Solved Exercise for Precis writing “State of Education in India” for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

The state of education in India before the British occupation is, unfortunately, a favourite subject for political dissertations. This had led to a certain confusion of thought about the various types of indigenous teaching of which three were of importance in the eighteenth century. The ideal training for the Brahmin youth is of great antiquity and represents an extremely high standard of education. After assuming the sacred thread at the age of eight the boy would spend fourteen years away from his home under the personal supervision of his guru or in the forest ashram. Such an upbringing was always confined to a very small and highly privileged class and was probably common only in the heyday of Brahminism. This was not a type of education in which the Government could take part, though the traditional relation between guru and chela might be an inspiration to university teachers, as it had been to Rabindranath Tagore in his ashram at Shantiniketan. Two other institutions catered for a wider but still limited range of boys. These were the Muslim and Hindu schools which were common in the towns and larger villages. Both suffered during the eighteenth century from the continual disorders which disturbed most parts of the peninsula, but they were found in many districts, when they came under British rule, and their work and scope are described in early reports. Most of them were of a very primitive nature, being usually attached to a temple or mosque. This meant the exclusion of the lower castes and the primitive tribes, and it is typical of the early attitude of the Government towards elementary education that almost the first elementary State schools were for the children of Bhils, Gonds, and of criminals whose parents could not send them to religious schools. The Muslim schools taught the Quran and some Persian to a few older boys, but there is little evidence about the standard of teaching in the Punjab, which was annexed later, indigenous education, was surveyed with a more modern eve. “The Hindu schools’, says a Punjab Administration Report, ‘were rare being either colleges in which Brahmin boys learnt Sanskrit and received a half religious, half professional training, or elementary schools, where sons of Hindu shop-keepers were taught to keep accounts and read and write the traders’ scripts. The few Gurmukhi schools that existed were of a purely religious character. The best feature of the indigenous schools was that they were not confined to the religious and mercantile classes, but were open to the few agriculturists who cared to attend them. These schools continued to function and some of them have survived till today; but they only reached a very small proportion of the population.

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Precis

Title :- State of Education in India

It has become so common to write on the state of education in India before the establishment of British rule that the subject has been somewhat observed. Three distinct types of education are, however, discernible in the eighteenth century. There was the Brahmanical system, reminiscent of the old days when boys of tender age were entrusted to a guru for receiving education in the guru’s ashram. This type of education, often of a very high standard, was open to the privileged few and was entirely free from Government influence. The other two types were the Muslim Schools and the Hindu Schools. These institutions were attached to mosques or temples. They were found in the towns and larger villages and consequently did not escape unharmed whenever there were political disorders. The education imparted by them was mostly of a religious nature and secular education, if taught at all in Hindu Schools, was confined to lessons in keeping accounts and the reading of traders’ script. The lower castes and the aboriginal tribes had no access to schools, which served only a very small fraction of the population, and traces of them may still be seen. In contrast the earliest educational effort of the British rulers was to open schools for the children of Bhils, Gonds and criminal cational effort of the British rulers

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