Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the legacy of missionary schooling in Ghana. It highlights continuities in the emphasis on character training as important attributes of educated and moral persons in a contemporary mission school.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of character-training was at the heart of Basel Mission pedagogy. These ideas have sustained the test of time and have influenced contemporary teaching and learning practices at Brilliant Academy, a boys’ mission school where the author conducted ethnographic fieldwork. At the heart of the idea of character training was the argument that education should be holistic; entailing training the heart, the head and the hands. To this end boarding school regimes emphasized not only academic excellence, but good grooming, domestic upkeep and the importance of training students to be economically self-sufficient through teaching practical skills. The Basel Mission’s emphasis on character training within their schools inspired the colonial government, who adopted these ideas and combined them with racist ideologies surrounding ‘proper’ education befitting Black Africans to their environment. Such ideas were also inspired by the Phelps Stokes Commission, as well as the Hampton-Tuskegee model of education adopted for Black Americans in the United States. The mantra of instilling character training through schooling was thus a product of missionary pedagogy seeking to reform the souls of students through education, as well as colonial and international influences informing the type of education recommended for Africans. How such ideas of ‘education for Africans’ is connected to place links ideas of race and subject formation to the missionary and colonial history of the education system in Ghana. In this paper I focus on the impact of the emphasis on character-training on pedagogical practices at Brilliant Academy and their impact on students’ aspirations and goal-seeking behaviour. This research draws upon nine months of ethnographic fieldwork within a Ghanaian secondary school where the author conducted fieldwork. It argues that the Basel Mission had a lasting impact upon the type of educated person upheld within Brilliant Academy, affecting students’ aspirations and goal-seeking behaviour.