different, and the beginning of the influence which has proved
so disastrous on the men’s side is already felt. The Head of one
Government Normal school stated, “Our education cannot fail to
undermine their previous ideas,” and then commented afterwards on the
ineffectiveness of the moral instruction she was trying to introduce.
In some of the Government schools where the Principal is a woman
of special ability and tact, moral instruction is given, but as a
rule it is not attempted. In the Government mixed colleges there is
naturally no influence of this nature. In the Indian schools religious
instruction is the rule, its character, as indicated in the reports to
the Allahabad Conference, differing enormously in different places. In
some it is carefully thought-out moral instruction, linked with those
ideas in the particular religious faith which bear it out. The Benares
school is a typical example of this; the whole school join in morning
_puja_, to Sarasvati, the goddess of learning, and there are
special times during the week for instruction from the Sanatana Dharma
series. The new Hindu High school in Bombay is visited once a week for
the purpose by a Brahman, and a small catechism of a more orthodox
nature is in use. The only Buddhist girls’ Anglo-Vernacular school
in Burma is marked by a strong religious tone. Instruction is given
daily by an elderly priest to the whole school together, “in order that
they may feel religion is the most important thing in daily life and
therefore must be daily.” A specimen of the catechism used is typical:--
“What are the three things to seek daily?
Truth, Knowledge, Righteousness.”
“What will you do when you go home?
We will do salutation to our parents.”
“And afterwards?
We will do our work.”
“And in the morning?
Our first thought will be of righteousness.”[158]
Religious and moral instruction is now given in most of the Parsi
schools of Bombay under the auspices of a special Zoroastrian
Association. This is, I understand, an innovation of the last ten
years. In the schools under committees of different faiths the same
difficulty is felt as in the Government schools. It is solved in one
case by carefully prepared moral instruction on an eclectic basis, in
another by parallel religious observances. There is no uniformity in
practice, but the universal attempt is a clear proof that the Indian
desire for education on a religious basis for their daughters is
genuine.
The Christian factor so far has been the predominating one,
for the “bulk of female Secondary education is provided by the
missionaries.”[159] The religious atmosphere is one of unity and
simplicity. It is part of the wonderful tolerance of Hinduism and
its desire to embrace other faiths in its pervading atmosphere, that
Hindu girls can share outwardly in Christian worship without apparent
realization of its incompatibility with their ancestral religion. The
daily instruction is given in class groups, and where the non-Christian
element enters largely there is usually a separate classification for
this. Its bearing is stated in simple direct terms by a teacher. “The
education of any child is not complete which has not led it consciously
to realize the supernatural, and the revelation of God in Christ.”
In the few schools where a “conscience clause” exists, it is not as
a rule taken advantage of. The girls in one convent who were thus
exempted sat in the back row quietly and were not asked questions;
they also attended chapel, but might take their own books with them.
Another curious instance of the working of the Hindu mind is seen in
the case of an Indian gentleman who withdrew his daughters from the
regular school lesson by virtue of the conscience clause, but sent
them back voluntarily to a special Scripture class held once a week.
Caste prejudice was possibly justified by this arrangement. The tone
and influence of the Christian schools is greatly appreciated; it is
this which fills the Diocesan School in Calcutta with pupils, although
a thorough education is available in the Bethune School. A high-caste
Brahman lady in Bombay testified in the warmest tones to the wonderful
character and spirit of the Catholic sisters who had educated her,
and to whom she had sent her daughters. It is not only the English
education which attracts, it is something more. It would be invidious
to multiply instances, but the testimony is practically universal to
the acceptability of educational work done in the name of Christ.
The three factors contributing to the education of women in India have
thus a varying contribution to make to the most fundamental element in
education, and it is this diversity which supplies the keynote to the
whole problem, and indicates the line for Western action in the future.
The share of the Government, as indicated by the present policy in
Eastern Bengal, Madras,[160] the United Provinces, and elsewhere will
of necessity become an increasing one in the direct establishment of
schools, if there is not a sufficient development of aided schools to
meet the rising tide. Its contribution to religion will be a negative
one. The spontaneous Indian schools which attempt to supply the need
are at their best--and they are not always at their best--only an
imperfect solution. It would be but a poor form of Christianity which
failed to recognize the diverse manners in which God has revealed
Himself to the world, and the truth of permanent value in the great
ethnic faiths of the world which finds its final interpretation in That
which is Perfect. There is nothing more striking in the modern reform
movements of India than the reflection in them of Christian thought and
idealism, and this is specially seen in the instruction given in the
girls’ schools. Christian hymns are used with certain specific verses
left out, the Lord’s Prayer is printed in a Parsi manual of devotion,
verses from Watts and Charles Kingsley are in the Benares series, and
the hope of Christ as the Lode Star of Indian thought can be read
in many a school manual. Together with all this is the perpetual
allegorizing of such facts in Indian literature as will not bear the
pure ethical light. Principal Paranjpe of the Fergusson College at
Poona, in arguing at the Bombay Educational Conference for a secular
basis for moral teaching, held that to make morality depend upon
religion is dangerous if the religious sanction comes to be no longer
regarded as binding. His speech is so illuminating as to be worth while
quoting in full:--“In times like ours where landmarks that were but
yesterday regarded as perennial are being removed to-day and are likely
to be forgotten to-morrow, it is best not to cling to too many rocks.
