Minute by His Excellency the Governor General, dated Calcutta, the 20th January 1805.
As it now seems an universally admitted axiom that education and the knowledge to be imparted by it can alone effect the moral regeneration of India, nothing need be said in support of this principle. Nor will it be necessary here to advert to the various questions connected with education, which at present occupy the public mind, as to the particular languages to be cultivated, and to be adopted in the transaction of public business, or upon the various other subjects connected with public instruction, because all these questions will, I presume, at a very early period, come before Council from the General Education Committee.
But there is one very material fact still wanting to be known, the actual state of Native education, that is, of that which is carried on, as it probably has been for centuries, entirely under Native management. This information, which Government ought at any rate to possess, regards a most important part of the statistics of India. A true estimate of the Native mind and capacity cannot well be formed without it. But at this time, when the establishment of education upon the largest and most useful basis is become the object of universal solicitude, it is essential to ascertain, in the first instance, the number and descriptions of the Schools and Colleges in the Mofussil; the extent to which instruction is carried; the knowledge and sciences taught in them; the means by which they are supported, with all the particulars relating to their original foundation; and their past and present prosperity. The same enquiry will point out the dreary space, if any, where the human mind is abandoned to entire neglect. I think it very likely that the interference of Government with education, as with most of the other Native Institutions with which we have too often so mischievously meddled, might do much more harm than good. Still it behoves us to have the whole case before us, because
