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

VI] HIGHER LITERARY EDUCATION 161
says the Chinese traveller, 'for I have myself met
such men.¹ In an age when books were very rare,
it was but meet that great emphasis should have
been laid on the development of memory.
Special devices to help the memory : Though
the memory of the average student was much better
trained and developed than is the case now, the
authors and educationalists left no stone unturned to
lighten its burden. Ancient Indian educationalists
had realised that rhime makes an appeal to æsthetic
sensibility and facilitates the task of memorising.
They therefore decided to utilise its help in the teaching
work by composing text books in verse. Even
dictionaries and elementary books on grammar were
composed in verse. The development of the Sūtra
style, where conclusions are stated in short and pithy
sentences, is also due to the exigencies of the schools
and colleges, the students of which had to rely more
on their memory than on books and notes for recalling
the contents of the works once studied by them.
Erroneous Impression about Cramming : The fact
that the modern Vedic Pandit does not know the
meaning of the hymns he recites with flawless accuracy,
has led to an erroneous impression that mere cramming
was encouraged by the ancient Indian educational
system. Such however was not the case. We have
already shown how for many centuries even Vedic
scholars could expound the meaning of the hymns
they had committed to memory ; it was owing to
the growth of the Vedic literature and the imperative
necessity of committing the whole of it to memory,
that it was reluctantly decided to assign the memo-

1. P. 183.
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