The Passing of Empire

by H. Fielding

Government accepts a certain number into its service, because the first ideal of Government is a man who can fill up forms and returns, speedily, accurately, and punctually. They can do that. When they have district work to do they fail, because they have no personality, no freedom of thought, and because the people despise them. The old officials whom we took over from the Burmese Government, whatever their defects, had "auza"—personality. It is a commonplace to say that the Burmese have deteriorated. That is not true. They have as much potentiality as before, but this potentiality is wiped out by "education." Far from being really educated, they are merely stuffed, and their natural abilities stifled. Moreover, they cease to be Burmans, or Madrassis, or Bengalis, and become a sort of hybrid. This is due to their English masters, who are obsessed with the idea that the only way to "educate" anyone is to turn him into a plaster Englishman. I have had some experience of these unfortunate boys who have taken degrees.

Personally, if I had to administer a difficult district, I should choose my Burmese assistants from men who had never been to school, and to satisfy Government I would engage some B.A.'s and F.A.'s to be their clerks and fill up the forms. I should be sorry for the B.A.'s, because I think they have as good stuff in them as the others, but their want of education has unfitted them for work requiring "auza."

That is really what it amounts to; the school-trained boy is not educated, whereas the boy brought up in contact with the world is perforce educated. The first is a hothouse plant; the second a useful field plant.

I am aware that current opinion puts down the failure of the educated young Indian to his want of religion. He has been educated out of his own faith and not accepted into any other; hence his want of character. Of all the wild shibboleths about India and the Indians this is, I think, the wildest. That a man is injured by being brought to see the foolishness of caste, of infant marriage, of harems and zenanas, of all the forms and ceremonies with which all religions are covered, seems to me a triumph of illogic. Only the "Occidental mind" at its best could conceive such an idea. In so far as education destroys these ideas it does good. Wherein it harms him is by taking him apart from his people, rendering him not desirous to help them but to disown them. He is taught that to be an Englishman should be his ideal—that he "should cultivate English habits of thought"—as if true thought had any habits—so that, finally, he can't think at all. He is directed to wrong ideals; he is rendered unhappy; he is dépaysé; he is useless for any work, except being a clerk or lawyer; he has no more character than a jelly-fish. Instead of wishing to lead his people he wishes to identify himself with the English Government, be a civilian, and rule his people. He should be filled with a boundless confidence in the future of his people, and that it is his duty to help that future to be realised. He is discouraged and rendered hopeless. Instead of being a help he is the greatest danger his own people will have to meet when they move forward. He is a danger to all.

The Education Department of the Government of India is the new Frankenstein, and the Higher Education is its monster. The students have sunk under their "education," and in consequence they are unhappy. Who wonders? But, in fact, an alien Power cannot introduce or work any real system of education. It must be indigenous—something of the soil, and not exotic. It, like self-government, must begin with small things in the village and gradually rise.

Like all things, if it is to live and prosper and extend it must have a soul. And the soul of education, like the soul of life, is an emotion tending towards a desired end. The desired end of education is the rise and progress not merely of the individual but of the nation. That has been the soul of the progress of Japan; that must be the soul of the progress of any people; and education will only be enthusiastically taken up when it is seen to be a means to that end.

Such an education cannot be given by Englishmen. Any Education Department must be Provincial and draw its vigour from below. It must not be a machine governed from Simla with text-books as thumbscrews and manuals as beds of Procrustes.

Before there can be a real Education Department it must be entirely native of the Province, responsible to the Province for its success. Can we create such a Department? I think we could, slowly, by handing our village schools as much as possible to Village Councils, district schools to District Councils, and the University to the head Provincial Assembly when it comes into being. They will each have to think out what result they want, and then how to attain that result.

But all must begin with the village; within it alone is the germ cell of all future progress.