Theodore Morison

“ Proof of this may be found in the almost daily experience that English education estranges men from sympathy with uneducated or only slightly educated wives. When once the husband has learned to look with European eyes, he finds it difficult to exchange ideas with his Indian wife, and she, in spite of her docile wish to admire and obey, no doubt finds him incomprehensible. That is the reason why the young men are insisting so passionately on female education, and why so many of them actually teach their wives English after marriage. ”

“ In the association of masters and boys, in their influence upon character, and in the creation of a healthy and manly tone among the boys, lies the distinctive and almost solitary merit of our historic public schools, and the same educational tradition is carried on in the Universities, where the junior Dons undeniably import an element of thoughtfulness into undergraduate life. This is the best characteristic of English education, and Englishmen would know how to transplant it to India. ”

“ This is singularly unjust both to the convincing power of English thought and the sincerity of Indian nature. The Indian does not, of course, become an Anglo-Saxon because he is a disciple of John Stuart Mill, but he ceases to be the intellectual child of the Maulvis and Pandits; a new compound is formed, from which the English element can never again be separated. ”

“ It is not a conciliatory platitude to cover an awkward situation, but the expression of an intense conviction, often uttered by educated Indians, that the regeneration of their people depends upon the introduction into India of Western thought and Western education. European culture necessarily comes to them through the medium of English, and it is therefore to the great masters of English thought that their homage is chiefly paid. This is how they come to be such warm advocates of the study of English literature by their countrymen. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say that upon the character of the education given in our colleges depends the content or discontent of India. The English-educated class forms whatever public opinion exists in India with regard to political affairs. It is, of course, true that they form only a microscopically small fraction of the whole population, but yet in the long-run it is their opinion which is likely to prevail, because there is no other class which holds any opinions at all upon public questions. ”

“ Of bright or intellectual society he knows nothing. Even his class-fellows are so scattered about the bazaar that he cannot count upon meeting them easily and frequently. He rarely has access to a library or reading-room, nor are there social or literary societies which he can join. Where there is such an absence of corporate life in the college it is well-nigh impossible for the English professors to enter into and influence the lives of the students, as do the Dons at the English University. ”

“ A German who had himself been well taught, and who came from a society in which the art of teaching is valued and understood, would have had before him in India a familiar task with which he would have grappled successfully; but, neither in his own experience as a boy, nor from the opinions prevalent in the schoolmaster's world, would an Englishman learn to appreciate the value and importance of good teaching, or understand the advantages of uniformity in instructional methods. ”

“ The consequence has been that every professor in India has been a law to himself, and that the greatest inequalities prevail in the efficiency of teaching. But the conception of education now put to the front is one which is familiar to every public-school boy and University man, and which appeals to an Englishman's idea of the 'right thing' in education. ”

“ Furious controversies have raged round University education for the last three or four years in India, and in the multitude of technical details round which the battle has been fought the English reader is apt to lose sight of the central policy at issue, but it is one which is not only easily intelligible, but which embodies a conception of education which is thoroughly familiar to all Englishmen. ”

“ The day scholar is to be turned into a boarder, and, instead of being allowed to roam at will about the bazaar, beguiling the vacuity of his leisure hours with dubious acquaintances, he is to be compelled to live in a college quadrangle or hostel, where he and his companions will have access to libraries, and clubs, and common rooms, and will be able to live a corporate college life, in which they will be under discipline, and in which their parents will have reasonable assurance that their sons are not going morally, mentally, and physically to the bad. ”

“ That a master should know how to teach has never been considered an essential qualification at English schools, and, therefore, very few 'Varsity men go through a training in pedagogics. Under the old conception of education in India, the student's guardians were responsible for his moral and physical training, and the college only undertook to supervise his intellectual development. Such a conception of education was perhaps inevitable when the people were hostile to English education, and suspected the Government of ulterior motives upon their religion ”

“ Personally, I am strongly of opinion that it is working for good, that all the most earnest, hopeful movements which are at work in Indian society are more or less directly inspired by this new spirit, but I cannot deny that while in the transitional state some of its manifestations are hard to bear with unless a man both knows and sympathizes with the ideas which prompt them. ”

“ There are perhaps about a dozen colleges in the whole of the province, each situated in a large town, and all of them teaching simultaneously for the same public examinations. If, as is often the case, the father knows nothing of English or modern education, the boy decides for himself, in consultation with his master and school friends, which college he will join. He leaves his father's home furnished with an unusually large sum of money, and goes to one of the big towns in which a college is situated. ”

“ The course of an Indian boy's education is generally something like this: he learns to read and write in the local vernacular at his own home, because there are probably no educational facilities in the rural village in which his parents live. When about eleven or twelve he is sent to live at the house of a relation or friend in a neighbouring townlet which possesses a High School—that is, a school in which English is taught up to the standard of matriculation to the University. ”

“ Opportunities for meeting outside the class-room do not exist, and the Englishman who wishes to cultivate personal relations with any of his class has to invent occasions for private conversation with them.
The above is typical of the normal life at an Indian college. Exceptional institutions do exist, as at Aligarh, which is a residential college professedly copied from a Cambridge model; but, as a rule, Indian colleges are not centres of an organized social life, and they do not attempt to guide or control the student when he is outside the class-room. ”

“ An Englishman transferred from Oxford or Cambridge to a residential college in India would know at once what part he was expected to take in the life of the boarding-house or hostel, and he would know how to set about it He would reproduce in India those parts of his own experience at Harrow and Cambridge, or Rugby and Oxford, which had most influenced and impressed him, and, either from that reason, or from some bent of national character, it also appears to be the kind of educational work which Englishmen like best. ”

“ It is no small part of the merit of the new policy that it contemplates a system of education which will be thoroughly understood by the men who have to carry it out, and that it demands the application to India of the tradition of English education. ”

“ In the social life of the college the English members of the staff will be expected to take a prominent part. The principal administrative officers of the hostels will be Englishmen—that is to say, they will do work similar to that of a house-master at a public school or a tutor at college. They will. take part in athletic games, and join the literary and social clubs which will inevitably sprint up where a number of young men are collected together. ”

“ The great mass of the agricultural population is as yet only concerned with the chances of the harvest, the gossip of the village, or the propitiation of the local ghost; but if ever they so far widen their mental outlook as to admit political conceptions, they will draw their ideas from the intellectual minority above them. ”