Page:Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (1835 & 1838).djvu/104

34 mentioned as existing at Alipore. The number of pupils in the boarding-school is not mentioned. In these boarding-schools it is not to be understood that the pupils or their parents pay their board, but that board, as well as education, is given gratuitously; and this additional expense is incurred in the hope that the minds and characters of the children may be brought more completely under the influence of religious instruction and good example. In the English school, English only is taught, while in the boarding-school the children learn both Bengalee and English. In the former, geography, natural philosophy, and the evidences of divine revelation are taught; and in the latter, the instruction is still more thoroughly Christian.

One of the objects of the Calcutta School Society was to provide a body of qualified Native teachers and translators; and in pursuance of this object the Committee at first sent twenty boys, considered to be of promising abilities, to the Hindoo College to be educated at the Society’s charge; and subsequently ten others were added. There are thus always thirty scholars at the Hindoo College receiving an English education at the expense of the School Society; and the selection of pupils, to fill the vacancies which occur from time to time, affords considerable encouragement to the boys in the indigenous schools. In 1829 three of the young men who had received their education at the Hindoo College at the expense of the School Society, on leaving the college were engaged as English teachers in the Society’s own school for which they were eminently qualified, and others have obtained respectable employment in Calcutta. The Society’s scholars are said to rank among the brightest ornaments of the college.

In prosecution of the same views the Committee of the School Society in 1823 established an elementary English school, entirely under its own management, to teach reading, writing, spelling, grammar and arithmetic, the vacancies in which are filled by pupils selected from the indigenous schools for their proficiency; and those again who afterwards prove themselves particularly deserving are in due course removed for superior education to the Hindoo College to which this elementary school is intended to be preparatory. It was hoped that this school would excite the emulation of the Native boys, and that by raising the qualifications for admission, and thus inducing