Superior Ancient Indian Education System - Proven With Statistics

The British or the West in general have in the past viewed India as a poor and uneducated country (just cant do so now). The following is a report by Sri Dharampal Ji, a scholar and most importantly an unbiased one. The following is a report from the British archives themselves. One more important aspect of these reports is that it has totally destroyed to pieces the myth that the Shudras and other so called backward castes were not educated and were prevented to study by the brahmins and the so-called upper castes. Not ready to believe? Well, read and believe for yourself. Below are just a few valuable points along with some tables from the gigantic work of Shri Dharampal Ji.

*England had few schools for the children of ordinary people till about 1800.

* In his first report, Adam observed:
1) There exist about 1,00,000 village schools in Bengal and Bihar alone around the 1830s, not to talk of the rest of India.
2) The content of studies was better than what was then studied in England. The duration of study was more prolonged.
3) The method of school teaching was superior and it is this very method which is said to have greatly helped the introduction of popular education in England but which had prevailed in India for centuries.
4) The only aspect, and certainly a very important one, where Indian institutional education seems to have lagged behind was with regard to the education of girls.
5) Two on the basis of personal observation & evidence collected he inferred there were app 100 institutions of higher learning in each district meaning app 1,800 such institutions and 10,800 scholars in them.
6) Adam said that he found a number of genuine, qualified medical practioners in Bengal who analyzed the symptoms of the disease before suggesting a cure.
7) In Punjab there were 3,30,000 pupils in 1850 as compared to 1,90,000 in 1882 as per Leitner’s Report.

* Sanskrit books were used to teach grammar, lexicology, mathematics, medical science, logic, law and vedant.






* Sir Sankaran Nair in his masterly Minute of Dissent writes:-

1) Efforts were made by the government to confine higher education and secondary education, leading to higher education, to boys in affluent circumstances
2) Rules were made calculated to restrict the diffusion of education generally and among the poorer boys in particular.
3) Conditions for “recognition” for grants-stiff and various-were laid down and enforced, and the non-fulfillment of any one of these conditions was liable to be followed by serious consequences.
4) Fees were raised to a degree, which, considering the circumstances of the classes that resort to schools, were abnormal.
5) When it was objected that minimum fee would be a great hardship to poor students the answer was such students had no business to receive that kind of education.
6) Managers of private schools, who remitted fees in whole or in part, were penalized by reduced grants-in-aid.

In every Indian village which has retained anything of its form…the rudiments of knowledge are sought to be imparted; there is not a child, except those of the outcastes (who form no part of the community), who is not able to read, to write, to cipher; in the last branch of learning, they are confessedly most proficient.’
- Vide BRITISH INDIA by Ludlow.



Source: ‘The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the 18th century” by Dharampalji. The book reproduces Reports of numerous Surveys undertaken in Bengal, Punjab and Madras Presidency by the British (between 1800-1830) to give you the state of education in India around 1800.

You can download the book at
http://www.samanvaya.com/dharampal/frames/published.htm