Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/259

Rh combining, and re-casting in various forms, the fables and speculations of past ages. The amount of authorship shown to exist in the different districts is a measure of the intellectual activity which, however now misdirected, might be employed for useful purposes. The same men who have wasted, and are still wasting, their learning and their powers in weaving complicated alliterations, re-compounding absurd and vicious fictions, and revolving in perpetual circles of metaphysical abstractions, never ending still beginning, have professed to me their readiness to engage in any sort of literary composition that would obtain the patronage of Government. It is true that they do not possess the knowledge which we desire should be communicated to their countrymen; but where the desire to bestow information exist on our part, and the desire to receive it on theirs, all intermediate obstacles will speedily disappear. Instead of regarding them as indocile, intractable, or bigoted in matters not connected with religion, I have often been surprised at the facility with which minds under the influence of habits of thought so different from my own have received and appreciated the ideas which I have suggested. Nor is it authors only who might be employed in promoting the cause of public instruction, it is probable that the whole body of the learned, both teachers and students, might be made to lend their willing aid towards the same object.

The class of institutions next in importance to vernacular and Sanscrit schools consists of those in which the Persian and Arabic languages and the learning they contain are taught. Persian and Arabic schools are so intimately connected that they are regarded here as one class.

In 20 thanas of this district there are 17 Persian and 2 Arabic schools; but it is to be understood in this and in similar cases that Persian is taught in the Arabic schools also, and that sometimes an Arabic is distinguishable from a Persian school only by the circumstance that one or two of the pupils have begun the study of one of the earliest and easiest works on the grammar of the Arabic language.

One village contains two Persian schools, and the remaining seventeen, Persian and Arabic, are contained in the same number of villages or mohallas.