Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/256

196 First.—There is not, as far as I have been able to observe and judge, any mutual connection or dependence between vernacular and Sanscrit schools. The former are not considered preparatory to the other, nor do the latter profess to complete the course of study which has been begun elsewhere. They are two separate classes of institutions, each existing for distinct classes of society,—the one for the trading and agricultural, and the other for the religious and learned, classes. They are so unconnected, that the instruction in Bengali and Hindi reading and writing, which is necessary at the commencement of a course of Sanscrit study, is seldom acquired in the vernacular schools, but generally under the domestic roof; and unless under pecular circumstances, it is not extended to accounts, which are deemed the ultimate object of vernacular school instruction. It has been already shown that an unusually small number of vernacular schools is found in certain parts of the Beerbhoom district, which have no institutions of learning; and it now appears that in the Burdwan district, where vernacular schools comparatively abound, there also schools of learning are most numerous. On the other hand, in that division of the Tirhoot district which contains the greatest number of schools of Hindu learning there are no vernacular schools at all; and in the whole district the vernacular schools are fewer, while the proportion of schools of learning is greater than in any other district. It seems to follow that the prosperity or depression of learning in any locality does not imply the prosperous or depressed condition of vernacular instruction, and that the two systems of instruction are wholly unconnected with, and independent of, each other.

Second.—Sanscrit learning is, to certain extent, open to all classes of native society whom inclination, leisure, and the possession of adequate means may attract to its study, and beyond that limit it is confined to Brahmans. The inferior castes may study grammar and lexicology, poetical and dramatic literature, rhetoric, astrology, and medicine; but law, the writings of the six schools of philosophy, and the sacred mythological poems, are the peculiar inheritance of the Brahman caste. This is the distinction recognized in the legal and religious economy of Hinduism, but practically Brahmans monopolize not only a part, but nearly the whole, of Sanscrit learning. In the two Behar districts both teachers and students, without a single exception, belong to that caste; and the exceptions in the Bengal districts are comparatively few. Of the class of teachers in Moorshedabad all are Brahmans; in Beerbhoom, of 56 teachers, one is of the medical caste; and in Burdwan, of 190, four are of the same caste. It thus appears that the only exceptions to the brahmanical monopoly of Sanscrit teaching are native physicians. In the class of students in Moorshedabad, of 153 there is only one Kayastha; in Beerbhoom, of 393 students nine are of the Vaidya or medical caste, three