Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
Try and imagine for a moment, however absurd it may seem, what would
have been the effect upon the brains of the youth of our own country if
it had been subject to Chinese rule for the last 100 years, and the
Chinese, without interfering with our own social customs or with our
religious beliefs, had taken charge of higher education and insisted
upon conveying to our youth a course of purely Chinese instruction
imparted through Chinese text-books, and taught mainly by Englishmen,
for the most part only one degree more familiar than their pupils with
the inwardness of Chinese thought and Chinese ethics. The effect could
hardly have been more bewildering than the effect produced in many cases
similar to that which I have instanced on the brain of the Indian youth
when he emerges from our schools and colleges.
It may be said that such cases are extreme cases, but extreme as they
are, they are not exceptional. The exceptions must be sought rather
amongst the small minority, who, in spite of all these drawbacks,
display such a wonderful gift of assimilation, or, it might perhaps be
more correctly termed, of intuition, that they are able to transport
themselves into a new world of thought, or at any rate to see into it,
as it were, through a glass darkly. But the number of those who possess
this gift has probably always been small, and smaller still, with the
reduction of the European element in the teaching staff, is the number
growing of those who have a fair chance of developing that gift, even if
nature has endowed them with it. A comparison of the Census Report of
1901 with the figures given in the Educational Statistics for 1901-2
shows that the total number of Europeans then engaged in Indian
educational work was barely, 500, of whom less than half were employed
by Government, whilst that of the Indians engaged in similar work in
colleges and secondary schools alone was about 27,500. As the number of
Indian students and scholars receiving higher education amounts to
three-quarters of a million, it is obvious that so slight a European
leaven, whatever its quality--and its quality is not always what it
should be--can produce but little impression upon so huge a mass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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