Education in Ancient India c3.27

c3.27

Preservation and Spread of Culture: The preservation and spread of national heritage and culture was the sixth and one of the most important aims of the Ancient Indian System of Education. It is well recognised that education is the chief means of social and cultural continuity and that it will fail in its purpose if it did not teach the rising generation to accept and maintain the best traditions of thought and action and transmit the heritage of the past to the future generations. Any one who takes even a cursory view of Hindu writings on the subject is impressed by the deep concern that was felt for the preservation and transmission of the entire literary, cultural and professional heritage of the race. Members of the professions were to train their children in their own lines, rendering available to the rising generation at the outset of its career all the skill and processess that were acquired after painful efforts of the bygone generations. The services of the whole Aryan community were conscripted for the purpose of the preservation of the Vedic literature. Every Aryan must learn at least a portion of his sacred literary heritage. It was an incumbent duty on the priestly class to commit the whole of the Vedic literature to memory in order to ensure its transmission to unborn generations. It is true that not all the Brahmanas obeyed this injunction, but that was because they had the commonsense to realise that the services of their entire class were not necessary for the task. A section of the Brahmana community, however, was always available to sacrifice its life and talents in order to ensure the preservation of the sacred texts. Theirs was a life-long and almost a tragic devotion to the cause of learning. For, they consented to spend their life in committing to memory what others and not they could interpret. Secular benefits that they could expect were few and not at all commensurate with the labour involved. Remaining sections of the Brahmana community were fostering the studies of the different branches of liberal education, like grammar, literature, poetics, law, philosophy and logic. They were not only preserving the knowledge of the ancients in these branches, but constantly increasing its boundaries by their own contributions, which were being made down to the medieval times. Specialisation became a natural consequence of this tendency and it tended to make education deep rather than broad.