Investigating the nature and scope of the conflict between the religious mission and academic mission in selected catholic secondary schools in Western province.

The Church in general has made a tremendous impact to various communities worldwide. One of
the notable areas where the church has made such an impact is in the area of education. This is
because the Church in general and Catholic Church in particular has been one of the leading social
institutions in terms of educational provision to the masses globally (Hambulo, 2016; Carmody,
2004; Snelson, 1974; O’Brien, 2006). The impact specifically by the Catholic Church in terms of
educational provision in Zambia stretches long back in time to the 1890s when the white fathers
in northern Zambia and the Jesuits in southern Zambia opened its first schools (Hambulo, 2016;
O’ Brien, 2006; Carmody, 2004).
From the early days of their settlement in Northern Rhodesia, an old name for the nation state of
Zambia, both the White Fathers and the Jesuits established Christian villages among the
indigenous people where they settled. The Christian village approach of both the White Fathers
and the Jesuits entailed giving basic education to the locals. This form of education was crude in
the sense that the teachers were mostly poorly qualified evangelists as they only had grounding in
the three Rs and a little hygiene and only possessed some elements of Catholic faith (Snelson,
1974:28).
These schools became Catholic missionary’s mode of access to the local population. Hence
Catholics established schools for conversion to Catholicism as a way of enhancing religious
conversion and church growth in the areas they occupied in the initial stages of their settlement in
Zambia. The key purpose for the establishment of Catholic schools is what became known as the
‘religious mission’ of such schools. Therefore, it became important for a Catholic mission station
to have a school in as many areas as possible.