The one solid rock on which we can rest is our own reason. If eating
pork is a heinous sin with one set of people, beef with another, and
any meat at all with a third, how can the alleged basis of morality be
regarded as absolute! Especially when, as in India, there are various
religions, each religion divided into innumerable sects, and each sect
divided into many separate sections; when the feeling aroused by any
religious question is of a pitch which can hardly be conceived in
Western countries; when the respectability of a man is in inverse ratio
to the number of people he is able to associate with without coming
into conflict with the prevailing religious ideas--it will be seen that
the less we have to do with religion in moulding the character of young
children the better for our national being. Let boys be taught to see
that there are some principles which they can all believe irrespective
of the fact that they belong to one religion or several. It is only in
this way that our various races can be brought closer together.”[161]
To bring morality into relation with a religion which is ethical to
the core, and which has attained with modern science and historical
criticism only a fuller and deeper content, is to place it on a new
footing and to endow it with spiritual power. While full sympathy
must be extended to the Indian effort, the emphasis must fall on the
Christian schools. They alone can supply in full the religious element
so needed in Indian education. The present situation offers to them
in increasing measure an opportunity for a voluntary contribution of
the needed spiritual force and power to the educational development
of India. Their contribution, as already indicated, has been great,
but modern conditions demand something more. Old schools must be
remodelled, new schools started; independent work must be done in
adapting curricula to Indian ideas and the special needs of girls; the
whole educational machinery must be raised to the level of the standard
required for men if the opportunity for imparting this spiritual power
is to be retained.
No social or religious problem can bear isolation, and if this book has
treated the question of the education of women in detail and in its
technical bearings, the relation of that question to the Christianizing
of Indian life and thought is the main interest in its composition.
The problem is a question of character, but of character built upon
personal contact with the Christ-life in God--a question of environment
and curricula, but also of showing that Christianity is of the East,
and Eastern in its spiritual appeal; a question of womanhood, but
also of that more perfect human fellowship where Christ is all and
in all. “Jesus Christ, by the silent action of a lifetime, laid the
first emphasis on the identity of woman’s humanity rather than on the
difference of her sex, thus both dignifying her and man in his attitude
to her.”[162] The solution of India’s social problem lies in the
fulfilment of the Christian ideal, and the progress towards it must be
a united one, in which both sexes share alike. The negative influence
of the home is often found to be the strongest in the student life of
the great Christian colleges, and many an earnest man has fallen back
from what he seemed to have gained because of a silent, unseen woman.
The work of Christian education in leavening thought and producing
the atmosphere in which there is hope of the ultimate acceptance of
Christianity is regarded by many as the most potent influence for
the Kingdom of God in India. The great majority of converts in later
life, who belonged to the high-castes, have been drawn from the ranks
of those who have been educated in Christian schools, and in spite of
intense opposition there are actually men to-day who seek for baptism
during their college career.[163] There is the further, and perhaps in
the sure Providence of God the greater, result in the permeation of
Hindu society by Christian thought and sentiment, which may yet pave
the way for a movement of the higher castes to Christ. At the recent
anniversary services of the Prārthanā Samāj in Bombay, the sermon
preached by a Justice of the High Court, on the present day as “The
Age of the Holy Spirit, the Age of Education,” throbbed throughout
with the reverence of one who had studied at the feet of Jesus. The
long open hall was packed from end to end with young men who had been
touched by the new ideas; in one corner sat some twelve Indian women
whose sympathies were with them. The disparity of the two sexes in the
audience indicted how the leavening influence of Christian education
will be deprived of half its power unless it touches the family as
the unit of civilization. The “direct result” longed for by those
who teach in Christian schools is not lacking. It is unnecessary in
these days to contradict once more the impression that the baptism of
children and girls of immature age is attempted. There are some cases
of the baptism of mother and child together, where careful zenana
visiting has followed up the school pupil; others--and these are the
majority--are secret disciples whose whole environment is massed up
against an open confession. One Moslem girl in the higher classes of
a Christian school is convinced of the truth of Christianity; every
vacation her parents inquire whether she is a Christian yet, and she
knows that if she replies in the affirmative all the advantages which
her younger sisters are enjoying in another Christian school will
cease. The case is not an extreme one. There is a different story of a
girl in Burma who was found teaching the children of her jungle village
daily, and gathering them on Sundays for Bible stories and hymns,
“until,” as she put it, “some one comes who can do it better than I.”
