acquisition of such an improved education as will make those who possess it more useful members of society in every condition of life—should exist in every district in India.”
This point was again strongly enforced by the Home Government in 1863 in a Despatch from Sir C. Wood:—
“I have noticed with some surprise the remarks of the present Chief Commissioner of Oude and of the Director of Public Instruction in Bengal with regard to the principle on which Government should proceed in its measures for the promotion of education in India. It would appear to be the opinion of these gentlemen that Government should, for the present, limit its measures to providing the means of education for the higher classes, and that the education of the lower classes should be left to be effected hereafter, when the classes above them shall have not only learnt to appreciate the advantages of education for themselves, but have become desirous of extending its benefits to those below them. Without entering into a discussion on the question here involved, it is sufficient to remark that the sentiments of the Home Authorities with regard to it have already been declared with sufficient distinctness, and that they are entirely opposed to the views put forward by Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Atkinson.”
Again, in 1864, Sir Charles Wood wrote—
“Those principles are that, as far as possible, the resources of the State should be so applied as to assist those who cannot be expected to help themselves, and that the richer classes of the people should gradually be induced to provide for their own education.”
These extracts seem to show that, until the State has placed the means of elementary Vernacular Education within the reach of those who are unable to procure it for themselves, an annually increasing Government expenditure in any Province upon “the higher classes who are able, and willing in many cases, to bear a considerable part at least of the cost of their own education,”is not in accordance with the main object of the Educational Code, nor with the subsequent views of the Home Governments.
Howell, in his Note on Education, 1867, published by the Government of India, puts the following questions:—
“It may perhaps, therefore, be asked, in the words of the Despatch of 1854, how far does the Bengal system tend ‘to confer those vast moral and material blessings which flow from the general diffusion of useful knowledge?’ There is ‘satisfactory evidence of the high attainments in English literature and European science in the few,’ but how does the system ‘provide for the extension to the general population of those means of obtaining an education suitable to their station in life which had theretofore been too exclusively confined to the higher classes’?
“Do Native gentlemen, like English gentlemen, return to their Zemindaries from a University career, to spread around them the reflex of the enlightenment they have received themselves? Does the process of highly educating a few, and leaving the masses, tend to increase, or to diminish, the gulf between class and class? Are there any indications of a decrease in crime, or of a dawn of intelligence in the agricultural classes of those districts where the mass Schools ‘have not been taken up by Government or by any Society,’ and where education only ‘filters’?
