He gets up about 6, and having dressed (which is not a long process) he starts work. Until 10, if you go into his mess, you will see him "grinding" away at his text-book, under the most amazing conditions for work—usually stretched out upon his bed or sitting on the side of it. The room is almost always shared with some other occupant, usually with two or three or more other occupants, mostly engaged in the same task if they are students. At 10 the boy gets some food, and then goes of to his college for about four or five hours of lectures. A little after 3 in the afternoon he comes home to his mess, and between 3 and 5 is usually seen lounging about his room, dead tired but often engaged in discussion with his room-mates or devouring the newspaper, which is his only form of recreation and his only bit of excitement. At 5 he will go out for a short stroll down College-street or around College-square. This is his one piece of exercise, if such you can call it. At dusk he returns to his ill-lighted, stuffy room and continues his work, keeping it up, with a short interval for his evening meal, until he goes to bed, the hour of bed-time depending upon the proximity of his examination. A very large percentage when they actually sit for their examinations are nothing short of physical wrecks.
Dr. Williams proceeds to quote Dr. Mullick, an eminent Hindu physician who has devoted himself to helping young students:—
The places where the students live huddled up together are most hurtful to their constitutions. The houses are dirty, dingy, ill-ventilated, and crowded. Even in case of infectious sickness … they lie in the same place as others, some of whom they actually infect. Phthisis is getting alarmingly common among students owing to the sputum of infected persons being allowed to float about with the dust in crowded messes…. Most of them live in private messes where a hired cook and single servant have complete charge of his food and house-keeping, and things are stolen, foodstuffs are adulterated, badly cooked and badly served.
Dr. Williams, who states emphatically that "it is not exaggeration to say that the student is often half-starved," goes on to deal with the moral drawbacks of a life which is under no effective supervision and is not even under the restraints, implied in the term "good form," that play so important a part in Universities where there is a real collegiate life.
When you segregate your young men by thousands in the heart of this "city of dreadful night," amid conditions of life which are most antagonistic to moral and physical well-being… the result is a foregone conclusion, and it does not only mean physical degeneration, it also means moral degeneration, and it becomes a most potent predisposing factor in political disease. Of that there can be no shadow of doubt.
The material conditions are not, it is true, nearly so bad in many other parts of India as they are in Bengal, and especially in Calcutta (though the Bengalees claim the intellectual primacy of India), and it is on the moral and physical evils produced by those conditions that Dr. Garfield Williams chiefly dwells. But the intellectual evils for all but a small minority are in their way quite as grave, and they are inherent to the system. Take the case of a boy brought up until he is old enough to go to school in some small town of the mofussil, anywhere in India, by parents who have never been drawn into any contact, however remote, with Western ideas or Western knowledge. From these purely Indian surroundings his parents, who are willing to stint themselves in order that their son may get a post under Government, send him to a secondary school, let us say in the chief town of the district, or in a University city. There again he boards with friends of his family, if they have any, or in more or less reputable lodgings amidst the same purely Indian surroundings, and his only contact with the Western world is through school-books in a foreign tongue, of which it is difficult enough for him to grasp even the literal meaning, let alone the spirit, which his native teachers have themselves too often only, very partially imbibed and are therefore quite unable to communicate[18]. From the secondary school he passes for his University course, if he gets so far, in precisely the same circumstances into a college which is merely a higher form of school. Whilst attending college our student still continues to live amidst the same purely Indian surroundings, and his contact with the Western world is still limited to his text-books. Even the best native teacher can hardly interpret that Western world to him as a trained European can, and unless our student intends to become a doctor or an engineer, and has to pass through the schools of medicine or engineering, where he is bound to be a good deal under English teachers, he may perfectly well, and very often does, go through his whole course of studies in school and in college without ever coming into personal contact with an Englishman. How can he be expected under such conditions to assimilate Western knowledge or to form even a remote conception of the customs and traditions, let alone the ideals, embodied in Western knowledge?
Try and imagine for a moment, however absurd it may seem, what would have been the effect upon the brains of the youth of our own country if it had been subject to Chinese rule for the last 100 years, and the Chinese, without interfering with our own social customs or with our religious beliefs, had taken charge of higher education and insisted upon conveying to our youth a course of purely Chinese instruction imparted through Chinese text-books, and taught mainly by Englishmen, for the most part only one degree more familiar than their pupils with the inwardness of Chinese thought and Chinese ethics. The effect could hardly have been more bewildering than the effect produced in many cases similar to that which I have instanced on the brain of the Indian youth when he emerges from our schools and colleges.
It may be said that such cases are extreme cases, but extreme as they are, they are not exceptional. The exceptions must be sought rather amongst the small minority, who, in spite of all these drawbacks, display such a wonderful gift of assimilation, or, it might perhaps be more correctly termed, of intuition, that they are able to transport themselves into a new world of thought, or at any rate to see into it, as it were, through a glass darkly. But the number of those who possess this gift has probably always been small, and smaller still, with the reduction of the European element in the teaching staff, is the number growing of those who have a fair chance of developing that gift, even if nature has endowed them with it. A comparison of the Census Report of 1901 with the figures given in the Educational Statistics for 1901-2 shows that the total number of Europeans then engaged in Indian educational work was barely, 500, of whom less than half were employed by Government, whilst that of the Indians engaged in similar work in colleges and secondary schools alone was about 27,500. As the number of Indian students and scholars receiving higher education amounts to three-quarters of a million, it is obvious that so slight a European leaven, whatever its quality—and its quality is not always what it should be—can produce but little impression upon so huge a mass.
Our present system of Indian education in fact presents in an exaggerated form, from the point of view of the cultivation of the intellect, most of the defects alleged against a classical education by its bitterest opponents in Western countries, where, after all, the classics form only a part, however important, of the curriculum, and neither Latin nor Greek is the only medium for the teaching of every subject. From the point of view of the formation of character according to Western standards, and even from that of physical improvement, the case is even worse. In Western countries the education given in our schools, from the Board school to the University, is always more or less on the same plane as that of the class from which the boys who attend them are drawn. It is merely the continuation and the complement of the education our children receive in their own homes from the moment of their birth, and it moves on the same lines as the world in which they live and move and have their being. In India, with rare exceptions, it is not so, but exactly the reverse.
On the deficiencies of the system, from the moral point of view, a new and terribly lurid light has been shed within the last few years. There has been no more deplorable feature in the present political agitation than the active part taken in it by Indian schoolboys and students. It has been a prominent feature everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the Bengal provinces, where from the very outset of the boycott movement in 1905 picketing of the most aggressive character was conducted by bands of young Hindus who ought to have been doing their lessons. That was only the beginning, and the state of utter demoralization that was ultimately reached may be gathered from the following statements in the last Provincial Report on Education (1908-9), issued by the Government of Eastern Bengal:—