Appendix C

Report  of A. D. Campbell, Collector of Bellary, 1822 . Extracts

The economy with which children are taught to write in the native schools, and the system by which the more advanced scholars are caused to teach the less edvanved, and at the same time to confirm their own knowledge is certainly admirable, and well deserved the imitation it has received in England. The chief defects in the native schools are the nature of the books and learning taught and the want of competent masters.

Imperfect, however, as the present education of the natives is, there are a few who possess the means to command it for their children even were books of proper kind plentiful and the master every way adequate to the task imposed upon him, he would make no advance from one class to another, except as he might be paid for his labor. While learning the first rudiments, it is common for the scholar to pay to the teacher, the quarter of a Rupee, and when arrived as far as a to write on paper, or at the higher branches of artithmatic, half a rupee per mensem. But in providing further such as explaining books, which are written in verse, giving the meaning of Sanskrit words, and illustrating the principle of vernacular languages, such demands are made as exceed the means of most parents. There is, therefore, no alternative, but that of leaving their children only partially instructed, and consequently ignorant of the most essential and useful parts of a liberal education. But there are multitudes that cannot even avail themselves of the advantages of this system, defective as it is.

I am sorry to state that this is ascribable to the gradual but general impoverishment of the country. The means of the manufacturing classes have been, of late years greatly diminished, by the introduction of our own European manufacturers, in lieu of the Indian cotton fabrics. The removal of many of our troops, from our own territories, to the distant frontiers of our newly subsided allies, has also, of late years, affected the demand of grain, the transfer of the capital of the country, from the native governments, and their officers, who liberally expended it in India, to Europeans, restricted by law from employing it even temporarily in India, and daily draining it from the land, has likewise tended to this effect which has been alleviated by a less rigid enforcemnt of the revenue due to the state. The greater part of the middling and lower classes of the people are now unable to defray the expenses incident upon the education of their offspring, while their necessities require the assistance of their children as soon as their tender limbs are capable of the smallest labor.

It cannot have escaped the government that of a nearly million of souls in this district, 7000 are now at scool; a proportion which exhibits but too strongly the result of the above stated. In many villages, where formerly there were schools, now only a few of the children of the most opulent are taught, others being unable, from poverty, to attend or to pay what is demanded…..