I've been mulling a post on Punahou School for a while and started drafting this yesterday. Now that the Washington Post ("With Obama's Rise, Hawaii School Adds to Its Distinctions") is talking about Barack Obama's Hawaiian school (and the New York Times, too, I now see), I suppose I should put this up, even though I'm still thinking this through....
When I have some time I'm going to go back and write a little about the intellectual origins of Mr. Obama's race and law course. But right now I want to reach a little further back into his history and talk about his prep school, the Punahou School in Honolulu.
During a wonderful semester I spent at the University of Hawaii Law School some years ago, I learned a ton from a very creative and bright property class. I also had the chance to learn something about Hawaiian jurisprudence (what I like to refer to as "aloha jurisprudence"). Plus, because much of my work is on the legal history of antebellum United States, I started reading some of the writings of the nineteenth century missionaries to Hawaii. One missionary in particular, Hiram Bingham, left a particularly rich book about his experience in Hawaii. It details his attitudes towards property and the market, as well as toward natives. Not surprisingly, Binhgam sought to bring Christianity to the natives. But he also saw a western style of property rights as part of the missionary process. (There's a might interesting story in all this, which I've written a little bit about in the pages of the University of Hawaii Law Review, in "How Missionaries Thought: About Property Law, for Instance."' I'll talk about at length another time.) Finally, I had the chance to spend a little bit of time on the campus of the extraordinary Punahou School, as well as to meet some its graduates. The students there are amazingly talented and accomplished. The education there is legendary; they produce some of the most mature and thoughtful high school students I've ever met. And over many years of college interviews and talking with prospective applicants, I've met a lot of really thoughtful and mature high school students.
How does this relate to Mr. Obama, you may be wondering? Well, the Punahou School that he attended was founded by Hiram Bingham. (Here's a 1905 book that celebrated Bingham's accomplishments at Punahou). The Washington Post story alludes to this in one paragraph:
Punahou was founded in 1841 by Congregationalist missionaries who tired of shipping their children to boarding schools 5,000 miles away in New England. The first class had 15 students and tuition cost $12. Today, the K-12 school has about 3,760 students, including 425 in the senior class, and tuition sets you back about $17,000.
The Post article also alludes to some of the tension that legacy has created and how the school has worked to overcome it:
To many native Hawaiians, Punahou long was an establishment of the haoles -- the local term for white foreigners -- who migrated to the island and built the school as an Anglo enclave.
In recent decades, however, Punahou has diversified its student body to more closely mirror the ethnic makeup of Hawaii, and the school now awards scholarships to meet the demonstrated financial need of each accepted student. The school's endowment, valued at $174 million, is on par with those of many colleges.
Bingham's a key figure in all Hawaiian history. And his family has reappeared in many places in American history. His grandson was a Yale anthropologist (in the news of late in the Yale--Peru controversy over artifacts from Machu Picchu); his great grandson was a heroic diplomat during World War II. Hiram Bingham was an important missionary; it will not surprise you that his attitude towards the natives was, well, I think you might say contemptuous. He wrote about them as barbarians:
Their manoeuvres in their canoes, some being propelled by short paddles, and
some by small sails, attracted the attention of our little group, and for a moment,
gratified curiosity; but the appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism,
among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much
of their sunburnt swarthy skins, were bare, was appalling. Some of our number,
with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle. Others with firmer nerve
continued their gaze, but were ready to exclaim, “Can these be human beings!
How dark and comfortless their state of mind and heart! How imminent the
danger to the immortal soul, shrouded in this deep pagan gloom! Can such
beings be civilized? Can they be Christianized?”
Well, the answer to that last question was: yes, as a matter of fact, they could be Christianized. However, that process of colonization and Christianization was a long one, which involved extraordinary hardship for the natives. The United Church of Christ (the successor to Bingham's Congregational Church) has been revisiting their history of late.
The 1905 celebration of Bingham's founding of Punahou continued some of the imagery of the Christian missionaries as saviors of a heathen people:
The early settlers of New England came into the possessi3n of barren hills, an inhospitable climate, and a rocky soil. They erected the church and the school house and for a crop raised the men who have shaped the course of empires. Our missionaries to Hawaii, despising not the day of small things, stooped to the people of low estate, adopted an alphabet, gave the people letters and some knowledge of the world. Teaching rulers and people alike to read, they gave them a translation of the Bible, wrote for them Christian hymns, and gave them what literature was possible. The transformation of the race, and of the condition of the people cannot be fully estimated by one who has not known heathenism in its hopeless degradation and darkness. The transformation exceeds the power of human language fully to represent.
As to Punahou, it's fulfilled the hopes of its founders and the celebrants in 1905. Judge Sanford Dole, one of the orators that day, spoke of the influence of Punahou's alumni:
Like the Punahou spring with its perennial flow of pure and life-giving water, the stream of influence in the direction of civilization and humanity has flowed from Punahou as its source refreshing thirsty places all over the world. Pupils from Punahou fought in the battles of the American Civil War. They have done great work in education in America. Тпэу have promoted human progress in Spain, in Turkey, in South America, in China, Japan and the Pacific Islands. They have done this work with the spirit of sacrifice. They have put their shoulders to the wheels of progress and caused them to move, and this work they have done largely because of the training which they received and the influence which inspired them during their stay at Punahou.
There's going to be a lot of talk about Punahou, its history, and its accomplishments, as there ought to be. It's a fabulous school, which offers extraordinary opportunities for those who are smart enough and mature enough to take advantage of them. I suspect it is yet another of those American institutions, which is founded by complex people--people whose motives are largely positive, even if the means they used to go about that are now viewed rather differently. And because Punahou is an institution devoted to forward progress and to introspection, I suspect there will be a lot of talk on its campus about its past and the road it traveled to a more positive and inclusive present. Ralph Ellison would love, love this story.
Well, you might want to check out the Punahou alumni page on wikipedia, or even better, the monograph by Connie Ramos, "Our Friend Barry: Classmates' Recollections of Barry Obama and Punahou," that came out during the campaign. (Lulu.com, B&N, Target...).
Posted by: RPL | February 17, 2009 at 06:38 PM