Page:Second Report on the State of Education in Bengal (1836).djvu/43

Rh elementary instruction at home to those who receive it in schools is thus as 1,000 to 109.9.

It is not always the father who gives this instruction, but quite as often an uncle or an elder brother. In one village I found that the children of three families received elementary instruction from pujari Brahman under the following arrangement. As a pujari or family chaplain he receives one rupee a month with lodging, food, clothing, &c., from one of the three families, the head of which stipulates that he shall employ his leisure time in instructing the children of that and of the two other families. In some villages in which not a single individual could be found able either to read or write, I was notwithstanding assured that the children were not wholly without instruction, and when I asked who taught them, the answer was that the gomashta, in his periodical visits for the collection of his master’s rents, gives a few lessons to one or more of the children of the village.

The classes of society amongst which domestic elementary instruction is most prevalent deserve attention. Of the 1,588 families, 1,277 are Hindu, and 311 are Mahomedan; and assuming the average of each class to be the same, viz., 1 children in each family as already estimated, then the number of Hindu children will be 1,915 and of Mahomedan children 466, or in the proportion of 1,000 to 243.2. This proportion, with the proportion previously established between the entire population of the two classes, affords a measure of the comparative degree of cultivation which they respectively possess, the proportion of Musalmans to Hindus being about two to one, the proportion of Musalman to Hindu children receiving domestic instruction being rather less than one to four. This disproportion is explained by the fact already stated that a very large majority of the humblest grades of Native society in this district are composed of Musalmans, such as cultivators of the ground, day-laborers, fishermen, &c., who are regarded by themselves as well as by others, both in respect of condition and capacity, as quite beyond the reach of the simplest forms of literary instruction. You may as well talk to them of scaling the heavens as of instructing their