Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎455v] (35/238)

248 Is State-aided Education in any Shape
the Indian educational system. . . . And the result has
been that our teaching manufactories have been turning out
graduates who are generally more or less ignorant of all
true culture.”
The grant-in-aid system is no more a solution of the
difficulty in India than it is in England. The money grant
is more eloquent than the finest Viceregal oration, and it
declares unmistakably to all concerned that the studies
inspected and paid for are, in the opinion of the State, the
essentials of good education, and that the studies ignored
are unimportant extras. For this reason I maintain that if
there is any Government in the world fit to control so sacred
and personal a business as education, it is certainly not one
pledged to religious neutrality. Still more unfit, of course,
would be a Government identified with the religion of an
insignificant minority of its subjects; which, however, I do
not understand to be the present position of the Govern
ment of India, notwithstanding a sentence in the Queen’s
Proclamation of 1858 which might be so interpreted.
Moral and Political Difficulties.
Until recently the Government concerned itself almost
as l.ttle about moral as about religious training, and it is
quite an open question whether it has strengthened or still
further weakened its position by abandoning that attitude,
and (among other things) bestowing its imprimatur on
untheological moral text-books, compiled expressly for
school use. I do not gather that these text-books have
been received with much enthusiasm, but cannot speak of
them from personal knowledge. There is, however, one
branch ^ Wkh that s P“iaI
which I T ° S T °i eth ' CS commonl y known as politics,
hich have read, and about which I have something to say
I refer to Str William Lee-Warner's “ Citizen of India ”
in ah TT ^ rec ~<>ed for school use
;; 3 P “ S u ° f Br r b '.f 3 ' and is -en supplemented
by an Authorized Guide" for examination purposes.