The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c10.s2.10

c10.s2.10

In Bengal, Mr W. Adam, conducted a similar inquiry and found that in 1835 ‘a network of primitive Vernacular schools existed throughout Bengal’, and he estimated their number to be about one lakh. The Sadler Commission has pointed out that ‘no attempt was made to develop these schools.’ Government preferred to devote its energies to secondary and higher schools, on the theory that, if Western education were introduced among the upper classes, it would ‘filter down’ by a natural process to the lower classes. Practically all the public funds available for education were expended on schools and colleges founded and controlled by Government, and nothing was spent upon indigenous schools, and as rent-free lands attached to these schools were resumed, the schools were left without any financial aid and naturally collapsed.