Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎455r] (34/238)

Suitable to the Present Circumstances of India ? 247
Dr. Duncan was completely successful as against both Mr.
Maconachie and the bishops, in showing that the reasons
for strict neutrality on the part of the Government are as
strong now as they ever were.* I fail to see that he (or
anyone else) has succeeded in rebutting the presumption
that a body which is debarred from meddling with religion
must be unfit to control education. The distinction thus
forced into prominence between secular and religious
subjects is very modern, highly artificial and probably
ephemeral even in the West; it is still more difficult to
imagine its taking root in the East. An uneasy conscious
ness of this incongruity has been undoubtedly one of the
motives for the gradual extension of the grant-in-aid
system in substitution for institutions directly managed by
Government. Dr. Duncan laid stress on the point, as
proving that the alleged moral failure of the system as a
whole cannot be due to exclusion of religious teaching, that
in 85 per cent, of the schools, comprising more than two-
thirds of the pupils, the religious teacher has a free hand.
But has he ? Let Dr. Duncan himself answer the question.
He says :
“ Of the extent to which teachers in non-Government
schools take advantage of their freedom it is impossible
to speak otherwise than in general terms. On all except
private schools the pressure of the secular subjects is felt to
be heavy.”
He goes on to remark that in missionary and non-mission
schools alike all earnest-minded teachers “feel the difficulty,
but at the same time the necessity, of striving against the
engrossing pursuit of those immediate and tangible results
that aid directly in the struggle for existence.” My
complaint is that this natural and universal difficulty is
aggravated, instead of being relieved, by the conditions of
State aid. To the same effect is the testimony of an earnest-
minded Hindu in the Calcutta weekly called New India :
“It is the cultivation of memory alone that is the aim of
* See this Review for January last, pp. 1 - 20 .