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Decision on Sending Missionary Kids to Boarding Schools in IndiaChapter 3Woodstock: A World ApartDad and Mother were faced with the serious problem of schooling for John during their first term in India, and for Frances and me after they returned to Khargpur in 1931. There were several options, such as using a correspondence course at home or sending us away to a boarding school in India. Another was to send us to the “States” and arrange for our schooling there. That was the one chosen by the Amstutz family (American Methodist missionaries in British Malaya) for their young daughter, Beverly. Of course, Bev and I are indebted to her parents for bringing her back with them from furlough in 1939 and sending her to Woodstock School in India. Making a school decision for children involved balancing calculation, sentiment and myth. The myth was a widely-held belief that the tropics (before air-conditioning) were unhealthy for white adolescents, especially girls. They mature early like “hot house flowers,” is the comment Beverly remembers hearing. That being the case, it was thought by some parents to be wiser to leave young children in America or send them back as early adolescents from overseas. A temperate climate was available, however, in India in the mountains, where the foreigner-friendly atmosphere was celebrated by dispensing with the bothersome topi. Here the British authorities built dozens of towns at elevations of 5000 to 7000 feet above sea level. They were places in which to locate summer offices, military cantonments and hospitals, holiday resorts – and schools, run mostly by church-related organizations along the lines of English boarding schools. Dad and Mother wanted to find one with an American curriculum and a Protestant orientation. Three qualified. They were Kodaikanal (pron. cody-kanal) in South India, Mt. Hermon School in Darjeeling, in the Himalayas of Northern Bengal and Woodstock School in Landour (pron. lan-dower), in the Garhwal Himalayas of the United Provinces north of Delhi. They chose Woodstock. It was a school that offered both an American curriculum and, at the high school level, the Cambridge examination curriculum preparatory for admission to British or Commonwealth universities. The total enrollment from kindergarten through high school (10th Standard –equivalent to 12th Grade) was three to four hundred. It had been founded by American Presbyterians in the 1850s as a girls’ school, had gone through several transformations and now was an institution supported and run by several cooperating Protestant groups with missionaries in India. The Woodstock community was international. It included Americans, Britishers, Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, Anglo-Indians, Indians and others, but was predominantly American. Classes and student activities were coeducational, which was unusual in India at that time. Boarding facilities (non-coed, of course) Photo: The Latin motto included in the Woodstock crest: Palma non sine Pulvere “No palm (of victory) without dust (of battle)” was central to the letter masthead shown here and was also embroidered in gold on our brown school blazers. Photo: Woodstock School patch: Courtesy of Fred Whitfield |
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