Her former school knew nothing of it, and but for the chance visit of a
Commissioner’s wife the tale would never have been told. Surely this is
direct result.
Christian educational work has also its place in the problem of the
Indian Church. Ultimately the interpretation of Christ to India
must be through the Indian, and the building up of a strong Indian
Christian community is strategically necessary. The power of the Indian
Christian home is in proportion to the power of the woman. Yet only 43%
of the Christian community are being educated. The dangers of mass
movements and of illiterate, uninstructed Christianity on one side,
of europeanizing the convert and educating him beyond his capacity on
the other, show at the same time the necessity and the difficulty of
action. The less romantic educational work of industrial orphanages has
its place in the building up of a strong, true community. The training
of Christian girls as teachers, through whom the leavening process
will again work on the non-Christian village life, is perhaps the most
definite and most direct form of influence.
There is no more subtle problem than the lack of any characteristically
Indian note in the Indian Christianity which is now assuming some
numerical importance. “There is no doubt that the lack of vitality,
the half dead and half alive spirituality which is the present
characteristic of the Indian Church, is due to enforced conformity to
Western standards of what is Christian and what is not Christian.”[164]
It may be that this problem too has its relation to the education on
Christian and Oriental lines of the women, who have been from all time
the custodians of religion, the upholders of traditional custom, and
conservative rite.[165]
From whatever point the larger question of the whole country is viewed,
it seems to attain perspective and reality in relation to the education
of its womanhood, and it is only thus as part of one great Christian
movement that the feminist problem receives its right emphasis and
value.
XI
CONCLUSION
“Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of
the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of
the fulness of Christ.”
+EPHESIANS+ iv. 13.
The spiritual heritage of the twentieth century is marked by extreme
diversity and yet by a deep inward reality. The march of science and
commerce, and the development of international relationships have
given a new content and width to the world’s thought. Isolated life
is powerless, and a larger synthesis links the human race together.
All such relationship must inevitably have spiritual content. The
social upheaval, the claim of the individual for recognition, have a
determining influence on the interpretation of our faith. Pragmatism
in modern philosophy tests religion by its results. The religious
evolution necessitated by the play of international forces is all the
more critical in that it is to a certain extent unconscious. There is
a deep Christianity apart from the Church as it is, which has yet to
make the Church its own. The demand is now for reality--an embodiment
of religious principles in modern social conditions; for charity--a
sympathy with the ethnic faiths which is the surer for belief in the
finality of the Christian revelation; for unity, since the modern mind
cannot accept a Christianity which does not transcend and interpret all
political, social, and intellectual life. “It is not our duty to-day to
fight for a new religion; we have but to awaken into freshness of life
the fathomless depths of Christianity. In so far as we succeed in doing
this, we can completely satisfy the requirements of the new situation;
we can seek to realize a Christianity that shall be at once more
universal and more active and intent on disengaging itself from its
anthropomorphisms; at the same time we shall view as our very own the
wealth of religious profundity and inward experience which the older
Christianity has gathered through its centuries of service, and shall
seek to realize them in our own life.”[166]
The growth of the desire to make Christianity universal is perhaps the
most wonderful phase in the advance of thought; while in one sense
it is very old and a return to the primitive times of the faith, its
modern phase thrills with fresh content by the ever-present working
of the Spirit of God. The fresh light which criticism has shed on
the historical Jesus has thrown once more into relief His wonderful
doctrine of the brotherhood of men in the Fatherhood of God. The desire
is not so much to bring salvation to those whom a rigid theology long
condemned as “heathen,” as to give freely of the fulness received in
clear consciousness of the solidarity of the human race. The world’s
best thought must be in terms of Christian philosophy; the Kingdom is
conceived as present now in power; Christ is seen as the Fulfiller of
all that is true and eternal in the ancient Faiths, and essentially the
Saviour of the corporate life.
The appeal of this book is thus for the Christianizing of every factor
in the education of women in India. None of the three contributing
forces need be alien to the Spirit of Christ; their unity, their mutual
relationship, and the necessity of their presence in a transitional
period must be felt and realized. Can all this educational advance be
made, if not directly in the Name of Christ, at least in the power
of His Spirit? The Government influence must determine the tone and
character of the whole frame-work. Can the Educational Service be
supplied in all its branches with women who, while absolutely loyal to
the great principle of neutrality, yet seek through it the spiritual in
the material, and whose whole work in Empire-building is consciously
related to the Kingdom of Christ? India has known men of this type
in the Government Service, and has esteemed their strict neutrality
the more because of the Christian conviction which lay behind it. The
influence of Christian ethics in the Government schools behind such
moral instruction as is possible is enormous, and it naturally enters
into the teaching of secular subjects. The direct influence permitted
out of school hours is a matter of great difficulty and calls for the
utmost discretion. If the Government policy were ultimately modified so
as to permit of parallel religious instruction, the direct opportunity
would be present, but in the meantime indirect religious influence has
a very definite place.
