Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/194

134 In estimating the means of instruction for this population, we may put schools of learning amongst the Hindus entirely out of the question, for although the teachers of those institutions receive pupils before they are fourteen, yet I found scarcely any instance of a student below that age and a large majority of them are full-grown men. It will, therefore, be correct to class the students at schools of Hindu learning generally, and convenient to class them universally, as of adult age. On the other hand, a very few instances may be found of youths above fourteen attending the schools of elementary instruction, and these on the same general principle will be classed as of the school-going age, although actually beyond it. We have already seen that, in the elementary schools of all descriptions, both amongst Hindus and Mahomedans, the total number of scholars is 263; and it has also appeared that in 1,588 families there are about 2,383 children who receive domestic instruction, the total number who receive any sort of instruction thus amounting to 3,644. Deduct this number from the number of male children between fourteen and five, and it thus appears that of 32,637 children of an age capable of receiving instruction, 19,993 are wholly uninstructed. Of the whole male population of the teachable age, the proportion of the instructed to the uninstructed is thus as 133 to 1,000. In other words, for every number of children amounting to 133 who receive some sort of instruction either at home or at school, there are 1,000 who receive no instruction whatever.

This, although a very decisive fact, does not alone present a complete view of the inadequacy of the means of instruction. The large numerical proportion of those needing instruction to those receiving it, shows that the means of instruction must be exceedingly scanty; but this conclusion is still more fully established when it is added that the means of instruction actually provided are not only insufficient numerically for the juvenile population to be instructed, but that compared with similar institutions in other countries they afford only the lowest grades of instruction, and those in imperfect forms and in the most desultory manner. What, for instance, bearing the semblance of instruction, can be less worthy of the name than the mere knowledge of the forms and sounds of letters to which instruction in the Arabic elementary schools is limited? And in the Bengali and Persian schools, which are several grades higher, I have shown how imperfect is the instruction communicated. Even that proportion, therefore, of the juvenile population who are receiving some sort of elementary instruction must be regarded as most defectively instructed.

Another element in estimating the adequacy of the means of instruction to the wants of a given population is the fit distribution of those means; but where the means are so scanty in