Page:The empire and the century.djvu/745

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
702
INDIAN EDUCATION

lating ideas he is likely to come across in his college career are derived from his text-books or the news-papers. Of bright or intellectual society he knows nothing. Even his class-fellows are so scattered about the bazaar that he cannot count upon meeting them easily and frequently. He rarely has access to a library or reading-room, nor are there social or literary societies which he can join. Where there is such an absence of corporate life in the college it is well-nigh impossible for the English professors to enter into and influence the lives of the students, as do the Dons at the English University. Opportunities for meeting outside the class-room do not exist, and the Englishman who wishes to cultivate personal relations with any of his class has to invent occasions for private conversation with them.

The above is typical of the normal life at an Indian college. Exceptional institutions do exist, as at Aligarh, which is a residential college professedly copied from a Cambridge model; but, as a rule, Indian colleges are not centres of an organized social life, and they do not attempt to guide or control the student when he is outside the class-room. The new educational policy which Lord Curzon instituted aims at remedying this cardinal defect. Furious controversies have raged round University education for the last three or four years in India, and in the multitude of technical details round which the battle has been fought the English reader is apt to lose sight of the central policy at issue, but it is one which is not only easily intelligible, but which embodies a conception of education which is thoroughly familiar to all Englishmen. The new educational policy aims at gradually converting existing Indian colleges into residential colleges upon the model of English public schools or of Aligarh. The day scholar is to be turned into a boarder, and, instead of being allowed to roam at will about the bazaar, beguiling the vacuity of his leisure hours with dubious acquaintances, he is to be compelled to live in a college quadrangle or hostel, where he and his companions will