Even to-day the old system persists, and millions of young Orientals are still wasting their time at this mind-petrifying nonsense. But alongside the old there has arisen a new system, running the whole educational gamut from kindergartens to universities, where Oriental youth is being educated along Western lines. These new-type educational establishments are of every kind. Besides schools and universities giving a liberal education and fitting students for government service or the professions, there are numerous technical schools turning out skilled agriculturists or engineers, while good normal schools assure a supply of teachers qualified to instruct coming student-generations. Both public and private effort furthers Western education in the East. All the European governments have favoured Western education in the lands under their control, particularly the British in India and Egypt, while various Christian missionary bodies have covered the East with a network of schools and colleges. Also many Oriental governments like Turkey and the native states of India have made sincere efforts to spread Western education among their peoples.[248]
Of course, as in any new development, the results so far obtained are far from ideal. The vicious traditions of the past handicap or partially pervert the efforts of the present. Eastern students are prone to use their memories rather than their intellects, and seek to cram their way quickly through examinations to coveted posts rather than acquire knowledge and thus really fit themselves for their careers. The result is that many fail, and these unfortunates, half-educated and spoiled for any sort of useful occupation, vegetate miserably, come to hate that Westernism which they do not understand, and give themselves up to anarchistic revolutionary agitation. Sir Alfred Lyall well describes the dark side of Western education in the East when he says of India: "Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural that in the last century certain philosophers should have assumed education to be a certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case, it was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt the intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of British rule. We have since discovered by experience, that, although education is a sovereign remedy for many ills—is indeed indispensable to healthy progress—yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration of this potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of which the disappointment is bitterly resented."[249]
Indeed, some Western observers of the Orient, particularly colonial officials, have been so much impressed by the political and social dangers arising from the existence of this "literate proletariat" of semi-educated failures that they are tempted to condemn the whole venture of Western education in the East as a mistake. Lord Cromer, for example, was decidedly sceptical of the worth of the Western-educated Egyptian,[250] while a prominent Anglo-Indian official names as the chief cause of Indian unrest, "the system of education, which we ourselves introduced—advisedly so far as the limited vision went of those responsible; blindly in view of the inevitable consequences."[251]
Yet these pessimistic judgments do not seem to make due allowance for the inescapable evils attendant on any transition stage. Other observers of the Orient have made due allowance for this factor. Vambéry, for instance, notes the high percentage of honest and capable native officials in the British Indian and French North African civil service (the bulk of these officials, of course, Western-educated men), and concludes: "Strictly conservative Orientals, and also fanatically inclined Europeans, think that with the entrance of our culture the primitive virtues of the Asiatics have been destroyed, and that the uncivilized Oriental was more faithful, more honest, and more reliable than the Asiatic educated on European principles. This is a gross error. It may be true of the half-educated, but not of the Asiatic in whose case the intellectual evolution is founded on the solid basis of a thorough, systematic education."[252]
And, whatever may be the ills attendant upon Western education in the East, is it not the only practicable course to pursue? The impact of Westernism upon the Orient is too ubiquitous to be confined to books. Granting, therefore, for the sake of argument, that colonial governments could have prevented Western education in the formal sense, would not the Oriental have learned in other ways? Surely it is better that he should learn through good texts under the supervision of qualified teachers, rather than tortuously in perverted—and more dangerous—fashion.
The importance of Western education in the East is nowhere better illustrated than in the effects it is producing in ameliorating the status of women. The depressed condition of women throughout the Orient is too well known to need elaboration. Bad enough in Mohammedan countries, it is perhaps at its worst among the Hindus of India, with child-marriage, the virtual enslavement of widows (burned alive till prohibited by English law), and a seclusion more strict even than that of the "harem" of Moslem lands. As an English writer well puts it: "'Ladies first,' we say in the West; in the East it is 'ladies last.' That sums up succinctly the difference in the domestic ideas of the two civilizations."[253]
Under these circumstances it might seem as though no breath of the West could yet have reached these jealously secluded creatures. Yet, as a matter of fact, Western influences have already profoundly affected the women of the upper classes, and female education, while far behind that of the males, has attained considerable proportions. In the more advanced parts of the Orient like Constantinople, Cairo, and the cities of India, distinctly "modern" types of women have appeared, the self-supporting, self-respecting—and respected—woman school-teacher being especially in evidence.
The social consequences of this rising status of women, not only to women themselves but also to the community at large, are very important. In the East the harem is, as Vambéry well says, the "bulwark of obscurantism."[254] Ignorant and fanatical herself, the harem woman implants her ignorance and fanaticism in her sons as well as in her daughters. What could be a worse handicap for the Eastern "intellectual" than his boyhood years spent "behind the veil"? No wonder that enlightened Oriental fathers have been in the habit of sending their boys to school at the earliest possible age in order to get them as soon as possible out of the stultifying atmosphere of harem life. Yet even this has proved merely a palliative. Childhood impressions are ever the most lasting, and so long as one-half of the Orient remained untouched by progressive influences Oriental progress had to be begun again de novo with every succeeding generation.
The increasing number of enlightened Oriental women is remedying this fatal defect. As a Western writer well says: "Give the mothers education and the whole situation is transformed. Girls who are learning other things than the unintelligible phrases of the Koran are certain to impart such knowledge, as daughters, sisters, and mothers, to their respective households. Women who learn housewifery, methods of modern cooking, sewing, and sanitation in the domestic-economy schools, are bound to cast about the home upon their return the atmosphere of a civilized community. The old-time picture of the Oriental woman spending her hours upon divans, eating sweetmeats, and indulging in petty and degrading gossip with the servants, or with women as ignorant as herself, will be changed. The new woman will be a companion rather than a slave or a toy of her husband. Marriage will advance from the stage of a paltry trade in bodies to something like a real union, involving respect towards the woman by both sons and fathers, while in a new pride of relationship the woman herself will be discovered."[255]
These men and women of the newer Orient reflect their changing ideas in their changing standards of living. Although this is most evident among the wealthier elements of the towns, it is perceptible in all classes of the population. Rich and poor, urban and rural, the Orientals are altering their living standards towards those of the West. And this involves social changes of the most far-reaching character, because few antitheses could be sharper than the living conditions prevailing respectively in the traditional East and in the modern Western world. This basic difference lies, not in wealth (the East, like the West, knows great riches as well as great poverty), but rather in comfort—using the word in its broad sense. The wealthy Oriental of the old school spends most of his money on Oriental luxuries, like fine raiment, jewels, women, horses, and a great retinue of attendants, and then hoards the rest. But of "comfort," in the Western sense, he knows virtually nothing, and it is safe to say that he lives under domestic conditions which a Western artisan would despise.[256]