communities affected by boarding schools, but it shows how the schools fit themselves into communities and the role they assumed in promoting European-centered education. Those who study missionaries, settler colonialism, and systems of education generally are among the many scholars who will gain insight from this work. Global Perspectives provides a window into how boarding schools have been a means of empire building, emphasizing the importance in studying these institutions and the many types of violence that existed within them. This kind of work is crucial as communities and nation-states continue to grapple with the impact of these schools and students of all backgrounds continue to have their stories heard.
