The Crying Need: Dutch Reformed Responses to the Education Crisis of the 1870s

Abstract

In March 1873 Langham Dale, the Cape’s Superintendent of Education, appealed to the DRC in the Cape Monthly Magazine (CMM). In an article titled ‘Our Agricultural Population’ he asked the church’s clergymen if they realise the fact of the children of Dutch-speaking, European parentage growing up with less care bestowed upon them than upon the beasts of the field; — without the ability to read or write even their mother tongue; without any instruction in the knowledge of the God that made them; having at their command no language at all, but a limited vocabulary of semi-Dutch, semi-Hottentot words, and these only concerning the wants and doings of themselves and the animals which they tend?1 This was not the first article published by the CMM on the apparently appalling conditions under which poor white children, the vast majority of whom were Dutch-Afrikaans, were raised in the colony’s interior. Other authors had described the ‘purely animal existence’ which these children led, bemoaning the fact that so few of them had progressed beyond a basic grasp of literacy and numeracy.2 But as the Superintendent for Education and one of the most powerful civil servants in the colony in terms of the influence he wielded over the Cape government and the resources he commanded, Dale’s article elicited a swift response from the DRC.