attached Model School, where the relative numbers are 60-40, the Head Master of the Training School, Babu Kalicoomar Mitter, observes:—Our discipline and course of study is the same as observed in all Government English Schools and Colleges. We teach history, geography, and mathematics. Only all this instruction is given, not in English, but in the Vernacular. Hence our School is more popular with Mahommedans, and the time-honored though miserable, Maktabs and Meeajees are being drained of the Mahommedan pupils, who will not go to an English School.
“Such is the important functions which Vernacular Schools are performing, albeit only Lower Class Schools, ill-supported and too little encouraged. They are drawing a large section of an influential class who have persistently kept aloof for the most part from English Schools, where the pupils acquire the ‘foreign dress and manners which will shut them out from Paradise,’ and where the time allotted to Oriental literature and the language of their Koran, with the small consideration in which Arabic and Persian literature are held, are wholly inadequate and fall far short of the value set on it by themselves. The knowledge acquired in those Vernacular Schools in some subjects up to the Entrance standard is in others not much below it. And all who gain Vernacular scholarships, besides numbers in whose minds the Vernacular Schools has awakened the first desire for knowledge, are so many additions from year to year on the roll of the higher English School, which they might have never entered but for the Lower Vernacular School.
“There is yet another important service which they render, and it is one of great social and political significance. The special attention given to Arabic and Persian in Oordoo Schools and the inclusion in Hindee Schools of Sanskrit literature and classical Ramayan and Premsagur, venerated by the Hindoos as their sacred Purans, help to set at rest deeply-rooted suspicions, and to fill up the breach due to divergence of faith, language and customs. ‘These books,’ they say, ‘would never have been allowed in Government Schools if the Government had any design against our religious faith.' This cultivation of our sacred language does not look as if Government wanted to uproot the language and to supersede it by English.”
The attempt to bar up knowledge to the Mahommedans, except they gain it through English has been a failure; the remarks of Sir D. Macleod, Governor of the Punjab, in his reply to the address of the Native nobility of Lahore on this point, are striking:—
“The great bulk of our scholars never attain more than a very superficial knowledge, either of English or of the subjects they study in that language, while the mental training imparted is, as a general rule, of a purely imitative character, ill-calculated to raise the nation to habits of vigorous or independent thought.
“It appears indeed evident that, to impart knowledge in a foreign tongue must of necessity greatly increase the difficulties of education. In England, where the Latin and Greek languages are considered an essential part of a polite education, all general instruction is conveyed, not in those languages, but in the vernacular of the country; and it seems difficult to assign a sufficient reason why a different principle should be acted upon here.
“And this brings me to the defect which I myself more especially deplore in the system of instruction at present almost exclusively followed, viz., that it has tended, though not intentionally, to alienate from us, in a great measure the really learned men of your race. Little or nothing has been done to conciliate these, while the literature and science which they most highly value have been virtually ignored. The consequence has been that the men of most cultivated minds amongst our race and yours have remained but too often widely apart, each being unable either to understand or to appreciate the other. And thus we have virtually lost the aid and co-operation of those classes who, I feel assured, afforded by far the best instruments for creating the literature we desire.”
