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the home-land constituted themselves into the General Council of Education in India, and stimulated public interest in missionary endeavour, religious and secular, by publishing pamphlets, delivering lectures, and conducting revival meetings. Upon all persons connected with the Government of India, they perseveringly pressed the urgency of ever-increasing efforts to banish illiteracy from the land; and, as we have seen at the end of the last chapter, they petitioned Lord Ripon, the newly-appointed Governor-General, to be pleased to enquire into the extent to which effect had been given, and was being given, to the principles enunciated by the Educational Despatch of 1854.

Some Points in the Petition of the General Council

of Education in India to Lord Ripon.

The authors of the petition pointed out that whereas in England almost one-twentieth of the revenues was being expended upon the education of the people, in India the proportion was only one-eightieth :* that whereas in England the cost of education worked out to 2s. 6d. per head of population, in India it was less than 1d. a head. They also drew attention to the fact that there was, on the average of all India, only one institution for every 14 square miles of country; and that, while in England, about 160 children in every thousand were at school, in India the figure was only nine. They further observed that the department for primary education in India had been carried on so feebly † that it had not kept pace with the natural increase in population, and that "notwithstanding what has been done during the last twenty-seven years, we are further from undertaking the education of the masses of the people than when we began; for while we did not add

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At present the Government spends £27 9s. on the education of each of the 8,331 graduates in their (Indian) colleges, only a fraction of whom ever take a degree, and on each of the 640,000 boys in lower and middle schools the sum of 2s. 10 d., while 14,000,000 are left uncared for."--Our Educational Policy in India-Johnston, 1880.

"In 1877-78 only £730,013 was spent on the entire education of about 200,000,000 of a population, and of that not more than £300,000 on the education of the most needy class. Why, the Government spent that same year, 443,776 on 'Stationery and Printing."" Our Educational Policy in India-Johnsto n.

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50,000 a year to our schools, the birth-rate added nearly 200,000 children of school age to the population of the country," so that "in 1881 there were more millions of uneducated children than in 1854, the year of the great Educational Despatch."*

The line taken by the General Council of Education in India in drawing a parallel between the condition of primary instruction in India and in England, was a proceeding entirely novel to India; for the progress of education in that country had hitherto been treated as parochial, and the practice had been to compare the advance of education in one Province with its expansion in another. But obviously the contrasting of public conditions in England and in India could not stop at education. The comparison had to be extended of necessity in all directions; and it was possibly no mere co-incidence that the Government of India Resolution which foreshadowed the introduction of Local Self-Government into India, synchronized with the appointment of the Education Commission of 1882.

The Personnel and Instructions of the Education Commission of 1882.

Having resolved upon appointing a Commission to enquire into the state of education in India, Lord Ripon was solicitous that it should, above all things, be a truly representative body. He therefore recruited its members from the prominent officials and from the best-known public men in each of the administrative units of British India. Mr. (afterwards Sir) W. W. Hunter was appointed President with Mr. B. L. Rice, Director of Public Instruction in Mysore and Coorg, as Secretary. The Commission was instructed that its duty "should be

Hitherto not even the most optimistic legislator had dared to entertain, much less contemplate, the gigantic task of instructing all the children of the soil. And yet a hope that they would be eventually educated seems to have been vaguely cherished, among others, by the Duke of Argyll, who wrote to the Viceroy in 1871, "If we can once instil into the real upper classes of India, that one of the main duties of society is to provide sound primary instruction for the humbler class, we shall lay the real foundation for that general system of education which it is the desire of Your Excellency's Govern ment to establish." The 'filtration theory" had not yet been discredited, although it had been on trial so many years.

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to enquire into the manner in which effect has been given to the Despatch of 1854, and to suggest such methods as it might think desirable, with a view to more completely carrying out the policy* therein laid down" "For the Government of India," continued Lord Ripon, "is firmly convinced of the soundness of that policy, and has no wish to depart from the principle upon which it is based."

The Commission gets to work. Its Plan of Operation.

Work assigned to the Provincial Committees.

