Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/169

Rh nature untransferable are not such as should be encouraged and might be gradually made to lose their influence without doing any violence to popular feeling.

II. Elementary Domestic Instruction.—The number of families in which domestic instruction is given to the children is 1588. These families are found in 238 villages out of 485, the total number of villages in Nattore. I omitted to note at the commencement of the inquiry the number of children in each of these families, and I cannot, therefore, state with perfect accuracy the total number of children receiving domestic instruction; but after my attention had been attracted to this omission, I found that a very large majority had each only one child of a teachable age receiving instruction, a few had two, a still smaller number had three, and one or two instances were found in which four children of one family received domestic instruction. The number of families in which two or more children receive domestic instruction are comparatively so few that I cannot estimate the total average for each family at more than 1, which, in 1,588 families, will give 2,382 children who receive domestic instruction. It has before appeared that the number of children receiving elementary instruction in schools is 262; and the proportion of those who receive elementary instruction at home to those who receive it in schools is thus as 1,000 to 109.9.

It is not always the father who gives this instruction, but quite as often an uncle or an elder brother. In one village I found that the children of three families received elementary instruction from pujari Brahman under the following arrangement. As a pujari or family chaplain he receives one rupee a month with lodging, food, clothing, &c., from one of the three families, the head of which stipulates that he shall employ his leisure time in instructing the children of that and of the two other families. In some villages in which not a single individual could be found able either to read or write, I was notwithstanding assured that the children were not wholly without instruction, and when I asked who taught them, the answer was that the gomashta, in his periodical visits for the collection of his master’s rents, gives a few lessons to one or more of the children of the village.

The classes of society amongst which domestic elementary instruction is most prevalent deserve attention. Of the 1,588 families, 1,277 are Hindu, and 311 are Mahomedan; and assuming the average of each class to be the same, viz., 1 children in each family as already estimated, then the number of Hindu children will be 1,915 and of Mahomedan children 466, or in the proportion of 1,000 to 243.2. This proportion, with the proportion previously established between the entire population of the two classes, affords a measure of the comparative degree of cultivation which they respectively possess, the proportion of