Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎454r] (32/238)

Suitable to the Present Circumstances of India ? 245
provinces, but all confessedly unsatisfactory, while their
application involves the diversion of a large amount of
energy from education to inspection and the compiling
of statistics. Whether I go for information to the great
Report of 1883, or to the Quinquennial Review of 1898, or to
the Times special article of the last day of last year, I am
reminded of the remark made by a Bengal civilian ten years
ago, concerning Indian administration generally, but with
special reference to its educational side : “ The Government
of India, being both poor and ambitious, is bent on making
a show at as little cost as possible.”*
This is how Mr. Carstairs, from whom I am quoting,
speaks of the system of school inspection—that is, of
inspectors who receive reports from deputy-inspectors, who
in turn supervise a still lower grade of men by whom alone
the schools are actually visited :
“ The work is degraded because unfit workmen cannot
but turn out bad work ; the few good labourers are degraded
because they have to spend their time, labour and brains in
the vain effort to make bad workmen do good work, instead
of doing good work of their own ; the employer, by
employing unfit men and accepting their bad work, loses
reputation ; and the cause itself is identified with the bad
work, not with the good design.” [My contention is that a
design cannot be good which takes no account of conditions
rendering good work impossible.] “ When a boy has been
sent back from school with the stamp of a successful
examination on him, the Education Department has
done with him, and takes no further interest. But the
interest of his friends begins here. When they see him
come back with a smattering of reading and writing, soon to
* British Work in India, by R. Carstairs ( 1891 ), p. 62 . In the next
sentence the word “alone,” to which Sir Charles Stevens took exception
at the meeting, goes a little beyond what the author says in the passage
here summarized. His words are (p. 66 ) : “Inspectors and their deputies
being chiefly occupied with the conduct of their own subordinates, with
accounts and returns, with reports and correspondence, the main part of
the actual work is done by the subinspectors and pundits, and is of a
correspondingly low class.”