The Commissioners assembled in Calcutta for the first time on the 18th of February, 1882, and sat regularly till the 31st March following. Before its first collective session was concluded, the members from each Province, official and non-official, were constituted into Provincial Committees. † Each Committee was required to prepare a report furnishing a full presentation of the actual state of education on the 31st of March, 1882, prefaced by a statistical summary of the area and population of the Province as determined by the census of 1881; an account of its physical characteristics; a description of the social condition of the people and of the languages spoken by them; and recommendations for the future of their education. To facilitate the collection of "evidence" the Commissioners drew up a series of questions which were everywhere to be proposed to witnesses, whose examinationin-chief and answers in cross-examination were committed to print. By this procedure a considerable volume of carefully weighed and valuable "evidence" was obtained, recording every shade of opinion on educational conditions and problems. In the course of the eight months which intervened before the reassembling of the Commissioners, the President made a tour of the Provinces,

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"The main object of the Despatch is to divert the efforts of the Government from the education of the higher classes, upon whom they had up to that date heen too exclusively directed, and to turn them to the wider diffusion of education among all classes of the people, and especially to the provision of primary instruction for the masses." Parliamentary Blue Book, 1870.

†The members of the Bengal Provincial Committee were A. W. Croft (Chairman), W. R. Blackett, A. M, Bose, Bhoodeb Mookerjee and Jotendro Mohun Tagore.

and in each a session of the Provincial Committee was held for the examination of witnesses.

Survey of the Bengal Presidency made by the Bengal Provincial Committee.

The Bengal Provincial Committee made an educational survey of the Presidency of Bengal, comprising as it then did Bengal Proper, Bihar, Orissa and Chota Nagpur. In their report they dwelt on the great extent of the Province, on its varied physical features, on the diverse ethnic elements of its dense population, on the sharply contrasted social and religious condition of its different people, and on the manifold languages spoken within its boundaries-factors which necessarily complicated the already difficult problem of providing suitable education to a population of 69,536,861 souls. They observed that the people subsisted mainly on vegetables, and that 94 per cent. of them lived in villages. Meanwhile, in England the rural population was only 35 per cent. and in France, pre-eminently an agricultural country, the percentage of the peasantry did not exceed half the total inhabitants of the land. They pointed out that the most striking and important feature in the social economy of Bengal was that its rustic population was far in excess of the requirements of agriculture-there being on an average less than one acre per head. Had it not been for the communistic principles which underlie the Hindu social organization in its village system; had it not been for the caste guilds and the joint-family system, the masses could not have upborne against the pressure of overpopulation even in years of an average harvest. The effects of the density of population were more and more felt in the low standard of living, in the exhaustive processes of agriculture, in the yearly encroachments of arable land upon village commons and pasturage, and in the consequent deterioration of land, of cattle, and of man. From these baneful effects escape, the Committee observed, was not found in emigration, for the people did

not readily migrate from one part of India to anothermuch less to a country beyond the seas.

The Report of the Commission.

The Commission re-assembled in Calcutta on the 5th of December, and continued in session till the 16th of March, 1883: when having marshalled the information which had been collected, it proceeded to formulate its recommendations. These were included in its final report, the writing of which devolved upon the President, assisted by Mr. A. W. Croft, Director of Public Instruction, Bengal, Rev. W. Miller, Principal of the Madras Christian College, Mr. A. W. Howell, Commissioner of Berar, Mr. W. Lee-Warner, first Assistant Commissioner of Satara, Bombay, and Mr. K. Deighton, Principal of the Agra College. The chapters on vernacular education, which alone are relevant to these pages, were written by Mr. Lee-Warner.

In submitting their Report to the Government of India, the Commissioners made the following Recommendations in respect of elementary vernacular education :—

(1) RECOMMENDATIONS ON INDIGENOUS

EDUCATION.

That an indigenous school be defined as one established or conducted by natives of India on native methods.

That all indigenous schools, whether high or low, be recognized and encouraged, if they serve any purpose of secular education whatsoever.

That the best practicable method of encouraging indigenous schools of a high order, and desiring recognition, be ascertained by the Education Departments in communication with Pandits, Maulavis, and others interested in the subject.

That preference be given to that system which regulates the aid given mainly according to the results of examinations.

That special encouragement be afforded to indigenous schoolmasters to undergo training, and to bring their relatives and probable successors under regular training.

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