The Little Red American School House in China

by Audrey Ronning Topping

“Education of the common man is of prime importance

to the modernization of China.”

—– Halvor N. Ronning. Xiangfan China 1893. (Qing Dynasty)

For centuries, learned men held the most respected professions in ancient China. Advisors to the Imperial Court were chosen from the most brilliant scholars in the land. The few who passed the grueling three-day official exam based on the Confucian Classics became Mandarin Officials. But this meritocracy left little chance for the children of ordinary Chinese to be educated and no chance for the girls. Today millions of Chinese students of both sexes study in Chinese and American universities as China strives to modernize. This is the story of three American missionaries who, over a century ago, built a little red school house in the interior of China and took the first step to offer education to all Chinese children regardless of sex or social status.

In 1891, twenty years before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, my grandparents built an American type ‘Little Red School House’ deep in the heart of Imperial China. It was the first school in the interior where every child was welcome. The Rev. Halvor Ronning founded the school with his wife Hannah Rorem Ronning and his sister Thea. They were Lutheran missionaries with the China Inland Mission stationed in the city of Xiangfan in Hubei Province. After building a church they constructed a school. “We fervently believe that all Chinese children should have the opportunity to be enlightened intellectually as well as spiritually,” grandfather wrote to his brother Nils in Minnesota. “Schools are just as important as churches.”

As supervisor of the Mission, Rev.Ronning, with the help of a dozen Chinese workmen, built a red brick school house with a brass bell on the roof that chimed ‘Jingle Bells’. There was one room for boys, ages six and up, whom Halvor would teach himself, and one for girls to be supervised by Hannah and Thea. ‘We soon discovered,’ wrote grandpa, ‘that it was easier said than done’.

When the later winter plum trees bloomed to herald the spring of 1894 the missionaries hung posters on the town bulletin boards announcing the opening of a free school for all children regardless of sex or social standing. The mission would furnish books and writing materials. This was shocking news for the local gentry. There had never heard of a girl’s school and only boys of the privileged classes had the opportunity for education. To ensure success, the Mission School was to open on the propitious ninth day of the ninth moon.

The missionaries invited the local officials and gentry for tea and discussion. Rev. Ronning explained that reading and writing would be taught first in Chinese and then English. He pointed out that the merit system established by Confucius was to be highly recommended but that it usually allowed for only one boy in a family or one boy in a whole village to be educated whereas the Mission School would accept all children. Hannah and Thea explained that they wanted to restore the educational opportunities that girls enjoyed during the great Tang Dynasty, when China was at the height of its glory and girls had the same opportunity for education as boys.

“The elite group,” wrote Halvor later, “listened with an air of apathetic indifference which seems to veil the inner feelings of most polished Chinese gentlemen.” He was soon to discover their real feelings.

At 6:00 in the morning of September 9,1984 Rev. Ronning dressed smartly in a black scholar’s robe tailored to fit his tall frame. Then he carefully placed a long black queue attached to a satin skull over his brown hair and set off for his new school house with long, purposeful strides.

At that time the Ronnings had one son, Nelius, who was too young to attend school and an adopted ten-year-old Chinese son, Peter, whom Halvor had rescued from the local jail. Peter, a starving orphan, had been caught stealing food. Rev. Ronning held the reluctant Peter firmly by the hand and dragged him to school. It was not the auspicious beginning he had anticipated.

“When I came to the schoolhouse,” he wrote, “I found one small ragged urchin sitting on the steps. That was all! Just one! Two with Peter. However, I welcomed the child warmly and carried on classes as if I had a full house. The two children seemed to enjoy it greatly.

“The next day the boy, whom I discovered was the nephew of our loyal gate keeper, came back with a friend who looked so bedraggled and frightened I had to laugh. That was a mistake, he ran off crying and Peter had to fetch him back. So now there were three. I taught them how to count. The boys learned quickly. They were proud of themselves and left promising to spread the good word. The next day there were five. That’s what we call progress, isn’t it?

“The boys arrive at school around six in the morning, go home at noon and then return at three to study and read until it is dark. All the children read aloud, all together at the top of their voices, just as in Norway in days of old. It is a deafening noise, so it is almost impossible to be near the classroom. Soon we shall introduce more modern methods.”

While Halvor was making progress. Hannah and Thea were despondent. In spite of their earnest campaigning, not a single girl appeared the first day. Obviously the citizens of Xiangfan had been shocked at the very thought of educating girls.

This was not surprising considering the history of women in China since the downfall of the Tang Dynasty in 907 ad. Since then, Chinese sages had taught that women were inferior by nature. They stressed the danger of educating women or letting them go freely about. Two `old sayings reveal the attitudes in China at that time. “At the bottom of every trouble there is a woman” and “If women take to reading what will men do?”

With this way of thinking brain washed into the minds of the Chinese for centuries it is no wonder that my Grandparents had a difficult time bringing girls to their school. Customs regarding women were even more restrictive in China’s interior than in the coastal cities. Beggars, servants and the poorest peasants were often freer than the upper classes where it was considered cause for divorce if a woman dared to venture alone on the streets. If called upon to go on an errand without her husband she must ride a mule or travel in a curtained sedan chair carried on the shoulders of two bearers who reported her movements to their master. If she went out with her husband she was obliged to walk three paces behind.

The first girl to enter the mission school was not a member of the gentry but a ten-year-old girl that Hannah and Thea bought at the slave market for a few silver dollars. She had bound feet, which was unusual because only the privileged classes perpetrated that horror upon their young girls. The servant class and poor peasants needed girls with natural feet to be able do the work expected of them. The slave girl claimed she had been kidnapped and was hysterical with fear and the pain in her feet.

At the mission Hannah and Thea unwrapped several yards of filthy bandages that tightly bound the child’s broken feet. She screamed in agony as the blood suddenly rushed to her toes. They lowered her feet into a bucket of warm water with soothing oils. The child sighed in relief but Hannah and Thea were horrified beyond belief. “We saw with our own eyes what the Chinese call `killing the feet’, wrote Hannah in a letter to Mission Headquarters in Faribault, Minnesota imploring them to send funds for a hospital.

“The smell was quite revolting but we tried not to notice. Her poor feet had been forced into line with the leg and the toes doubled under the soles of the feet. The big toes had been forced crooked to overlap the others. The bandages had been applied with a cruel amount of pressure. The child’s feet were blue and the skin cracked and indented where the circulation had been completely cut off. Fortunately she is not yet permanently crippled, as her young bones are still soft.

“It must be the cruelest custom ever inflicted by man. Mothers sleep with sticks, which they use to beat the child if she disturbs the household with her wails and if that doesn’t work they sometimes lock her in an outhouse. The poor darlings are in such pain that their mother’s give them opium to stifle the agony. We are told that the pain lets up after three years but many of the girls die of gangrene or shock before that. Some go mad and others become opium addicts. When they grow up they are crippled for life. They get no exercise because they can only walk on their heels with the knees stiff. The feet are no longer than a small hand’s width. The muscles of the calf never develop and the lower legs are like broomsticks with drooping folds of skin. But, thank God, our little girl will not suffer this. She will recover in time and we will do everything we can to give her a good education in our girls school. Halvor baptized her and we have named her Sarah.”