4. There is a danger in Bengal of the following clause of the Education Despatch of 1854 being forgotten:—
"The Government Schools and Colleges, whether high or low, should be regarded not as permanent institutions, but only as a means for generating a desire and demand for education, and as models meanwhile for imitation by private institutions. In proportion as the demand for education in any given locality is generated, and as private institutions spring up and flourish, all possible aid and encouragement should be afforded to them, and the Government, in place of using its power and resources to compete with parties, should rather contract and circumscribe its own measures of direct education, and so shape its measures as to pave the way for the ultimate abolition of its own Schools.
“We look forward to the time when any general system of education entirely provided by Government may be discontinued, with the gradual advance of the system of grants-in-aid, and when many of the existing Government institutions, especially those of the higher order, may be safely closed, or transferred to the management of local bodies under the control of, and aided by, the State.”
But the urgent question at present is money.
Twenty-three Normal Schools, and an ample supply of school books are available. The main difficulty in Bengal now is a pecuniary one—funds. £200,000, according to the estimate of the Director of Public Instruction, have been applied for, to organise a system of Vernacular Education, and it is calculated that £480,000 will ultimately be requisite for the maintenance of 40,000 Patshalas or Village Schools in Bengal; the present expenditure mainly for high Education being about £160,000.
But how is this expense to be met?
It has been shown by Howell in his Note on Education that Government cannot increase the grant to education in Bengal from Imperial Revenues without taxing other and poorer parts of India for Bengal, whose rich plains can yield much to the Imperial Revenue. The Education Authorities, prior to the Despatch of 1859, advocated a local cess for education; it was then suggested as feasible by the Home Government, it has been justified on this ground. "If, therefore, it is essential, even to the material advancement, and to the true prosperity of the people, that the general bulk of the village population should receive education, and the General Revenues of the State cannot bear the cost, it is not unfair that the share of the produce of the land left with the proprietor should bear the burden of the cost, and this, the rather, because the persons who directly benefit are almost wholly agriculturists. That as the impost is levied mainly for the benefit of the agricultural population, it may most fairly be levied upon the land. That the cess, when so imposed, though in every sense a true tax, and although levied by the same machinery and from the same source as a land tax, is equally in every sense distinct and separate from it.”
