Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c30.16

c30.16

Brahmanical education, indeed, stands justified by its results. The highest aim of a school of learning is to produce in its alumni an absorbing love of learning for its own sake. The ancient Hindū schools of learning poured out streams of scholars in whom the love of learning grew up to be the overmastering passion subduing all other passions of the human heart and compelling the consecration of their entire life to its satisfaction. The pedagogic methods pursued in these schools were not the mechanical, soulless, and oppressive ones which crush out the very taste for learning in the students when they leave them, as is so often the case with most modern schools. They were living and natural methods that, under the congenial conditions of education they created, helped the seeds of thought in the tender minds committed to it to germinate and fructify, to generate in the young learners a spirit of inquiry, of the quest of truth which is the highest gift a teacher can bestow upon them. Thus it was that Knowledge or Truth could claim so many votaries in ancient India, as was noticed by the foreign traveller. A special value attaches to his statements because, as has been already pointed out, they come from a foreigner free from any pro-Indian bias and also from an eye-witness who speaks from his personal observation and experience and not from the evidence of antiquated records or idealizing texts of religion.