Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎453v] (31/238)

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Is State-aided Education in any Shape
is remote indeed of relief to the taxpayer from any con
ceivable curtailments of home charges, however pacific may
be our foreign policy, however restricted our employment
of Europeans. Every pice that can be saved in other
departments must go for many a long year to come in
discharge of this alleged outstanding debt to eleven out of
every twelve children—say fifty-four or fifty-five millions.
Does the debt also include the feeding and clothing ot
those who would otherwise not be in a fit state to receive
instruction? As these will presumably be found among the
eleven-twelfths who have not yet been reached, the question
is not so immediately pressing as that of the
Quality of the Instruction
imparted to the favoured one-twelfth.
For it is unfortunately not a simple case of the proverbial
half-loaf, it being well known that bad teaching is worse for
a child than none at all. It gives him a lot to unlearn,
and intensifies his natural aversion to study of any kind.
But in the administration of public funds there is the
further danger of arousing discontent by unfair distribution
of a benefit, even if the benefit is real to the actual recipients.
Thus a poor Government, setting itself to diffuse education
among a vast and poor population, is between Scylla and
Charybdis. If it spends its small income in maintaining
a few good schools at important centres, those who live
near those centres must be unduly favoured at the expense
of other taxpayers. If, on the other hand, it aims at
planting a school of some sort within reach of every child,
it is certain that, long before that result is achieved, the
quality of the instruction will have fallen (so to speak) below
zero. The course actually pursued, of departmental grants-
in-aid, combined with a system of partly permissive local
rating, presents on paper the appearance of judicious com
promise, but in practice steers dangerously near the
Charybdis of general inefficiency. The tests by which
the grants are apportioned are different in different