Pioneering Education for Girls Across the Globe by Sperandio Jill;

Author:Sperandio, Jill;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Beginnings of Girls’ Education in Singapore

A few schools for girls in Singapore were started by missionaries and the first of these was a Church of England school, the Zenana Mission for Chinese Girls, founded in 1842 and offering domestic subjects. This was followed by the Raffles Girls’ School in 1844 that excluded “native and heathen females” (Blundell, 1855). A Roman Catholic school, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, was opened in 1854 followed by St. Anne’s Convent School in 1893. American missionaries opened the Anglo-Tamil Girls’ School in 1888 and the Methodist Girls’ School in 1889.

The mission schools attracted few daughters of Straits Chinese, even though many leading families had adopted Christianity (Cooke, 1966; Han, 2009). The exclusive nature of the schools, their religious requirements and the general disinterest of the community in educating girls contributed to this (New Nation, 1997). Sophia Blackmore, an Australian missionary who headed the Methodist Girls’ School for many years made strenuous efforts to involve the Straits’ Chinese in the initiative to educate girls. She reported on the responses to her door to door visits to the Straits Chinese women thus:

One mother would say, “We do not want our girls to ‘makan gaji’” (earn their livelihood). Another woman told me that if her daughter studied from the same book as her son, the girl would get all the learning out of it; there would be none for the boy, and he would be “bodoh” (stupid). The girl might be stupid—that did not matter, but the boy must be clever. (Frost and Balasingamchow, 2009)

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