Ancient Indian Education: An Inquiry into its Origin, Development, and Ideals c8.73

c8.73

In spite, however, of many deficiencies and weaknesses, there were many good points about these schools which must not be overlooked. Individual rather than class teaching was the rule, and each pupil was free to develop at his own speed according to his own intellectual power. In small schools, such as they were, with pupils of varying age, this must have been a distinct advantage. The employment of monitors to help the master must have been a most valuable means not only of helping him in his work, but of giving the more promising pupils a training in responsibility and also an opportunity for testing and practising the skill they themselves had acquired. The teachers, if somewhat narrow in their intellectual capacity, and dependent upon the good will of those who employed them, seem to have been nevertheless hardworking and conscientious, and although their aim was not very wide, it seems to have been accomplished. The schools were closely connected with life outside the school, and teaching for the most part only that ‘useful knowledge’ which is so highly regarded by the ‘man in the street,’ they had no temptation to develop theories of formal discipline. If some of the methods employed in teaching were antiquated and unsatisfactory judged by modern standards, others were fully in accordance with modern theory. In the Montessori system we find it advocated that writing should be taught before reading, and that in teaching to write the child should first be made constantly to run his fingers over grooved or sandpaper letters in order to fix the forms in the muscular memory. Both these ideas were long ago current in Indian schools. We have already had occasion to refer to this in connection with the extract from the *Āīn-i-Akbarī*¹; and in.