Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/343

338 accompanied by the cultivation of the moral sentiments and habits. Here the native system presents a perfect blank. The hand, the eye, and the ear, are employed; the memory is a good deal exercised; the judgment is not wholly neglected; and the religious sentiment is early and perseveringly cherished, however misdirected. But the passions and affections are allowed to grow up wild without any thought of pruning their luxuriances or directing their exercise to good purposes. Hence, I am inclined to believe, the infrequency in native society of enlarged views of moral and social obligation, and hence the corresponding radical defect of the native character which appears to be that of a narrow and contracted selfishness, naturally arising from the fact that the young mind is seldom, if ever, taught to look for the means of its own happiness and improvement in the indulgence of benevolent feelings and the performance of benevolent acts to those who are beyond a certain pale. The radical defect of the system of elementary instruction seems to explain the radical defect of the native character; and if I have rightly estimated cause and effect, it follows that no material improvement of the native character can be expected, and no improvement whatever of the system of elementary education will be sufficient, without a large infusion into it of moral instruction that shall always connect in the mind of the pupil, with the knowledge which he acquires, some useful purpose to which it may be and ought to be applied, not necessarily productive of personal gain or advantage to himself.”

II. Private or Domestic Instruction—Meagre and imperfect as is the system of instruction in public schools, we have Mr. Adam’s express authority for asserting “that the instruction given in families is still more limited and imperfect.” Elsewhere he adds, “there can be no doubt that the instruction given at home is in general more crude and imperfect, more interrupted and desultory, than that which is obtained at the common schools.” In some cases he found that “it did not extend beyond the writing of the letters of the alphabet, in others the writing of words.” Pundits and priests, “unless where there is some landed property in the family, confine the Bengali instruction they give their children to reading and writing, addition and subtraction, with scarcely any of the application of numbers to agricultural and commercial affairs. Farmers and traders naturally limit their instructions to what they best know, and what is to them and their children of greater direct utility, the calculations and measurements peculiar to their immediate occupations.” The parents with whom Mr. Adam conversed on the subject did “not attach the same value to the domestic instruction their children received which they ascribed to the instruction of a professional schoolmaster, both because in their opinion such instruction would be more regular and systematic, and because the teacher would be probably better qualified.”

The fact is, that this domestic instruction can be regarded only as “a sort of traditionary knowledge of written language and accounts, preserved in families from father to son, and from