Indian Education: Retrospect and Prospect

Abstract

THE Universities of modern India owe very little to our ancient and medieval centres of learning. This opening remark of the University Education Commission's Report is apparently an academic observation, but to anyone aware of the value of continuity in culture and education, it reveals at once the basic defect and the tragedy of Indian education during the last century and a quarter. As against the principle that education should be organically related to environment and culture, the English system of education in India was founded on the hope that schools and colleges transmitting Western knowledge through the medium of English would create a new cultural type and a new culture. This hope could not be realised. Indeed, Grant, Macaulay, Wood, and Curzon, whose contribution to the establishment and development of English education in India was most outstanding, were officers or administrators with views about Indians and Indian culture which assured the defeat of their hopes that Indians would be anglicised or Europeanised. Curzon, in particular, distinguished himself by earning unpopularity and creating opposition because of those very measures which did him most credit as an administrator. He overhauled the whole educational administration, and his Indian Universities Act (I904) was a powerful corrective and stimulus. He may be considered the typical British administrator, because he possessed to a remarkable degree the good intentions and the arrogance, the efficiency and the disregard for sentiment, which Indian opinion has associated with the British rulers of India. At the conclusion of his historic address to the directors of public instruction called together at Simla in i905, he said: