Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/160

100 professing to limit themselves to agricultural, and others to include commercial, accounts. The most of them appeared to have a very superficial acquaintance with both.

With the exception of the Multiplication Table, the rhyming arithmetical rules of Subhankar, and the form of address to Saraswati, all which the younger scholars learn by the mere imitation of sounds incessantly repeated by the elder boys, without for a long time understanding what those sounds convey—with these exceptions, native school-boys learn every thing that they do learn not merely by reading but by writing it. They read to the master or to one of the oldest scholars what they have previously written, and thus the hand, the eye, and the ear are equally called into requisition. This appears preferable to the mode of early instruction current amongst ourselves, according to which the elements of language are first taught only with the aid of the eye and the ear, and writing is left to be subsequently acquired. It would thus appear also that the statement which represents the native system as teaching chiefly by the ear, to the neglect of the eye, is founded on a misapprehension, for how can the aid of the eye be said to be neglected when, with the exceptions above-mentioned, nothing appears to be learned which is not rendered palpable to the sense by the act of writing? It is almost unnecessary to add that the use of monitors or leaders has long prevailed in the common schools of India, and is well known in those of Bengal.

The disadvantages arising from the want of school-houses and from the confined and inappropriate construction of the buildings or apartments used as school-rooms have already been mentioned. Poverty still more than ignorance leads to the adoption of modes of instruction and economical arrangements which, under more favorable circumstances, would be readily abandoned. In the matter of instruction there are some grounds for commendation, for the course I have described has a direct practical tendency; and, if it were taught in all its parts, is well adapted to qualify the scholar for engaging in the actual business of native society. My recollections of the village schools of Scotland do not enable me to pronounce that the instruction given in them has a more direct bearing upon the daily interests of life than that which I find given, or professed to be given, in the humbler village schools of Bengal.

Although improvements might no doubt be made both in the modes and in the matter of instruction, yet the chief evils in the system of common Bengali schools consist less in the nature of that which is taught or in the manner of teaching it, as in the absence of that which is not taught at all. The system is bad because it is greatly imperfect. What is taught should, on the whole, continue to be taught, but something else should be added to it in order to constitute it a system of salutary popular instruc-