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

VII] PRIMARY EDUCATION 181 primary education at this time was almost entirely dominated by vernaculars. The Scope of the Vernacular Education :—When Sanskrit was the spoken language in earlier days, primary education was intended to become an integral part of the higher Sanskritic studies. When Sanskrit became a dead language as far as the masses were concerned, primary education became Vernacular education and developed a self-contained course. Vernacular education of the masses was organised not with a view to enable them to develop into good Sanskrit scholars, but with the object of making them efficient in their ordinary walks of life. Reading writing, commercial arithmetic, accountancy, good knowledge of vernaculars with perhaps a smattering of Sanskrit, and moral training through the stories of epics constituted the curriculum of the vernacular education at about 1200 A. D. The same continued to be the case during the subsequent centuries as well. In the case of Brahmana boys, who intended to take to Sanskritic education later, elements of Sanskrit grammar were included ; but agricultural and com- mercial arithmetic dominated the courses intended for students hailing from agricultural and commercial classes. How to measure the area of fields, how to deduce monthly wages from the daily ones and vice versa, how to find the prices of corn per maund when those per seer were given, etc,—questions like these engaged the attention of the teachers and students in primary schools. The extent of Literacy at c. 1200 A. D. With the levelling down of both the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas to the position of the Shudras, the extent of literacy must have further gone down during this period. The average farmer at this time was illiterate and