Christianity. Laird suggests, that missionaries acted as “instigators of an intellectual awakening, or even revolution” because they taught Hinduism, Islam, as well as Christianity, challenging pupils to analyze each. This was effective in appealing to the parents of the students who might have felt that Christianity would be forced. Although parents were not at all open to Christianity or conversion therein, they were open to the education that the Westerners had to offer.Missionary schools were mostly conducted with the educational principles of Lancaster and Bell who were secular educationalists from Europe. Christianity was supposedly only to be presented in the comparative arena during ethics class. However, missionaries were hopeful that the general attitude and conduct of the school would create an atmosphere of conversion for the Indian people. The second of Laird’s chapters on the development of missions schools between 1793 and 1823 focuses on missionary publications, teachers, caste and class, secular contributions, and relations between missionaries. One of the most significant contributions of the missionaries during this period was their compilation of textbooks, for both the introduction of the ‘new learning’ of the West in the Bengali education system, and the improvement of methods of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. The missionaries were also responsible for the publication and circulation of the first Bengali newspaper ever to be published, the Samachar Darpan. They also published an educational magazine, the Dig Darshan, that presented history, astronomy, geography, and ethics to the Bengali people in English and Bengali. As there was little available to read during this time, these publications were extremely popular. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the missionary educationalists in Bengal was the lack of qualified teachers. Laird explains the difficulties that...
