A name applied to church-sponsored community schools designed to assist indigenous people to learn the English language, and at the same time to teach them the message of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Small schools of this kind have been operating on and off in most countries of the Far East ever since overseas missionaries first arrived.
The organized language school idea did not materialize until the colleges of North America started a student missionary program.
History. The organized English language school idea started in the fall of 1966 at the Osaka Center in Japan, when a young American evangelist, M. T. Bascom, discovered soon after he arrived in that city that one of the most effective evangelistic programs in the Osaka Center had been the English language classes started by Bobbie Jane Van Dolson when the center was opened and that most Japanese young people wanted to learn English. Bascom and his wife started a school with an enrollment of 16. This grew very rapidly until it was necessary for him to call on students from the United States to assist with the program. The school continued to expand until, in early 1975, there were eight schools in Japan alone. Bascom returned to the United States to work on his doctorate, and a former student missionary, Bruce Bauer, took over as director of the language schools. He remained in that position until 1983, when Roy Castlebuono took over. In 1991 the language schools were reorganized and were directed from the English Language School Department at the Japan Union Conference. In 1993 Mark Duarte was serving as director.
In September 1969 Dean Hubbard, then finishing his Korean language study, started a similar school in Seoul, Korea, and it was an immediate success. A second school started shortly thereafter in Pusan, Korea. In 1973 the former city hall in Kwangju, Korea, was purchased by the Seoul school and thus a third school started in Korea. See Seventh-day Adventist Language Institutes, Korea .
The idea spread, and soon there were schools in Djakarta and Bandung, Java, Indonesia; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Haad Yai, Thailand; and Menado, Celebes, Indonesia. In early 1975 there were 16 English language schools operating in the territory of the Far Eastern Division.
In the fall of 1974 the Far Eastern Division committee appointed a full-time English language school director for the division. The first director was Dr. M. T. Bascom.