The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c8.s1.t5.3.1

c8.s1.t5.3.1

There are three kinds of colleges in Bengal—one in which chiefly grammar, general literature, and rhetoric, and occasionally the great mythological poems and law are taught; a second, in which chiefly law and sometimes the mythological poems are studied; and third, in which logic is made the principal object of attention. In all these colleges select works are read and their meaning explained; but instruction is not conveyed in the form of lectures. In the first class of colleges, the pupils repeat assigned lessons from the grammar used in each college, and the teacher communicates the meaning of the lessons after they have been committed to memory. In the others the pupils are divided into classes according to their progress. The pupils of each class having one or more books before them seat themselves in the presence of the teacher, when the best reader of the class reads aloud, and the teacher gives the meaning as often as asked, and thus they proceed from day to day till the work is completed. The study of grammar is pursued during two, three, or six years, and where the work of Panini is studied, not less than ten, and sometimes twelve, years are devoted to it. As soon as a student has obtained such a knowledge of grammar as to be able to read and understand a poem, a law book, or a work on philosophy, he may commence this course of reading also, and carry on at the same time the remainder of his grammar-studies.