The Indian girl learns easily and is often most eloquent. There are no better public speakers than are the Bengali women, who seem to share with their men in the alertness of their brain. A prominent educator of India said:—
I have come in contact with people from all over the world in my capacity as educator, but I believe there are no men of any country who can compare with the Indian in quickness of thought and in capacity to learn. Within the small round head of the Bengali is a dynamo of resistless energy, that is for ever working, either for good or bad, but which ever way it turns, we of England must recognize its power.
The crying need of India is the great teacher, both man and woman; the teacher who will really take an interest in his pupils and not feel the bar of race. This is the fault of the average man who comes to India, and if he does not have it when he arrives he soon acquires a pride in being one of the ruling race. The Indian boy and girl are extremely clever, and feel instantly this racial prejudice of the Englishman, and consequently resent his attitude of superiority. Tennyson’s indictment of English schoolmasters could be justly applied to many of the teachers in India to-day:—
Because you do profess to teach, and teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.
There are wanted teachers who will give the Indian boy and girl the true value of an education other than its advantages from an economic standpoint. That must be considered also, and in a land where the crowds are great and famines many, it assumes even a larger importance in the lives of the boys who must become the wage-earners, than it does in Western lands, where life is not such a fierce struggle for the necessities. But along with the training for the making of a livelihood should be given another training. These boys and girls of India who are just starting on the road that their Occidental brothers and sisters have been treading for many generations should be given the broader view of education, its worth and meaning. They should be taught by loving teachers the true knowledge of which so beautiful a definition is given by Bishop Mant:—
What is true knowledge! Is it with keen eye
Of Lucre’s sons to thread the mazy way?
Is it of civil rights, and royal sway,
And wealth political, the depths to try?
Is it to delve the earth, to soar the sky?