Between the years 1918 and 1920, compulsory education laws for primary grades were, indeed, enacted in the seven major provinces of India. This was largely the effect of an Indian political opinion which saw, in principle, at least, the need of a literate electorate in a future democracy.
The laws, however, although operative in some few localities, are permissive in character and have since remained largely inactive[1]--a result partly due to the fact that the period of their passage was the period of the "Reforms." "Dyarchy" came in, with its increased Indianization of Government. Education itself, as a function of Government, became a "transferred subject" passing into the hands of Indian provincial ministers responsible to elected legislative councils. The responsibility, and with it the unpopularity to be incurred by enforcement of unpopular measures, had now changed sides. The Indian ministers, the Indian municipal boards, found it less easy to shoulder the burden than it had been to blame their predecessors in burden-bearing. No elected officer, anywhere, wanted either to sponsor the running up of budgets or to dragoon the children of a resentful public into schools Undesired.
[1. For example: "The Bengal Legislature...passed an Act introducing the principle of compulsory primary education in May, 1919; but it does not appear that a single local authority in the province has availed itself of the option for which the Act provides"--"Primary Education in Bengal," London Times, Educational Supplement, Nov. 13, 1926, p. 484.
A recent official report prepared by Mr. Govindbhai H. Desai, Naib Dewan of Baroda, by order of the reigning prince, shows that although that state has had compulsory education for twenty years, its proportion of literacy is less than that of the adjoining British districts where education began much earlier than in Baroda, but where compulsion scarcely exists.]
Compulsory education, moreover, should mean free education. To build schools and to employ teachers enough to care for all the children in the land without charge would mean money galore--which must be taxed out of the people.
In one province--the Punjab--the Hindu element in the Legislature tried to meet one aspect of the crux by saddling the compelling act with a by-law exempting from school attendance all "Untouchables," otherwise known as "depressed classes." This idea, pleasant as it was for the élite, withered in the hands of unsympathetic British authority. As with the Maharajas,[2] so at the other end of the social scale, it would sanction no class monopoly of public education.
[2. See ante, p. 137.]
Thus Government spoke. But negative weapons, ever India's most effective arms, remained unblunted. How two Punjab cities used them is revealed as follows:[3]
[3. Progress of Edvfdtion in India, Eighth Quinquennial Review, Vol. I, p. 108.]
The percentage of boys of compulsory age at school has risen with the introduction of compulsion in Multan from 27 to 54 and in Lahore from 50 to 62. Since no provision has been made at either place for the education of the children belonging to the depressed classes and no proceedings have yet been taken against any defaulting parent, it is improbable that a much higher percentage of attendance can be expected in the near future.
Showing that there are more ways than one to keep the under-dog in his kennel!
In all British India, the total number of primary schools, whether for boys or girls, was, by latest official report, [4] 168,013. Their pupils numbered approximately 7,000,000. But there are in British India about thirty-six and a half million children of primary school age,[5] 90 per cent, of whom are scattered in groups averaging in school attendance forty children each." The education of these children presents all the difficulties that beset education of difficult folk in other difficult countries, plus many that are peculiar to India alone, while offsetting advantages are mainly conspicuous by their absence.[7]
[4. Statistical Abstract for British India, 1914-15 to 1923-24, p. 263.]
[5. Ibid., p. 24.]
[6. Progress of Education in India 1917-22, Vol. II, p. ??]
[7. Cf. Village Education in India, pp. 176-7.]
We of America have prided ourselves upon our own educational efforts for the Philippines, and in India that performance is frequently cited with wistful respect. Parallels of comparison may therefore be of interest.
We recall that in the Philippines our educational work has been seriously burdened by the fact that the islanders speak eighty-seven dialects [8] and have no common tongue. Against this, set the two hundred and twenty-two vernaculars spoken in India, [9] with no common tongue.
[8. Population of the Philippine Islands In 1916, H. Otîey Beyer, Manila, 1917, pp. 19-20.]
[9. Census of India, 1921, Vol. I, Part I, p. 193.]
In the Philippines, again, no alphabet or script aside from our own is used by the natives. In India fifty different scripts are employed, having anywhere from two hundred to five hundred characters each; and these are so diverse as to perplex or defeat understanding between dialects.
In the Philippines and in India alike, little or no current literature exists available or of interest to the masses, while in both countries many dialects have no literature at all. In the Philippines and in India alike, therefore, lack of home use of the shallow-rooted knowledge gained in the school produces much loss of literacy--much wastage of cost and effort.
In the Philippines, no social bars exist--no caste distinctions except the distinction between cacique and tao--rich man and poor man--exploiter and exploited. In India something like three thousand castes [10] split into mutually repellent groups the Hindu three-quarters of the population.
[10. Oxford History of India, p. 37.]
In the Philippines, whatever may be said of the quality of the native teachers, especially as instructors in English, their good will suffices to carry them, both men and women, from the training schools into little and remote villages and to keep them there, for two or three years at least, delving on their job. In India, on the contrary, no educated man wants to serve in the villages. The villages, therefore, are starved for teachers.
In the Philippines the native population hungers and thirsts after education and is ready to go all lengths to acquire it, while rich Filipinos often give handsomely out of their private means to secure schools for their own localities. In India, on the contrary, the attitude of the masses toward education for boys is apathy. Toward education for girls it is nearer antagonism, with a general unwillingness on the part of masses and classes alike to pay any educational cost.
