Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
The material conditions are not, it is true, nearly so bad in many other
parts of India as they are in Bengal, and especially in Calcutta (though
the Bengalees claim the intellectual primacy of India), and it is on the
moral and physical evils produced by those conditions that Dr. Garfield
Williams chiefly dwells. But the intellectual evils for all but a small
minority are in their way quite as grave, and they are inherent to the
system. Take the case of a boy brought up until he is old enough to go
to school in some small town of the _mofussil_, anywhere in India, by
parents who have never been drawn into any contact, however remote, with
Western ideas or Western knowledge. From these purely Indian
surroundings his parents, who are willing to stint themselves in order
that their son may get a post under Government, send him to a secondary
school, let us say in the chief town of the district, or in a University
city. There again he boards with friends of his family, if they have
any, or in more or less reputable lodgings amidst the same purely Indian
surroundings, and his only contact with the Western world is through
school-books in a foreign tongue, of which it is difficult enough for
him to grasp even the literal meaning, let alone the spirit, which his
native teachers have themselves too often only, very partially imbibed
and are therefore quite unable to communicate[18]. From the secondary
school he passes for his University course, if he gets so far, in
precisely the same circumstances into a college which is merely a higher
form of school. Whilst attending college our student still continues to
live amidst the same purely Indian surroundings, and his contact with
the Western world is still limited to his text-books. Even the best
native teacher can hardly interpret that Western world to him as a
trained European can, and unless our student intends to become a doctor
or an engineer, and has to pass through the schools of medicine or
engineering, where he is bound to be a good deal under English teachers,
he may perfectly well, and very often does, go through his whole course
of studies in school and in college without ever coming into personal
contact with an Englishman. How can he be expected under such conditions
to assimilate Western knowledge or to form even a remote conception of
the customs and traditions, let alone the ideals, embodied in Western
knowledge?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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