Virginia Boucher

Cindy Rouzer

Soc1DE1

Las Positas College

26 May, 2006

Education

In the days before the missionaries, education was handled by the family to prepare children for adult life.  Daily skills such as tending the animals and crops were taught by including the children in the chores from a very early age.  Fishing, gathering fruit and hauling water were all introduced as a child gained the strength to perform the duties safely.  Boys were also taught warfare through games of strength and skill.  In some instances a child might be placed outside the birth family to be fostered in a specific skill or knowledge set.  These adoptions, called hanai, were relatively common. 

Upon the arrival of the missionaries, the educational system became one of indoctrination into Christianity.  Since there was no written Hawaiian language, literacy and reading were taught from the Bible.  There was, eventually, a school of higher learning that was vocational based in order to attempt to interest the youth of the Islands in the plantation agriculture of the time.  This school, called the Kahamehame School was founded in 1887.  The vocational based focus was eventually abandoned and it became a school of general studies.    

The current educational system in Hawaii is comparable to any other state in the US,  there are community colleges as well as a choice of Universities on the islands.

In looking through the eyes of the sociology theories, what can we see about education in Hawaii?  From a Conflict perspective, the control and indoctrination of the uneducated by the missionaries shows the recruitment of resources.  From a Functional perspective, the gaps in being able to record notable events in written form were resolved by the missionaries’ creation of the Hawaiian alphabet.  From the Interactionist perspective, the symbols of a written language marked the Hawaiian natives as “civilized” in the eyes of the western world.