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410 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
invited to the following extracts from the Report of the Board of Education
of the Bombay Presidency for the year 1850-51 :
“Paragraph 5th. Thus the Board of Education at this Presidency having
laid down a scheme of education, in accordance System adopted by the Board based on with the leading injunctions of Despatches from the the views of Court Honourable Court, and founded not more on the of Directors. opinions of men who had been attentively considering
the progress of education in India, such as the Pearl 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.
“Paragraph 8th. Equally wise, if we may be permitted, to use the expression, Views of Court on do the indications of the Hon. Court appear to the expediency of us to be as to the quarters to which Government educating the upper education should be directed, and specially with classes. the very limited funds which are available for this
branch of expenditure. The Hon. 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 number 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 single
establishment in England.
“Paragraph 9th. The arguments adduced in the few last paragraphs appear Retrospect to show that a careful examination of the real facts, of Principal and an analysis of the principal phenomena which Educational facts have displayed themselves in the course of educational during the last ten proceedings in the Presidency, would not be without years necessary. their uses, if made with sufficient industry and
impartiality to ensure confidence, and with a firm determination to steer clear of
bootless controversy and all speculative inquiries. The present epoch, also, appears