Educational missions have been designed to convert the young whilst they
were yet pliable, to influence the growing generation in order to
prepare for a great advance of Christianity later, to Christianise
society, to educate young Christians in a Christian atmosphere, to
prepare leaders for the Christian Church, to elevate an ignorant and
illiterate Christian Church. All these various objects have been set
before us as the reasons for the establishment of schools, both
separately, each in different circumstances, and unitedly, all at the
same time, as though one school could fulfil all these different
purposes without any confusion. At one and the same moment Christian
children were to be educated in a Christian atmosphere, and
non-Christian children in large numbers were admitted, and non-Christian
teachers employed. At the same time non-Christian children were to be
converted and not converted, but filled with Christian ideas.

All these aims and objects are confusedly set forth, each as its turn
comes round, as the immediate aim of our educational missions; but the
attempt to draw tables for a survey which shall embrace impartially all
these objects is enough to satisfy the inquirer that they are not easily
combined into one. We propose, therefore, in this bewildering maze of
mixed purposes and ideas, to follow the line which seemed possible in
the case of medical missions--to accept the idea that there is an
educational need of the people which it is the business of the
educational mission to meet so far as it can; and then to add a further
inquiry concerning the direct evangelistic influence of the educational
mission, and its relation to the evangelistic and medical work.

But in educational mission survey there is an added difficulty which
arises from the fact that scholastic education is divided into many
grades, and this division has no common standard in different countries,