The British Administration in India has without doubt made serious mistakes in its educational policies. As to the nature of these mistakes, much may be learned by reading the Monroe Survey Board's report[11] on education in the Philippine Islands. The policies most frequently decried as British errors in India are the very policies that we ourselves, and for identical reasons, adopted and pursued in our attempt to educate our Filipino charges. Nothing is easier than to criticize from results backward, though even from that vantage-point conclusions vary.
[11.A Survey of the Educational System of the Philippines, Manila Bureau of Printing, 1925.]
Queen Victoria, in 1858, on the assumption by the Crown of the direct Government of India, proclaimed the royal will that:[12]
[12. Foreshadowed in Lord Hardinge's Resolution oî 1844]
So far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to office in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified by their education, ability, and integrity duly to discharge.
Similarly President McKinley, in his instructions to the Hon. William H. Taft, as President of the first Philippines Commission, laid down that:[13]
[13. Letter from the Secretary of War, Washington, April 7, 1900.]
The natives of the islands...shall be afforded the opportunity to manage their own local affairs to the fullest extent of which they are capable, and...which a careful study of their capacities and observation of the workings of native control show to be consistent with the maintenance of law, order, and loyalty.
On both congeries of peoples the effect of these pronouncements was identical. Their small existing intelligentsia, ardently desiring office, desired, therefore, that type of education which prepares for office-holding.
Britain, as we have seen, began with another idea--that of developing Indian education on native lines. But under Indian pressure she soon abandoned her first policy;[14] the more readily because, counting with-out the Indian's egocentric mentality, she believed that by educating the minds and pushing forward the men already most cultivated she would induce a process of "infiltration," whereby, through sympathetic native channels, learning converted into suitable forms would rapidly seep down through the masses.
[14. The Heart of Aryavarta, the Earl of Ronaldshay, London, 1923, Chapters II and III.]
America, on her side, fell at once to training Fili-pino youths to assume those duties that President Mc-Kinley had indicated. At the same time, we poured into the empty minds of our young Asiatics the history and literature of our own people, forgetting, in our ingenuous altruism, the confusion that must result.
Oblivious of the thousand years of laborious nation-building that linked Patrick Henry to the Witenage-mot, drunk with the new vocabulary whose rhythm and thunder they loved to roll upon their nimble tongues, but whose contents they had no key to guess, America's new charges at one wild leap cleared the ages and perched triumphant at Patrick Henry's side: "Give us liberty or give us death!"
"Self-government is not a thing that can be 'given' to any people...No people can be 'given' the self-control of maturity," said President Wilson, [15] commenting on the situation so evoked. But such language found no lodgment in brains without background of racial experience. For words are built of the life-history of peoples.
[15. Constitutional Government in the United States, Woodrow Wilson, New York, 1908, pp. 52-3.]
And between the Filipino who had no history, and the Hindu, whose creative historic period, as we shall see, is effectively as unrelated to him as the period of Pericles is unrelated to the modern New York Greek, there was little to choose, in point of power to grasp the spirit of democracy.
Schools and universities, in the Philippines and in India, have continued to pour the phrases of western political-social history into Asiatic minds. Asiatic memories have caught and held the phrases, supplying strange meanings from their alien inheritance. The result in each case has been identical. "All the teaching we have received...has made us clerks or platform orators," said Mr. Gandhi.[16]
[16. Statement to the author, Ahmedabad, March, 1926.]
But Mr. Gandhi's view sweeps further still:[17]
[17. Indian Home Rule, M. K. Gandhi, Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1924, pp. 97-8, loo, 113.]
The ordinary meaning of education is a knowledge of letters. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. He knows fairly well how he should behave towards his parents, his wife, his children and his fellow villagers. He understands and observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness?...
It now follows that it is not necessary to make this educa-tion compulsory. Our ancient school system is enough...We consider your [modern] schools to be useless.
On such views as this, the Swarajist leader Lala Lajpat Rai makes caustic comment:[18]
[18. The Problem of National Education in India, George Alien anc. Unwin, London, 1920, pp. 79-80.]
There are some good people in India who do, now and then, talk of the desirability of their country leading a retired, isolated, and self-contained life. They pine for good old days and wish them to come back. They sell books which contain this kind of nonsense. They write poems and songs full of soft sentimentality. I do not know whether they are idiots or traitors. I must warn my countrymen most solemnly and earnestly to beware of them and of that kind of literature...The country must be brought up to the level of the most modern countries...in thought and life.
But whose shoulder is being put to the wheel in the enormous task of bringing 92 per cent, of the populace of British India--222,000,000 Indian villagers--"up to the level of the most modern countries," even in the one detail of literacy? Who is going to do the heavy a-b-c work of creating an Indian electorate on whose intelligence the work of a responsible government can be based?
A little while ago a certain American Mission Board, being well replenished in means from home and about to embark on a new period of work, convened a number of such Indian gentlemen as were strongest in citizenship and asked their advice as to future efforts. The Indian gentlemen, having consulted together, proposed that all higher education (which is city work), and also the administration of all funds, be at once turned over to them, the Indians.
"Does that, then, mean that you see no more use for Americans in India?"
"By no means! You Americans, of course, will look after the villages."
"To you, perhaps, it sounds dubious," said a British Civil Servant of thirty years' experience, to whom I submitted my doubts, "but we who have spent our lives in the work know that the answer is this: We must just plod along, giving the people more and yet more education, as fast as we can get them to take it, until education becomes too general to arrogate to itself, as it does today, a distinction by rights due only to ability and character."