THE GROWTH OF WESTERN EDUCATION.
The rising generation represent the India of the future, and though
those who come within the orbit of the Western education we have
introduced still constitute only a very small fraction of the whole
youth of India, their numbers and their influence are growing steadily
and are bound to go on growing. If we are losing our hold over them, it
is a poor consolation to be told that we still retain our hold over
their elders. I therefore regard the estrangement of the young Indian,
and especially of the young Hindu who has passed or is passing through
our schools and colleges, as the most alarming phenomenon of the present
day, and I am convinced that of all the problems with which British
statesmanship is confronted in India none is more difficult and more
urgent than the educational problem. We are too deeply pledged now to
the general principles upon which our educational policy in India is
based for even its severest critics to contemplate the possibility of
abandoning it. But for this very reason it is all the more important
that we should realize the grave defects of the existing system, or, as
some would say, want of system, in order that we may, so far as
possible, repair or mitigate them. There can be no turning back, and
salvation lies not in doing less for Indian education, but in doing
more and in doing it better.
Four very important features of the system deserve to be noted at the
outset:--(1) Following the English practice, Government exercises no
direct control over educational institutions other than those maintained
by the State, though its influence is brought in several ways indirectly
to bear upon all that are not prepared to reject the benefits which it
can extend to them; (2) Government has concentrated its efforts mainly
upon higher education, and has thus begun from the top in the
over-sanguine belief that education would ultimately filter down from
the higher to the lower strata of Indian society; (3) instruction in the
various courses, mostly literary, which constitute higher education is
conveyed through the medium of English, a tongue still absolutely
foreign to the vast majority; and (4) education is generally confined to
the training of the intellect and divorced not only, absolutely, from
all religious teaching, but also, very largely, from all moral training
and discipline, with the result that the vital side of education which
consists in the formation of character has been almost entirely
neglected.
To make the present situation intelligible, I must recapitulate, however
briefly, the phases through which our Indian system of education has
passed. The very scanty encouragement originally given, to education by
the East India Company was confined to promoting the study of the
Oriental languages still used at that time in the Indian Courts of Law
in order to qualify young Indians for Government employment and chiefly
in the subordinate posts of the judicial service. After long and fierce
controversies on the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as
the more suitable vehicle for the expansion of education, Macaulay's
famous Minute of March 7, 1835, determined a revolution of which only
very few at the time foresaw, however faintly, the ultimate
consequences. Lord William Bentinck's Government decided that "the
great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of
English literature and science, and that all the funds appropriated for
the purpose of education would be best employed in English education
alone."
Another influence--too often forgotten--had at least as large a share as
Macaulay's in this tremendous departure. That was the influence of the
great missionary, Dr. Alexander Duff, who inspired the prohibition of
suttee and other measures which marked the withdrawal of the countenance
originally given by the East India Company to religious practices
incompatible, in the opinion of earnest Christians, with the sovereignty
of a Christian Power. Duff had made up his mind, in direct opposition to
Carey and other earlier missionaries, that the supremacy of the English
language over the vernaculars must be established as a preliminary to
the Christianization of India. He had himself opened in 1830 an English
school in Calcutta with an immediate success which had confounded all
his opponents. His authority was great both at home and in India, and
was reflected equally in Lord Hardinge's Educational Order of 1844,
which threw a large number of posts in the public service open to
English-speaking Indians without distinction of race or creed, and in
Sir Charles Wood's Educational Despatch of 1854, which resulted in the
creation of a Department for Public Instruction, the foundation of the
three senior Universities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, the
affiliation to them of schools and colleges for purposes of examination,
and the inauguration of the "grant-in-aid" system for the encouragement
of native educational enterprise by guaranteeing financial support
according to a fixed scale to all schools that satisfied certain tests
of efficiency in respect of secular instruction. Duff's influence had
assured the supremacy of English in secular education, but he never
succeeded in inducing Government to go a step beyond neutrality in
regard to religious education, and though the remarkable successes which
he had in the meantime achieved, not only as a teacher but as a
missionary, amongst the highest classes of Calcutta society no doubt led
him to hope that, even without any active co-operation from Government,
the spread of English education would in itself involve the spread of
both Christian ethics and Christian doctrine, he never ceased to preach
the necessity of combining religious and moral with secular education or
to prophesy the evils which would ensue from their divorce.
The system inaugurated by the Educational Minute of 1835 and developed
in the Educational Orders of 1854 began well. The number of young
Indians who took advantage of it was relatively small. They were drawn
mostly from the better classes, and they were brought into direct
contact with their English teachers, many of them very remarkable men
whose influence naturally, and often unconsciously, helped to form the
character of their pupils as well as to develop their intellect--and
most of all, perhaps, in the mission schools; for the Christian missions
were at that time the dominant factor in Indian educational work. In
1854 when there were only 12,000 scholars in all the Government schools,
mission schools mustered four times that number and the rights they
acquired, under the Orders of 1854, to participate in the new
"grants-in-aid" helped them to retain the lead which in some respects,
though not as to numbers, they still maintain. For more than 50 years
after the Minute of 1835, and especially during the two or three decades
that followed the Orders of 1854, the new system produced a stamp of men
who seemed fully to justify the hopes of its original founders--not
merely men with a sufficient knowledge of English to do subordinate work
as clerks and minor _employés_ of Government, but also men of great
intellectual attainments and of high character, who filled with
distinction the highest posts open to Indians in the public service, sat
on the Bench, and practised at the Bar, and, in fact, made a mark for
themselves in the various fields of intellectual activity developed by
contact with the West. It is much to be regretted that no _data_ have
ever been collected to show what proportion men of this stamp bore to
the aggregate number of students under the new system. The proportion
was certainly small, but it was at any rate large enough to reflect
credit upon the system as a whole and to disguise its inherent defects.
It is characteristic of the narrowness of official interest in
educational questions that, whereas abundant statistics are forthcoming
on all subjects connected with material progress, no attempt seems to
have been made to follow the results of Western education statistically
into the after-life of high school pupils and college students. We know
that a certain number have emerged into public distinction, but there is
nothing to show, except in the most, general way, how many have turned
their education to humbler but still profitable account, or how many
have turned it to no account at all.
Paradoxical as it may sound, it is the eagerness of young India to
respond to our educational call that has led to the breakdown of the
system in some of the most important functions of education. In its
earlier stages those who claimed the benefit of the new system were
chiefly drawn from the intellectual _élite_--i.e., from the classes
which had had the monopoly of knowledge, though it was not Western
knowledge, before the introduction of Western education. With the
success which the new system achieved the demand grew rapidly, and the
quality of the output diminished as it increased in quantity. On the one
hand education came to be regarded by the Indian public less and less as
an end in itself, and more and more as merely an avenue either to
lucrative careers or to the dignified security of appointments, however
modest, under Government, and, in either case, to a higher social
_status_, which ultimately acquired a definite money value in the
matrimonial market. The grant-in-aid system led to the foundation of
large numbers of schools and colleges under private native management,
in which the native element became gradually supreme or at least vastly
predominant, and it enabled them to adopt so low a scale of fees that
many parents who had never dreamt of literacy for themselves were
encouraged to try and secure for some at least of their children the
benefit of this miraculous Open Sesame to every kind of worldly
advancement. Much of the raw material pressed into secondary schools was
quite unsuitable, and little or no attempt was made to sift it in the
rough. Numbers therefore began to drop out somewhere on the way,
disappointed of their more ambitious hopes and having acquired just
enough new ideas to unfit them for the humbler work to which they might
otherwise have been brought up[17]. On the other hand, whilst schools
and colleges, chiefly under private native management, were multiplied
in order to meet the growing demand, the instruction given in them
tended to get petrified into mechanical standards, which were appraised
solely or mainly by success in the examination lists. In fact, education
in the higher sense of the term gave way to the mere cramming of
undigested knowledge into more or less receptive brains with a view to
an inordinate number of examinations, which marked the various stages of
this artificial process. The personal factor also disappeared more and
more in the relations between scholars and teachers as the teaching
staff failed to keep pace with the enormous increase in numbers.
