Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

CHAPTER XVII.

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.