EDUCATION.
villages in the district the ancient system of imparting instruction in the Védas still survives, the Bráhman teacher receiving the pupils into his house, supplying them with food and otherwise treating them as members of his own family until they have reached the requisite stage of erudition, and requiring them, in return, to discharge certain minor duties about the house.
The most advanced school for girls in the district is that belonging to the Roman Catholic Mission and located in the striking-looking building erected by Bishop Clerc opposite the Waltair railway-station. In this and its branch in the fort, 180 girls are under instruction by about a dozen nuns and several lay teachers. The classes go up to the matriculation standard, and besides the day school there is a large boarding establishment and a special school for pupils whose parents can afford to pay for separate accommodation, all located in different parts of the spacious building. There are also seven lower secondary vernacular schools for girls in different parts of the district, the two largest being those for caste girls kept up by the London and Roman Catholic Missions in Vizagapatam and Vizianagram respectively, both of which contain over 200 pupils.
Besides the Jeypore and Gunupur schools already referred to 130 primary schools are maintained in the Agency specially for hill tribes. Of the 2,700 pupils in these, 30 per cent, are reported to belong to those classes. The highlanders, as has been already stated, do not take kindly to books, and the danger is that the schools will be attended less by them than by the sons of the alien or lower castes who cheat and overreach them, and will result, not in the enlightenment of the backward races, but in conferring additional intelligence on that section of the population which already preys upon them more than is good. About 1,000 'Panchamas' are under instruction at schools kept up specially for their kind. The percentage of scholars to the population of these people of school-age is, however, lower than anywhere in the Presidency except on the conservative west coast.
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