The spontaneous Indian element will have an important contribution to
make in the determining of the curricula. Will the Indian committees,
who need the help of English women, be able to secure those of the
highest talent and educational qualifications, who for the sake of
Christ will give them of their best and remain, if silent, yet strong
in the Faith? This is hard and perplexing work, and calls for strong
personalities, but it is fraught with endless possibility. India will
never be won if she does not behold Christianity in her midst lived in
the lives of those who pursue their ordinary vocation in the Spirit of
the Master.
These suggestions are made with hesitation lest their attraction should
weigh with those who could take the more definite line of associating
themselves with the educational work in India which is done directly
in the name of Christ. The development of this work on sound lines
by women of experience and of the highest educational qualifications
is, as has been indicated in the preceding chapter, the keynote to
the whole problem. In no work is there such a magnificent sphere of
influence as in this. A spiritual heritage involves responsibility and
opportunity. Nearly a century of patient work for the women of India
is written in the annals of the Church: the task of the present day is
to enter into this work with the same earnest patience. The need for
action is urgent. It is not only that there are endless opportunities
for new work which are not being utilized, but that schools with an
excellent tradition are not being raised to the modern standard of
efficiency. They are inevitably handicapped by shortage in the English
staff. A young girl of little experience may find herself almost at
once at the head of some most complex institution, long before she
would ever have had such a position of responsibility at home. The
perpetual strain on those who work on at such tension prevents the due
result. In other cases the needed and desired expansion is checked by
lack of the trained educator who could supervise village schools and
their teachers, or who could put her energy and talent into building
up a first-class school for non-Christian girls in the centre of
some district where the new spirit is manifest. Facts indicate the
appointment in the future of women to act as Tutors or Directresses
of Studies to the girl students in the mixed mission colleges. There
is the possibility also of women’s Christian colleges. On every side
the need is apparent, and the power to meet it lies with the women
of the English-speaking countries. It is work which makes demands on
intellect, on character, and on the religious nature. The hesitation
to respond to it springs in part from the sense of reverence for
things sacred. There are women in educational circles at home who hold
the truth of Christianity and its sufficiency to meet the need of the
whole world, but have not offered to share in educational missions
lest their contribution be not of the required type. There is need in
India for every type of worker. Christianity gains there, as at home,
by interpretation through diverse personalities, and there is room
for all who can reflect, it may be silently, its spirit and power in
the daily routine of work. A sense of vocation is a sense of personal
relationship to Him Who calls, and therein lies the motive power for
all educational work done in the name of Christ.
Appendix A
+CURRICULA+
Matriculation subjects of the five Universities of Calcutta, Madras,
Bombay, Panjāb, and Allahabad:--
English and Mathematics, compulsory in all.
History and Geography, compulsory in all except Calcutta.
Science, compulsory in Madras and Bombay; elective in the other three.
Classical language, compulsory in Calcutta, Bombay, Panjāb;
alternative with vernacular in Madras; elective in Allahabad.
Vernacular compulsory in Calcutta and Bombay; alternative with
classical in Madras; elective in Allahabad and Panjāb.
Drawing, elective in Allahabad and Panjāb.
+TEXT-BOOKS+
State Schools.--No choice.
Aided Schools.--Choice among authorized alternatives.
Unaided but recognized Schools.--Abstention from books disapproved by
Government.
Text-book Committees.--In every case appointed by Government, and
include official and non-official members; in some provinces places
are reserved for members of the staff of mission schools.
From Analysis of Educational Codes in British India.
Appendix B
+COURSES FOR THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS+
Training colleges and classes:--
(1) Graduate Course--one year. } Both in
(2) Undergraduate Course--two years. } English.
(3) Vernacular Course--after Middle examination--two years.
(4) Lower Vernacular Course--after
Upper Primary examination (women only)--two years.
Courses (1) and (2) are pursued in the Universities, in special English
Training schools for men, or in the Training Department of some
European schools.
Courses (3) and (4) in Government or mission Vernacular Training
schools for women. These consist frequently of very small groups in an
ordinary Middle or High school. A few students are also found in mixed
schools.
Appendix C
Diagram showing INCREASE OF FEMALE EDUCATION in India.
[Illustration:
In Burma 9.6% of girls of school age are receiving education.
” Bombay 7.2% ” ” ” ”
” Madras 6.8% ” ” ” ”
” Bengal 4.3% ” ” ” ”
” Punjāb 3.1% ” ” ” ”
” United
Provinces 1.3% ” ” ” ”
]
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