But the subject taught never matters much. The thing that does matter is the manner of teaching, and nearly all the schools and colleges I visited in India had the one common fault, that they tried to force knowledge into the mind by giving information. They treated the mind as a passive vessel to be filled through the channel of the ears. The method was by lecture, not by dialectic, and I at least have never learnt anything by being lectured. If the officials wish to reform our system of education in India, here, at the very basis of teaching, is where they might begin. They will find they are far too late if they hope to stifle the national aspiration for liberty by excluding the study of our own history and the works of Western thinkers. Those are plants that we ourselves have generously set in India, and they are too deep-rooted to be pulled up now. But to transform the ordinary teaching into real education would be a change indeed. The Gurukula (the word means The Master’s Home) that I have been describing takes no Government grant, and submits to no Government inspection; nor is it affiliated to a Government University, like the Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore. In the boarding houses of the Anglo-Vedic School and College a pupil’s total expenses come to 20 or 25 rupees a month. In the Gurukula the parents pay 10 rupees a month (£8 a year) for the complete education, including clothes, food, games, and all. But the cost for each boy is really about £15 a year, and the deficit is made up by the subscriptions of the Samajists. Fifteen pounds a year is a great deal for a poverty-stricken country like India, but I wish our public schools did not cost ten times as much. In the great Government school and college for Mohammedans at Aligarh the Principal told me the parents paid from 20 to 40 rupees a month according to the boy’s room (£16 to £32 a year). But that is a home of luxury, and I believe the money required to keep a son there often amounts to £45 or even £50 a year, as much as a third of the payment at one of our own public schools. [Illustration: IN THE GURUKULA. [_Face p. 310._ ] FOOTNOTES: [62] “Life and Teachings of Dayananda Saraswati,” by Bawa Chaju Singh (Lahore, 1903). [63] Speech at Lahore before the meeting of the Calcutta Congress, 1906. [64] “Our Struggle for Freedom: How to Carry it on”; see “Lala Lajpat Rai, the Man in his Word” (Madras, Ganesh and Co., 1907), p. 134-145. [65] _Ibid._, p. 197, “Indian Patriotism towards the Empire,” being an answer to a circular order from the Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab (May, 1906) requiring all schools to celebrate Empire Day in a certain manner. [66] _Ibid._, p. 141, “Our Struggle for Freedom.” [67] _Ibid._, p. 184, “The Swadeshi Movement.” [68] _Ibid._, p. 209, “The National Outlook.” [69] See Introduction, p. 17 ff. [70] For a full account of these events, see “The Story of My Deportation,” by Lajpat Rai (The Punjabi Press, Lahore, 1908).