प्राचीन भारत में शिक्षा (डॉ. ए.एस. अल्तेकर - गुरुकुल एवं बौद्ध विहार शिक्षण इतिहास)

176 EDUCATION IN ANCIENT INDIA [Ch.. used to spend about six months in mastering them. Then about a year was spent in mastering elementary arithmetic. Down to c. 250 A.D. Prakrits were in ascendancy ¹ and so students must have spent some time in mastering them. After about 250 A. D. Sans- krit regained its position and even primary education became to some extent influenced by it. During the later stages of primary education boys used to study the Sūtras of Pāṇini and some other simple grammatical works from the age of 8 to 11.² **The Method of Teaching :—**The present generation cannot easily imagine the methods of teaching in primary schools in an age when paper and cheap text books were unknown. Boys of the rich used to write on wooden boards in some kind of colour. There is a sculpture in the Peshawar Museum representing the Buddha in his primary school as holding a rectangular board in his hand and engaged in writing upon it.³ Poorer students used to write on ground, covered with sand or dust. There was no pencil ; they used pointed sticks or their own fingers for writing the alphabet. The latter method incidently trained the muscles, the necessity of which is advocated in the Montessori method. The teacher used to write 1 During the period c. 250 B.C. to c. 250 A D. most of the public documents are seen to be composed in Pali or Prakrits. Sans- krit appears in inscriptions very rarely. So this period is regarded as a period of the ascendancy of Prakrits ; there is a tradition to the effect that the Sātavāhana kings of the Deccan had decreed that all their public documents should be in Prakrit alone (Kāvyamīmāṁsā, p. 50). This tradition is confirmed by the inscriptions of the house. The Guptas were champions of Sanskrit and had decreed that Sans- krit should be spoken even in their harems, (Ibid, p. 50). Their records are all in Sanskrit. 2 I-tsing, chap. XXXIV. 3 A. S. R., 1903-4, pp. 246-7 and Pl. LXVI, 1.