Minutes on Education In India, Written in the Years 1835, 1836 and 1837

by Thomas Babington Macaulay

 

MACAULAY'S

Minutes on Education

IN

INDIA.

WRITTEN IN THE YEARS 1835,1836, AND 1837

AND

NOW FIRST COLLECTED FROM RECORDS IN THE
DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION,

BY

H. WOODROW, Esq. M. A.
INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS, CALCUTTA, AND FORMERLY FELLOW OF
CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

 

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CALCUTTA:

PRINTED BY C.B. LEWIS, AT THE BAPTIST MISSION PRESS.

1862.

 

When the posthumous and forgotten writings of distinguished authors are discovered, and presented to the public, it is customary for the publisher to state where and how the manuscripts were found.

In the office of the Department of Public Instruction in Calcutta are hundreds of manuscript volumes and bundles, containing minutes, reports, and correspondence, accumulated during the last forty years by the several authorities who have exercised control over the course of public instruction in Bengal. The records of the Committee of Public Instruction extend from 1823 to 1842, when the Committee was superseded by the Council of Education, which, in its turn, in January 1855, was displaced by the appointment of a Director of Public Instruction. In April, 1854, the offer of the appointment of Secretary to the Council of Education was accepted by me, and in this capacity I received charge of all the records, and became acquainted with the valuable minutes which lay buried in a vast mass of official correspondence.

In January, 1855, the system prescribed in Sir Charles Wood's great Educational Despatch was carried out in Bengal, the Council of Education was abolished, and a member of the Bengal Civil Service was appointed to discharge its functions under the title of Director of Public Instruction. To the first Director, Mr. W. Gordon Young, my grateful acknowledgements are due for his unvarying courtesy, and for his permission to continue my researches among the old.records of his office. I also received from him permission to use in a public lecture, the educational minutes of Lord Macaulay. The permission accorded by Mr. Young, was continued by his successor Mr. W. S. Atkinson, the present Director of Public Instruction, to whom also my thanks are due.

A selection from Macaulay's minutes was read before the Bethune Society, which was established in Calcutta in 1851, for “the consideration and discussion of questions connected with Literature and Science;" and the following pages were published as part of the proceedings of this Society. Among the minutes will be found many which are of no general interest; but apart from the desire to publish every scrap of Macaulay's writings, several of these minutes have still a local value in Bengal, though they are unimportant in other parts of the world.

H. WOODROW.

Calcutta, 20th May, 1862.