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

VII] PRIMARY EDUCATION 181
primary education at this time was almost entirely
dominated by vernaculars.
The Scope of the Vernacular Education :—When
Sanskrit was the spoken language in earlier days,
primary education was intended to become an integral
part of the higher Sanskritic studies. When Sanskrit
became a dead language as far as the masses were
concerned, primary education became Vernacular
education and developed a self-contained course.
Vernacular education of the masses was organised not
with a view to enable them to develop into good
Sanskrit scholars, but with the object of making them
efficient in their ordinary walks of life. Reading
writing, commercial arithmetic, accountancy, good
knowledge of vernaculars with perhaps a smattering of
Sanskrit, and moral training through the stories of
epics constituted the curriculum of the vernacular
education at about 1200 A. D. The same continued
to be the case during the subsequent centuries as well.
In the case of Brahmana boys, who intended to take
to Sanskritic education later, elements of Sanskrit
grammar were included ; but agricultural and com-
mercial arithmetic dominated the courses intended
for students hailing from agricultural and commercial
classes. How to measure the area of fields, how to
deduce monthly wages from the daily ones and vice
versa, how to find the prices of corn per maund when
those per seer were given, etc,—questions like these
engaged the attention of the teachers and students in
primary schools.
The extent of Literacy at c. 1200 A. D. With the
levelling down of both the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas
to the position of the Shudras, the extent of literacy
must have further gone down during this period.
The average farmer at this time was illiterate and