402 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
APPENDIX
(Refer footnote on page 339)
Extracts from the Report of the Board of Education of the Bombay Presidency for the year 1850-51
System adopted by the Board based on the views of Court of Directors
“ Paragraph 5. Thus, the Board of Education at this Presidency, having laid down a scheme of education, in accordance with the leading injunctions of Despatches from the Honourable Court, and founded not more on the opinions of men who had been attentively considering the progress of education in India, such as the Earl of Auckland, Major Candy and others, than on the openly declared wants of the most intelligent of the natives themselves, the Board, we repeat, were informed by your Lordship’s predecessor in Council that the process must be reversed.”
Views of Court on the expediency of educating the upper classes
“ Paragraph 8. Equally wise, if we may be permitted to use the expression, do the indications of the Honourable Court appear to us to be as to the quarters to which Government education should be directed, and specially with the very limited funds which are available for this branch of expenditure. The Honourable Court write to Madras in 1830 as follows : ‘ The improvements in education, however, which most effectively contribute to elevate the moral and intellectual condition of a people are those which concern the education of the higher classes — of the persons possessing leisure and natural influence over the minds of their countrymen. By raising the standard of instruction amongst these classes you would eventually produce a much greater and more beneficial change in the ideas and the feelings of the community than you can hope to produce by acting directly on the more numerous class. You are, moreover, acquainted with our anxious desire to have at our disposal a body of natives qualified by their habits and acquirements to take a larger share and occupy higher situations in the civil administration of their country than has been hitherto the practice under our Indian Government.’ Nevertheless, we hear on so many sides, even from those who ought to know better of the necessity and facility for educating the masses, for diffusing the arts and sciences of Europe amongst the hundred or the hundred and forty millions (for numbers count for next to nothing) in India, and other like generalities indicating cloudy notions on the subject, that a bystander might almost be tempted to suppose the whole resources of the State were at the command of Educational Boards, instead of a modest pittance inferior in amount to sums devoted to a single establishment in England.”
Conclusion that no means exist for educating the masses
“ Paragraph 14. It results most clearly from these facts, that if sufficient funds are not available to put 175 vernacular schools into due state of organisation, and to give a sound elementary education to 10,730 boys, all