Education -- India; India -- Politics and government -- 1857-1919; India -- Social conditions
But he is still more dangerous when he
remains a schoolmaster and uses his position to teach disaffection to
his pupils either by precept or by example.
I have already alluded to the unfortunate effect of the recommendations
of the Public Service Commission of 1886-7 on the native side of the
Education Service. But if it has become more difficult to attract to it
the right type of Indians, it has either become almost as difficult to
attract the right type of Europeans, or the influence they are able to
exercise has materially diminished. In the first place, their numbers
are quite inadequate. Out of about 500 Europeans actually engaged in
educational work in India less than half are in the service of the
State. Many of them are admittedly very capable men, and not a few
possess high University credentials. But so long as the Indian
Educational Service is regarded and treated as an inferior branch of the
public service, we cannot expect its general tone to be what it should
be in view of the supreme importance of the functions it has to
discharge. One is often told that the conditions are at least as
attractive as those offered by an educational career at home. Even if
that be so, it would not affect my contention that, considering how
immeasurably more difficult is the task of training the youth of an
entirely alien race according to Western standards, and how vital that
task is for the future of British rule in India, the conditions should
be such as to attract, not average men, but the very best men that we
can produce. As it is, the Education Department cannot be said to
attract the best men, for these go into the Civil Service, and only
those, as a rule, enter the Educational Service who either, having made
up their minds early to seek a career in India, have failed to pass the
Civil Service examinations, or, having originally intended to take up
the teaching profession in England, are subsequently induced to come out
to India by disappointments at home or by the often illusory hope of
bettering their material prospects. When they arrive they begin work
without any knowledge of the character and customs of the people. Some
are employed in inspection and others as professors, and the latter
especially are apt to lose heart when they realize the thanklessness of
their task and their social isolation. In some cases indifference is the
worst result, but in others--happily rare--they themselves, I am
assured, catch the surrounding contagion of discontent, and their
influence tends rather to promote than to counteract the estrangement of
the rising generation committed to their charge. Some men, no doubt,
rise superior to all these adverse conditions and, in comparing the men
of the present day with those of the past, one is apt to remember only
the few whose names still live in the educational annals of India and to
forget the many who have passed away without making any mark. The fact,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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