( 9s ) Fиом THE INSPNcroR of ScHools, PRESIDENCY CIRCLE. ʼT`G9 THE SECRETARY, BENGALACADEMY OF LITERATURE. 4, Dalhousie Square, Calcutta, the 2nd February 1895. SIR, I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your circular letter dated the 5th January 1895, in which you have asked my opinion as to the extent to which the Vernacular languages of this country may be made the medium of instruction in the Arts Colleges and High English schools. 2. In reply I beg leave to state that though a firm believer in the theory that the instruction in the lower classes should be conveyed chiefly through the pupil's mother-tongue, the persistent agitation against what is known to educational officers as the amalgamated system under which pupil's reading in the fifth class of a very few high English Schools have so long been made to undergo an examination in the middle vernacular standards as a condition of promotion to the fourth class has convinced me that education on a vernacular basis is unfortunately very unpopular among my country men including some of the best educated and most highly placed. The system above referred to consisted in dividing a highl English school into Io or 1 I classes the lowest beginning the vernacular alphahet, the next higher classes up to the fifth reading English literature, and the middle vernacular strandards in a progressive, and the upper section, i. e. from the 4th upwards, preparing for the Entrance and being-practically the Anglo Sanskrit Department to render it attractive higher grants were offered to school that adopted it and scolarships and free-studentship were set apart for pupils who might stand high at the middle scholarship examination, clearly advatageous as these terms were, the system was never tried in any parts of Bengal, except the Presidency and Rajshahye Division, and the few school that tried it became gradually unpopulor, and at last the Departmant had to yield to the pressure of public opinion and consent to the virtua abolition of the system. 3. The ground of the popular dislike appears to be the notion that reading subjects like History Geograpey and mathematics in English enriches the pupil's stock of words and expressigns in that language and give him greater mastery over its literature, plausible as this argumant
