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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 Persian); 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. ==British support for Indian learning== When the British Parliament had renewed the charter of the East India Company for 20 years in 1813, it had required the Company to apply 100,000 rupees per year〔The rupee was then worth about two shillings, so roughly £10,000 (equivalent current purchasing power clearly considerably more)〕 "for the revival and promotion of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories."〔quoted in Macaulay's Minute〕 This had gone to support traditional forms (and content) of education, which (like their contemporary equivalents in England) were firmly non-utilitarian. By the early 1820s some administrators within the East India Company were questioning if this was a sensible use of the money. James Mill noted that the declared purpose of the Madrassa (Mohammedan College) in Calcutta and the Hindu College in Benares set up by the company had been "to make a favourable impression, by our encouragement of their literature, upon the minds of the natives" but took the view that the aim of the company should have been to further not Oriental learning but "useful learning." Indeed, private enterprise colleges had begun to spring up in Bengal teaching Western knowledge in English ("English education"), to serve a native clientele which felt it would be more important that their sons learnt to understand the English than that they were taught to appreciate classic poetry. Broadly similar issues (‘classical education’ vs ‘liberal education’) had already arisen for education in England with existing grammar schools being unwilling (or legally unable) to give instruction in subjects other than Latin or Greek and were to end in an expansion of their curriculum to include modern subjects. In the Indian situation a complicating factor was that the 'classical education' reflected the attitudes and beliefs of the various traditions in the sub-continent, 'English education' clearly did not, and there was felt to be a danger of an adverse reaction among the existing learned classes of India to any withdrawal of support for them. This led to divided counsels within the Committee of Public Instruction. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was Legal Member of the Council of India, and was to be President of the Committee, refused to take up the post until the matter was resolved, and sought a clear directive from the Governor-General on the strategy to be adopted. It should have been clear what answer Macaulay was seeking, given his past comments. In 1833 in the House of Commons Macaulay (then MP for Leeds),〔subsequent financial difficulties had led him to go out to India to rebuild his fortunes〕 had spoken in favour of renewal of the Company's charter, in terms which make his own views on the culture and society of the sub-continent adequately clear: I see a government〔that of the East India Company〕 anxiously bent on the public good. Even in its errors I recognize a paternal feeling towards the great people committed to its charge. I see toleration strictly maintained. Yet I see bloody and degrading superstitions gradually losing their power. I see the morality, the philosophy, the taste of Europe, beginning to produce a salutary effect on the hearts and understandings of our subjects. I see the public mind of India, that public mind which we found debased and contracted by the worst forms of political and religious tyranny, expanding itself to just and noble views of the ends of government and of the social duties of man. Finishing with a peroration holding it a moral imperative to educate the Indians in English ways, not to keep them submissive but to give them the potential eventually to claim the same rights as the English: What is that power worth which is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery—which we can hold only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed—which as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light—we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priest craft? We are free, we are civilized, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「English Education Act 1835」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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