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

182 EDUCATION IN ANCIENT INDIA [Ch.
members of commercial and industrial guilds were no
longer as educated and cultured as those of the
weavers' guild at Mandsore in c. 400 A. D. We have
however no sufficient evidence to compute the extent
of literacy at c. 1200 A. D. We may perhaps utilise
the data about the state of affairs at the advent of
British rule in this connection. The village teacher
was not usually one of the grain-sharing servants
supported by the village community ; his services
therefore were clearly required not by the whole
community, but only by certain sections of it ; literacy
must have been confined only to them. In the
second decade of the 19th century Sir Thomas Monroe
found a primary school in every village ; 'I am
inclined' says he, 'to estimate the proportion of male
population receiving education to be nearer one third
than one fourth'.¹ In Bengal at this time most
villages possessed schools for primary education, but
the percentage of boys attending them varied in
different places. In some districts² as many as
18 percent of the boys of the school going age attended
schools, in others the percentage was only 3. In
Malva, which for more than half a century was suffer-
ing from anarchy, Malcolm found a school in almost
every village with more than 100 houses.³ It would
therefore appear that about 15 percent of the boys of
the school-going age were attending schools towards
the beginning of the 19th century. If in spite of the
prevailing unsettled conditions, about 15 percent boys
were attending schools at the beginning of the 19th
century, we may well conclude that the percentage
may have been at least twice this figure at the end of

1. Quoted by Sen in History of Elementary Education, p. 78.
2. Ibid, p. 76
3. Malcolm. Memoirs of Central India and Malva, p. 158.