Ch 7-1: Home Schooling in West China
Laura Riddell with Students on Lawn
Laura Riddell was the teacher and matron of the Canadian School in West China's Chongqing branch, 1929-1934.
Most West China missionary children attended the Canadian School in West China (CSWC), either as day students or as boarders. Founded in 1909, the CSWC was located in makeshift classrooms in Chengdu before its large building adjacent to the WCUU was completed in 1918. With the exception of the 1911 and 1927 evacuations, the CSWC remained operational with varying grade levels at different times until 1939 when it moved to Renshou due to Japanese bombing during WWII. Meanwhile, a second branch of the CSWC opened in the hills across from Chongqing, which took on day and boarding students between 1922 and 1935. In 1943, the Renshou CSWC moved back to Chengdu where the last classes were held in 1950.
Many missionary mothers felt the need for their children to attend school because they were highly educated professionals with day jobs in medicine, education and social programs. However, in the early years, and later in the outstations, many mothers home-schooled their own children, and sometimes those of others, because of the distance the children would have to travel to reach the nearest foreign school, the dangers of travel, or the cost of boarding. In 1929, Emily Gentry 1988, 61) decided to home-school her son in Chongqing City rather than send him across the Yangtze River to the CSWC where he would have to board for a fee. During the 1940s, the Reeds were stationed in the relatively small city of Zigong where Elinor Reed Knight (2021, 9-10) recalls her mother taught her and her brother at a single desk with two chairs.
Both Emily Gentry and Annie Reed used the Calvert System which, introduced in 1906, was the first home-schooling system for grade school (Montessori had already released its kindergarten materials). John Service (1981, 35), whose mother Grace also used Calvert, recalls that, “The Calvert system sent out textbooks, daily assignment sheets, examination questions. You sent the completed examinations back to Baltimore to the head office and they graded them.”
Gertrude Jolliffe home-schooled her children while the family was stationed in Luzhou from 1908 to 1921. Their home classroom was better equipped than that of the CSWC of those days:
"I got a carpenter to make three desks. One bedroom was set aside as the schoolroom. The desks were put in a row as they would be in school. We bought black paint and made blackboards. Maps were obtained cheaply from Shanghai and the walls were decorated with them" (C. Jolliffe n/d, 97).
Even after the CSWC opened to boarders in 1918, some parents favored home-schooling. In some cases, parents feared sending their children to boarding school. In 1923 and 1924, Charles and Gertrude Jolliffe (n/d, 41, 97) had sent three of their children to board at the CSWC in Chengdu. In the fall of 1925, however, they decided to keep them at home. Due to “chronic disturbances” over the summer they were afraid their children would not be safe returning to the CSWC.
Other parents found fault with the CSWC. Grace Service (19, 183) considered sending her sons to the CSWC in 1916, but was dissuaded by stories she heard from other parents.
I learned there was already a rumpus at the school. Some criticized the teacher; others valiantly upheld her. It seemed to me that it would be impossible, as a parent, to avoid getting involved. I immediately decided to teach the children myself and ordered supplies from the Calvert School of Baltimore.
Grace’s son John Service (1981, 33) explained more candidly that since his mother had taught school herself before coming to China, she was critical of some of the teachers’ lack of training. She also wanted her children to be raised on an American curriculum, which Calvert provided, but the CSWC used the Ontario curriculum.
Mary Endicott made the most ambitious experiment in home schooling after the CSWC closed its Chongqing branch. At Duckling Pond, across the river from Chongqing, she not only homeschooled her own four children, but also took on another missionary child and three Chinese students. By 1938, her “International School” had these eight children at four different grades. It was highly unusual to mix foreign and Chinese children in the same school, as Chinese children were not allowed into the CSWC at Chengdu.
Mary’s curriculum was equally innovative. In addition to the regular academic subjects, she engaged her students in extra-curricular activities such as raising chickens, pigs and rabbits, training homing pigeons, growing vegetables and collecting stamps. The Chinese students, who also boarded with the Endicotts, were boys whom their parents wanted to prepare for school in America. Each of them did get foreign educations, which both helped and hindered them after the creation of the PRC in 1949 (Shirley Endicott 2013, 109-113, 126-7, 132-6).