THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

III. 5. Education129sisters in the family of knowledge and any self-respecting systemof education must in these days provide facilities for masteryin any one of these as well as for a modicum of all. Thefirst great error of our system comes in here. While we insist onpassing our students through a rigid and cast-iron course of knowledgein everything, we give them real knowledge in nothing.Mathematics, for instance, is a subject in which it ought not tobe difficult to give thorough knowledge, most of the paths arewell beaten and, being a precise and definite subject, it does notin itself demand such serious powers of original thought andappreciation as literature and history; yet it is the invariable experienceof the most brilliant mathematical students who go fromCalcutta to Bombay to Cambridge that after the first year theyhave exhausted all they have already learned and have to enteron entirely new and unfamiliar result. It is surely a deplorablething that it should be impossible to acquire a thorough mathematicaleducation in India, that one should have to go thousandsof miles and spend thousands of rupees to get it. Again, if welook at science, what is the result of the pitiful modicum of scienceacquired under our system? At the best it turns out goodteachers who can turn others through the same mill in whichthey themselves have been ground...(Incomplete)NOTE: There seem to have been other articles in this series but only this one hascome to light.