“Teach the Boys to Work”: Industrial Education as Colonial Education at Lahainaluna Seminary, 1880-1905

Abstract

This study is an examination of Lahainaluna High School’s gradual shift from an academic and religious training institution to an industrial education school between 1880 - 1905. Lahainaluna High School, located on Maui, Hawai‘i was an integral part of an ongoing debate among Hawai‘i’s white elite circles about how to best educate Native Hawaiian students. Consisting of Hawai‘i’s white religious leaders, politicians, and plantation owners, this affluent and powerful cadre argued there was a moral imperative to transitioning Native Hawaiian schools to industrial training sites focused on manual labor, skills in agriculture, and shop work. Hawai‘i’s white elite joined a larger educational movement generated by trans-national white middle-class Protestant reformers, politicians, and missionaries targeting industrial education for Black, Indigenous, and other non-white students in the U.S. and its occupied territories. Samuel Armstrong, son of missionaries to Maui, Hawai‘i, was a particularly vocal supporter of Lahainaluna’s transformation. As founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1868, an industrial school for newly freed Black slaves, he became an advocate of industrial education as an effective tool for subordinating Hawaiian students for their projected future as low-wage earners under white supervision. I argue that Lahainaluna’s transformation into an industrial school in 1905 was an intentional effort by Hawaiʻi’s elite white minority and transnational industrial education figureheads such as Armstrong to undermine Native Hawaiian survivance, prolong white ruling class status, and impose Western imperialist dogma, which led to the annexation of Hawai‘i in 1893 and Hawai‘i becoming a U.S. territory in 1898.