EDUCATION IN BENGAL AND ELSEWHERE..
THEME are many reasons why wo should value a book on education from the pen of an officer in the Bengal Educational Sen-ice. It was chiefly with a view to the educational needs of Bengal that Macaulay wrote his famous despatch, and came to the momentous decision that instruction must be imparted to Bengal, and con- sequently to all India, in English. One necessary result of this decision has been the fact that Englishmen have been employed in largo numbers to supervise the schools and colleges of Bengal. Hence, looking to our ways of administering India, there has followed the usual compromise. The Bengali wants English as a meatus of competing in the struggle for life with his own country- men, wit h other Indiana, and with Englishmen. His mental habit, his ethics, his religion, Ids political ideas are modified, but not noces- eerily Anglicised. At the best, wo got such products of English education as Sir Rabindranath Tager°, men with eclectic intellects, who take to themselves as much of Eastern and Western culture as suits their temperament, and frame a new and hybrid theory of social life. (It is perhaps a significant fact that Mr. West says nothing of Sir Rabindranath's now famous school at Bolpur.) At the worst we get the Anarchist undergraduate, who is so sinister a feat tiro of modem India. What would Macaulay say of the results of his educational policy ?
Mr. West has done his bed to think out the problem fairly and squarely.. Ho faces all the facts, and, bearing them in mind, begins very wisely by a singularly interesting analysis of education as it is now practised in Germany, France, and England, its aims and actual results. It is only in the latter part of his book that he applies his theoretical conclusions to his own special task, the education of Bengalis. He is not, wo gather, much interested in Bengali litera- ture or this progress of indigenous letters in Iris province. He is inclined to humour the Bengali's frank acceptance of English as a selective means of education, as an aid to the competitive reorganiza- tion of society. He has little choice, since, on the one hand, Ben- galis of all classes desire to use English as a tool for worldly advance- ment, and, on the other, the administration tends to be conducted more and more in our language, no that even the red-turbaned constable and the office messenger are expected to know English. Is it realized over here that, even in Courts where the Judge and Bar are all Hindus, and not a single Englishman is present, the forensic arguments are all conducted in English 7 Everywhere we got the hybrid, the biglot type of mind, the mind that is incessantly translating. At the top, we have the national poet, novelist, Inunorist, the immensely popular " Rabi Balm," whose translations of his Bengali thinking win Nobel prizes in Sweden, and are conspicuous in English bookshops. Lower down, we find men who acquire a smattering of English sufficient for their worldly needs. It is a queer, a paradoxical system. But perhaps Mr. West doer, not lay enough stress on the fact that all this is, in the Froncliman'a phrase, a luxury and an ornament, an addition to the structure of indigenous education. He does not tell us, what is evident enough, that Bengali literature flourishes greatly, and draws to itself new elements from English reading. He takes no note of the fact that men like Dincsh Chandra Son make use of English to deliver University lectures on the history of Bengali prose and verse. Perhaps Mr. West is too near the trees of the educational jungle in Bengal to roe how fast the trees are growing, and how vernacular life and thought are being affected. He lives in the society of the hybrid undergraduate, and sees chiefly the Anglicized side of his mind. We feel the need of a corrective, such as, perhaps, Sir Ashutoeh Mulder* or some other Bengali teacher might supply.
Within his self-imposed limiter however, Mr. West gives us a remarkably courageous and luminous analysis of modern education in India and Europe alike, and his book deeerves careful reading by parents and schoolmasters. It is not an easy or an optimistic book. Mr. West is in too close and practical touch with difficult problems to be very hopeful. He is the agent of a rather wavering and dubious system of State education. He is in contact with the stubborn wills of parents and pupils who have no very de-finite idea whither the political, social, and educational drift of Bengal is tending. At times ho seems to sigh for a Teutonic masterfulness in directing education to definitely administrative ends. But, on • Sditeation. Selective. Syrei fie, Compensatory. Ar Michael West, I.E.& London; Le.sous■ awl Co. Oa. W, pct.1
the whole, his theorizing is that of an English gentleman, patient, humorous, tolerant of exotic ways of thought. Perhaps he does not sufficiently recognize that the true evolution, the basic thoughts and aspirations of Bengal, am not English at all, and that the Bengali, subconsciously no doubt, but very resolutely, uses English as a means of holding his own with his English administrators, and is aided by the Englishman's good.natured indolence and indifferenco.
Lot us conclude with a brief quotation of Mr. West's last words :-
" It is my firm belief that if there were more joy of living, more play, more gaiety in Bengal, there would be less foolish grumbling, done simply for the sake of grumbling, loss actual anarchy. and murder ; while serious criticism would be all the more weighty and real coming from men who are living their lives, men of wider interests, deeper and stronger instincts, fuller and nobler days.... I look to the future, not with hope, yet without despair.
A poor result, you may say, of eighty years of English education ; anarchy and murder in the streets of Calcutta, and distinguished teachers not yet at the stage of positive despair I Once more, salvation probably lies fn the fact that, though we have little con- trol over it, indigenous culture and the Hindu thought of the country are being profoundly modified, and that the changes are doubtless more salutary than we can yet perceive. At present, Macaulara reform is not wholly justified by results, by all its results. Is Bolpur the way out, or are there other ways of escape
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