ENGLISH HISTORY IN INDIAN SCHOOLS.

At the opening of an Educational Conference held last April in Bombay under the joint auspices of the Director of Public Instruction and of the Teachers’ Association, the Governor, Sir George Clarke, alluded to some of the effects of Western education on the younger generation of Indians:—­“It is widely admitted by the thoughtful Indians that there are signs of the weakening of parental influence, of the loss of reverence for authority, of a decadence of manners and of growing moral laxity.  The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their power; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India.  There has thus been a certain moral loss without any corresponding gain.  The educated European may throw off the sanctions of religion; but he has to live in a social environment which has been built up on the basis of Christian morality, and he cannot divest himself of the influences which have formed his conscience.  The educated or partially educated Indian who has learned to look on life and the affairs of men from a Western standpoint has no such environment and may find himself morally rudderless on an ocean of doubt.  The restraints of ancient philosophies, which have unconsciously helped to shape the lives of millions in India who had only the dimmest knowledge of them, have disappeared from his mental horizon.  There is nothing to take their place.  Ancient customs, some of them salutary and ennobling, have come to be regarded as obsolete.  No other customs of the better sort have come to take their place, and blindly to copy the superficial customs of the West is to ignore all that is best in western civilization.”

Commenting on his Excellency’s speech, the Bombay Examiner, a weekly paper very ably conducted in the interests of the Roman Catholic missions, drew attention, in the following terms to some of the causes of the mischief.

(1) The study of English history in schools reveals a gradual transition from an unlimited monarchy to a limited monarchy differing barely from a republic, the gradual transfer of political power from kings and aristocracy through the barons and then through the burghers and finally to the whole people.  In reality this process took almost a thousand years, but in the schoolroom it is compressed into a term.  The gradualness of the process, the long preparation of each class of citizens, the slow political education of the masses, all of which forms a long historical perspective, is through the medium of the text-book thrown upon, the screen at once as a flat picture.  It may not occur perhaps to the young mind to apply the precedent to his own country; but as soon as he falls under the influence of the political agitator the question, suggests itself:  If the English people thus fought their way to supremacy, why should not the Indian people do the same?  Losing sight of the perspective of history, it seems to him feasible that India should achieve in one bound what it took nearly a thousand years for the English people to bring about.