December 09, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Minute on Indian Education 1835
We shall continue with the rather acerbic
writings of Lord Macaulay tonight.
“That the natives are desirous to be taught
English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanskrit or Arabic;
That neither as the languages of law, nor
as the languages of religion, have the Sanskrit and Arabic any peculiar claim
to our engagement;
That it is possible to make the natives of
this country thoroughly good English scholars, and to this end our efforts to
be directed.”
From what you see today not only were the
efforts of the English Empire well directed but turned out to remarkably
successful.
It was evident to any close observer that
education in both the exotic languages of Sanskrit and Persian was as much
inaccessible to a common Indian as it would in a foreign language in 1830s.
So Lord Macaulay wrote:
“I have no knowledge either of Sanskrit or
Arabic.
But I have done what I could to form a
correct estimate of their value.
I have read translations of the most
celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works.
I have conversed both here and at home
distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues.
I am quite ready to take the Oriental
learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves.
I have never found one among them who could
deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native
literature of India and Arabia.
Honors might be roughly in works of the
imagination, such as poetry, but even when we pass from the works of
imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles
investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable.”
Many modern Hindus and Moslems will surely
find the observations of Macaulay extremely distasteful and absolutely racist
but it would be so because temporally there is very little comparison between
the south Asia of today and the time when he made those observations.
If this seems objectionable (I must confess
that it does not seem so to me and therefore the likes of me are
condescendingly called “Macaulay’s Children”) the more is to come from
Macaulay:
“Whoever knows [English] has ready to
access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the
earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.
It may be safely said, that the literature
now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature
which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world
together.”
We shall continue with excerpts from
Macaulay’s Minute.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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