Kamehameha Schools for Boys campus prior to 1900. Courtesy of the KS Archives.
"For the next fifty years, the trust and schools were run exclusively by white members of the business elite, many of whom were directly tied to, or at least politically aligned with, the overthrow of Hawaiian governance and the establishment of American imperial control."
—Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua
"From 1887-1893, KSB enrolled Hawaiian boys over age twelve and engaged them in a three-year English language program focusing on vocational training for semi-skilled trades, labor to maintain the school, and basic academic subjects."
—Noelani Goodyear-Ka'ōpua
"Bishop had supported industrial and moral education for the masses and elite English-standard education for the highest tier of society. His administration marked a turn toward manual and industrial education, as well as increased funding for English-medium education. Although there was already a history of educating Kānaka in higher branches of academic pursuit, Bishop argued against education that failed to produce an industrial agricultural workforce."
—Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua
"English was the only language accepted for the work time and play time of Pauahiʻs school. Hawaiian was forbidden in the classroom and on the playing fields, and the boys were punished if they were heard speaking the language of their families." |
"Following the 1893 overthrow of the kingdom, the boys voted with their feet against this school that was run by annexationists. So many boys left and did not come back that enrollment was down by almost half and stayed down for the next two years."
—Kāwika Eyre, Kamehameha Schools
"Kamehameha School for Girls was preparing young Hawaiian women to be proper middle-class, Christian wives for those men…teachers and administrators cultivated Euro-American gender norms and hierarchies. The feminized "domestic sphere" became associated with bourgeois, American Protestant notions of home and care of the nuclear family, while the masculinized "political" sphere became associated with military service and wage labor to support the family." |
"The object of the school is to furnish a carefully arranged, practical education to Hawaiian girls of thirteen years of age and over, qualifying them for service at home, for wage-earning in some handicraft, or as teachers in the government schools." |
"The missionary-sugar industrialist faction used Kamehameha Schools as a vehicle for furthering their white supremacist vision of society, in which young Hawaiians would be integrated and subordinated, while Native self-government was snuffed out."
—Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua
"A person's ethnic/national identity is evident through the language he or she uses. If the mother tongue of a people were to disappear, so too would those people disappear. Currently, as we have already lost our independence, the loss of our mother tongue would certainly mean the end of the Hawaiian race."
—Ho'okahua Staff
As more students graduated from Kamehameha, they became less proficient in Hawaiian. Although the intensity of the language ban decreased over time, these changes became less relevant as the students became accustomed to English.
"Early Kamehameha was essentially an English immersion school. As our friends from the Pūnana Leo movement have so aptly demonstrated, immersion is the most powerful of language pedagogies." |
"In 1896, the self-proclaimed "Republic of Hawaiʻi" passed a law mandating that all instruction in schools, both public and private, be given in English. The law absolutely cut schools off from public funding and recognition if they taught in Hawaiian. For the bulk of the 20th century, under prolonged U.S. occupation, there wasn't a single school in the islands that made the indigenous Hawaiian language or culture central to its curriculum until the advent of Hawaiian language immersion schools in the 1980s."
—Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Willy Kauai, Kaleilehua Maioho, and ʻĪmaikalani Winchester