supplies respecting the number and residence, the character, qualifications, and emoluments of the teachers, and the number, the payments, and the attainments of the scholars will come into constant requisition in the practical conduct of a system of popular instruction. Nor will the benefit to be derived stop here, for it is only by previously ascertaining the nature and amount of juvenile and adult instruction in a district or in a division that we can obtain a standard of comparison with the future condition of education in the same district or division after the experiment of a national system shall have been fully and fairly made.
A further measure indispensable to the working of the plan is the preparation of a small series of useful school-books in the language of the districts in which it is to be carried into effect. The entire subject of school-books in the native languages involves so many principles and details, both moral and literary, that to do justice to it would require a separate and full report. All that I shall attempt in this place is to indicate a few of the leading ideas connected with it that bear most directly upon my immediate object.
For the purposes of vernacular instruction in Bengal, school-books should be prepared in the Bengali language, and for the same purposes in Behar in the Hindi language. These two languages will bring the instruction within the reach of the whole Hindu population of those two provinces and also of the rural Musalman population. Hindi school-books will be occasionally required in Bengal, Bengali books never in Behar; and for a majority of the Musalman population in some of the principal cities and towns of both provinces, such as Calcutta, Moorshedabad, and Dacca, Patna, Behar, and Gya, school-books in Urdu or Hindusthani will probably be the most appropriate. For the purpose of giving a trial to a system of vernacular instruction in the few districts of a commissioner’s division Bengali school-books only will be required, and a translation of them into English should be simultaneously printed and published in order that the members of the Government and the European community generally may know the nature and amount of the instruction proposed to be communicated.
The question what shall constitute the subject-matter of school-books under a national system of instruction is one on which a great diversity of opinion may be expected to prevail; and unless large and catholic views preside over their preparation, evil instead of good may be expected to result from the attempt. I deem it proper to introduce and fortify my opinions on this subject by those of others whose sentiments and reasonings are more likely to obtain general assent.
Lord Moira, in the Minute of 2nd October 1815, from which I have already had occasion to quote, continuing to speak of the
