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

82 EDUCATION IN ANCIENT INDIA [Ch. professors appointed to the task of regulating admission by testing the calibre, capacity and sincerity of the appli- cants for admission¹. Probably similar arrangements existed also in other institutions of higher education. Private teachers would themselves test the capacity of students seeking admission to their schools. At the beginning of Vedic and professional education, some religious rituals also were performed, which will be des- cribed in Appendix I, A. The Size of the Class: The income of the private teacher varied with the number of his students, and we sometimes come across rituals prescribed for getting more students. But the actual number of students reading under one teacher does not seem to have been large. The Jātakas no doubt very often state that the ‘world-renowned’ teachers of Taxila used to have 500 students reading under them; but this statement seems to be an exaggera- tion, suggested by the traditional number of disciples usual- ly associated with the Buddha. For all available evidence shows that the strength of a class under one teacher was usually about 15. Nālandā used to have about a thousand teachers for its student population of not more than nine thousand. In the 11th century in the Vedic college at Ennāyiram, each teacher had only about 20 students under his charge². At Benares during the 17th century, sometimes only four and usually about 12 to 15 students used to work under one teacher³. In the 19th century the number of students under one teacher in Sanskrit

1. These scholars bore the rather curious title of Dvārapālas or door-keepers. See Bose, Indian Teachers of Buddist Universities pp. 47, 60.
2. S. I. E. R., 1918, p. 145.
3. Bernier, p. 145.