The Mission School in Singapore

Abstract

Mission schools in Singapore’s history have played a significant role as a tertium quid between the Victorian imperium and its impulse to transform the colonial other into a serviceable tool of its project, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the perpetuation of a purely vernacular and local culture with its tendency towards social stasis and its problematic relationship with the modern commercial state. At the historical and political interstices of the colonial government in India (to which Singapore, as one of the Straits Settlements, initially reported), and the Islamic culture of its neighboring Malay states, Singapore was left to develop a hybrid social ideology in which Chinese mercantilism was reconciled with English colonial pragmatism, ethnicity with English as a national and imperial language, and economic individualism with the moral values and historical consciousness of the colonial masters.