All these deteriorating influences, though they were perhaps not then so
visible on the surface, were already at work in the 80's, when two
important Government Commissions were held whose labours, with the most
excellent intentions, were destined to have directly and indirectly, the
most baneful effects upon Indian education. The one was the Education
Commission of 1882-83, appointed by Lord Ripon, with Sir William Hunter
as President, and the other the Public Service Commission of 1886-87,
appointed by Lord Dufferin, with Sir Charles Aitchison as President. It
is quite immaterial whether the steps taken by the Government of India
during the subsequent decade were actually due to the recommendations of
the Education Commission, or whether the Report of the Commission merely
afforded a welcome opportunity to carry into practice the views that
were then generally in the ascendant. The eloquence of the Commission,
if I may borrow the language appropriately used to me by a very
competent authority, was chiefly directed towards representing the
important benefits that would be likely to accrue to Government and to
education by the relaxation of Government's control over education, the
withdrawal of Government from the management of schools, and the
adoption of a general go-as-you-please policy. Amongst the definite
results which we undoubtedly owe to the labours of that Commission was
the acclimatization in India of Sir Robert Lowe's system of "payment by
results," which was then already discredited in England. Just at the
time when the transfer of the teacher's influence from European into
native hands was being thus accelerated, the Public Service Commission,
not a single member of which was an educational officer, produced a
series of recommendations which had the effect of changing very much for
the worse the position and prospects of Indians in the Educational
Department. Before the Commission sat, Indians and Europeans used to
work side by side in the superior graded service of the Department, and
until quite recently they had drawn the same pay. The Commission
abolished this equality and comradeship and put the Europeans and the
Indians into separate pens. The European pen was named the Indian
Educational Service, and the native pen was named the Provincial
Educational Service. Into the Provincial Service were put Indians
holding lower posts than any held by Europeans and with no prospect of
ever rising to the _maximum_ salaries hitherto within their reach. To
pretend that equality was maintained under the new scheme is idle, and
the grievance thus created has caused a bitterness which is not allayed
by the fact that the Commission created analogous grievances in other
branches of the public service. Nor was this all the mischief done. It
quickened the impulse already given by the Education Commission by
formally recommending that the recruitment of Englishmen for the
Education Department should be reduced to a _minimum_, and, especially,
that even fewer inspectors of schools than the totally inadequate number
then existing should be recruited from England. It is interesting to
note in view of subsequent developments that, whilst this recommendation
was tacitly ignored by the Provincial Governments in some parts of
India, as in Madras and in Bombay, it was accepted and applied in
Bengal--i.e., in the province where our educational system has
displayed its gravest shortcomings.
From that time forward the dominant influence in secondary schools and
colleges drifted steadily and rapidly out of the hands of Englishmen
into those of Indians long before there was a sufficient supply of
native teachers fitted either by tradition or by training to conduct an
essentially Western system of education. Not only did the number of
native teachers increase steadily and enormously, but that of the
European teachers actually decreased. Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee, the
Vice-Chancellor of the Calcutta University, told me, for instance, that
when he entered the Presidency College about 1880 all the professors,
except a few specialists for purely Oriental subjects, were English, and
the appointment, whilst he was there, of an Indian for the first time as
an ordinary professor created quite a sensation. Last year there were
only eight English professors as against 23 Indians, though, during the
same 30 years, the number of pupils had increased from a little over 350
to close on 700--i.e., it had nearly doubled. The Calcutta Presidency
College is, even so, far better off in this respect than most colleges
except the missionary institutions, in which the European staff of
teachers has been maintained at a strength that explains their continued
success. Out of 127 colleges there are 30 to-day with no Europeans at
all on the staff, and these colleges contain about one-fifth of the
students in all colleges. Of the other colleges 16 have only one
European professor, 21 only two, and so forth. In the secondary schools
the proportion of native to European teachers is even more overwhelming.
From the point of view of mere instruction the results have been highly
unsatisfactory. From the point of view of moral training and discipline
and the formation of character they have been disastrous.