English Education Act 1835
The English Education Act was a legislative Act of the Council of India in 1835 giving effect to a decision in 1835 by William Bentinck, 4th Duke of Portland, the then Governor-General of British India to reallocate funds the East India Company was required by the British Parliament to spend on education and literature in India. Formerly, they had supported traditional Muslim and Hindu education and the publication of literature in the native learned tongues (Sanskrit and Arabic); henceforward they were to support establishments teaching a Western curriculum with English as the language of instruction. Together with other measures promoting English as the language of administration and of the higher law courts (replacing Persian), this led eventually to English becoming one of the languages of India, rather than simply the native tongue of its foreign rulers.
In discussions leading up to the Act Thomas Babington Macaulay produced his famous Memorandum on (Indian)Education which was scathing on the inferiority of native (particularly Hindu) culture and learning. The Act itself however took a less negative attitude to traditional education, and was soon succeeded by further measures based upon the provision of adequate funding for both approaches. Vernacular language education, however continued to receive little funding.
Read more about English Education Act 1835: British Support For Indian Learning, Macaulay’s “Minute Upon Indian Education”, The Act, Opposition in London Suppressed
Famous quotes containing the words english, education and/or act:
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will, therefore, always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometime stop that motion.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)