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

X] PERIOD-WISE SURVEY 241 students continued to maintain themselves by begging if necessary ; the number of teachers eager to follow the high code of the profession, which enjoined free tuition, still continued to be very large. Society's earnestness for education was thus remarkable. **Educational Defects of the Age :-**Though thus higher education continued to prosper, the education of the masses suffered during this period. Upanayana now completely disappeared from Kshatriyas and Vaishyas ; this gave a serious blow to their cultural and literary education, reduced the percentage of literacy among them and made their education very narrow. Useful arts and professions began to be regarded as plebian and were boycotted by the higher sections of Brahmanas ; as the services of the best intellect in society were no longer available for the development of arts and crafts, they ceased to make any progress worth the name. Growing orthodoxy of the age disapproved of dissection and condemned the pursuit of agriculture on the ground that it involved killing of insects at the time of ploughing. Medical education in the course of time became less efficient ; surgery went out of vogue and agriculture became a neg- lected and plebian profession. The marriageable age of girls was further lowered during this period ; girls were ordinarily married at the age of 10 or 11. This natural- ly gave a death blow to the female education. A few ladies no doubt appear as poetesses during this period ; they were however exceptions rather than the rule. Education could not reach the masses as the medium of higher instruction was Sanskrit, which was no longer the spoken tongue. No serious or concerted effort was made to develop literature in vernaculars in order to facilitate the infiltration of knowledge to the 16