The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c5.s17.15

c5.s17.15

14. The whole of the books, however, in the Teloogoo and Carnataca schools, which are by far the most numerous in this district, whether they treat of religion, amusement, or the principles of these languages, are in verse; and in a dialect quite distinct from that of conversation and business. The alphabets of the two dialects are the same, and he who reads the one, can read, but not understand, the other also. The natives, therefore, read these (unintelligible) books to them, to acquire the power of reading letters, in the common dialect of business; but the poetical is quite distinct from the prose dialect, which they speak and write; and though they read these books, it is to the pronunciation of the syllables, not to the meaning or construction of the words, that they attend. Indeed few teachers can explain, and still fewer scholars understand, the purport of the numerous books which they thus learn to repeat from memory. Every school boy can repeat verbatim a vast number of verses, of the meaning of which, he knows no more than the parrot that has been taught to utter certain words. Accordingly, from studies, in which he has spent many a day of laborious, but fruitless toil, the native scholar gains no improvement, except the exercise of memory and the power to read and write on the common business of life; he makes no addition to his stock of useful knowledge, and acquires no moral impressions. He has spent his youth in reading syllables, not words, and, on entering into life, he meets with hundreds and thousands of books of the meaning of which he can form not even the most distant conjecture, and as to the declension of a noun, or the conjugation of a verb, he knows no more than of the most abstruse problem in Euclid. It is not to be wondered at, with such an imperfect education, that, in writing a common letter to their friends, orthographical errors and other violations of grammar, may be met with in almost every line written by a native.