The Importance Of Education In India

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Education under British rule, despite the lofty sentiments of men like Macaulay, had remained a peripheral activity of the colonial government, the principal one being extraction of revenue. The education system during British rule did produce hundreds of engineers, doctors and administrators for sure but given the country’s vast population and hunger for education, it had not touched the majority of Indians. At the time of the country’s independence in 1947, just about 14 per cent of its population was literate. India’s traditional education system, on the other hand, had withered away for various reasons, mainly because of its perceived irrelevance in the new order of things, leaving education accessible only to a thin, mostly urban, upper layer of society. Earlier, several Indian observers had noticed and objected to the small proportion of revenues set aside by the British Indian administration for education. The British journalist-historian John Clark Marshman in a statement to the British House of Commons in 1853 had estimated the total spending on education by the British government in India to be about 90,000 pound sterling, which he felt was…show more content…
In the last 10 to 15 years, however, the return of English is by stealth and subaltern demand.” While English education is here to stay what worries people like Prof Bajpai is faltering academic standards in state funded vernacular schools, which constitute the overwhelming majority in the country. At a time when the whole world is turning to English, India, which had the initial advantage thanks to the pioneering work of men like David Hare, today is falling behind other countries, including China which imports English language teachers from all over the

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