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

182 EDUCATION IN ANCIENT INDIA [Ch. members of commercial and industrial guilds were no longer as educated and cultured as those of the weavers' guild at Mandsore in c. 400 A. D. We have however no sufficient evidence to compute the extent of literacy at c. 1200 A. D. We may perhaps utilise the data about the state of affairs at the advent of British rule in this connection. The village teacher was not usually one of the grain-sharing servants supported by the village community ; his services therefore were clearly required not by the whole community, but only by certain sections of it ; literacy must have been confined only to them. In the second decade of the 19th century Sir Thomas Monroe found a primary school in every village ; 'I am inclined' says he, 'to estimate the proportion of male population receiving education to be nearer one third than one fourth'.¹ In Bengal at this time most villages possessed schools for primary education, but the percentage of boys attending them varied in different places. In some districts² as many as 18 percent of the boys of the school going age attended schools, in others the percentage was only 3. In Malva, which for more than half a century was suffer- ing from anarchy, Malcolm found a school in almost every village with more than 100 houses.³ It would therefore appear that about 15 percent of the boys of the school-going age were attending schools towards the beginning of the 19th century. If in spite of the prevailing unsettled conditions, about 15 percent boys were attending schools at the beginning of the 19th century, we may well conclude that the percentage may have been at least twice this figure at the end of

1. Quoted by Sen in History of Elementary Education, p. 78.
2. Ibid, p. 76
3. Malcolm. Memoirs of Central India and Malva, p. 158.