The Rashtrakutas and their Times c23.s1.1

c23.s1.1

The theory that the compulsory education of the masses is a duty of the state is a very modern one, and we must banish it from our minds while examining the educational arrangements in the medieval or ancient times, whether in the west or in the east. The knowledge of the 3 R's was not regarded as a necessary part of the equipment of every citizen; members of the industrial classes paid more attention to the initiation of their boys in the mysteries of their professions than in those of the 3 R's. The village communities of the Deccan had arranged for the services of a permanent residential staff to meet their normal public needs by the grain-share system; the carpenter, the smith etc., whose services were required by every villager were assigned a grain share which was paid to them annually at the time of the harvest by all the villagers. The teacher does not figure among the grain sharing servants of the community, a fact which shows that the community at large did not regard the primary teacher as essentially necessary for the ordinary villager. It is very probable that only the children of the Brahmanas and the trading classes cared to be literate, and the arrangements for educating them could not be obviously made at the cost of the whole community, by assigning the village teacher a grain share from every villager.