Page:The empire and the century.djvu/747

 either from that reason, or from some bent of national character, it also appears to be the kind of educational work which Englishmen like best. What is certain is that the Englishman taken suddenly from Oxford or Cambridge either to India or to a public school at home cannot do one thing, and that thing is unfortunately the sole work which used to be required of him in India—namely, teach. That a master should know how to teach has never been considered an essential qualification at English schools, and, therefore, very few 'Varsity men go through a training in pedagogics. Under the old conception of education in India, the student's guardians were responsible for his moral and physical training, and the college only undertook to supervise his intellectual development. Such a conception of education was perhaps inevitable when the people were hostile to English education, and suspected the Government of ulterior motives upon their religion; but it was one with which the ordinary University man was ill equipped to carry out. A German who had himself been well taught, and who came from a society in which the art of teaching is valued and understood, would have had before him in India a familiar task with which he would have grappled successfully; but, neither in his own experience as a boy, nor from the opinions prevalent in the schoolmaster's world, would an Englishman learn to appreciate the value and importance of good teaching, or understand the advantages of uniformity in instructional methods. The consequence has been that every professor in India has been a law to himself, and that the greatest inequalities prevail in the efficiency of teaching. But the conception of education now put to the front is one which is familiar to every public-school boy and University man, and which appeals to an Englishman's idea of the 'right thing' in education. It is no small part of the merit of the new policy that it contemplates a system of education which will be thoroughly understood by the men who have to carry it