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A LITERATURE of SCHOOL BOOKS a Study of the Burmese Books A LITERATURE OF SCHOOL BOOKS A Study of the Burmese books approved for use in schoolsby the OP Education Department in 1885* and^their place in the developing Educational System in British Burma by L.E. Bagshawe, B.A. (Oxon) Submitted for the Degree of Master of Philosophy School of Oriental and African Studies. •’The creation of a literature, even though it be but a literature of s chool-books, is a work of many years........11 Hunter Commission Report 1882. ProQuest Number: 10672855 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10672855 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 A LITERATURE OF SCHOOL BOOKS ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis Is to consider the Burmese language text books approved for use in schools and listed in the Burma Education's Handbook of 1385, and to demonstrate their place In the system that had been developed up to that year which marks the end of the early formative stage of Western education in Burma under British administration. First, in order to understand how government policy towards education evolved in Burma, the rationale of British involvement in the education of Eastern peoples, leading to the Dispatches of 1354- and 1o59j is examined. Secondly some account is given of the major government decisions concerning education taken during the 1360s; that which determined, following the 1354* Dispatch, that education should be modern in content and, so far as possible, in the Burmese language, was of great importance, giving rise to a constantly appearing strain between the desire of the Burmese for an English education and the official concept of the government's duty. Thirdly the three types of school already existing in the country are discussed, namely thegovernment's own schools, the mission schools, and the 'indigenous' schools, comprising monastic schools and lay ('house') schools, which together it was hoped would serve as the basis of a new integrated system, and also the problems involved In this integration. The second part of the thesis (Chapter 17 onward) contains an examination of the way in which the system developed and. how the government assumed Increasing responsibility for education by the establishment of institutions such as the Teachers' Training School, Committees of Public Instruction, Cess Schools, the Rangoon High School and the Educational Syndicate. Chapter V deals with the Vernacular Committee, which in 1379 became the Text Book Committee and Its mode of operation; the difficulties of producing 'modern' text books in Burmese; authors and their backgrounds and the expansion of book publishing. Finally in Chapters 71 end VII a detailed examination of the list of approved books shows that by 1385 the government had not found it possible to integrate the three different educational systems into a coherent whole. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I Introduction page 1 Chapter II Backgrounds - Burmese and English page 6 Chapter III The Beginnings of an Educational System page 33 Chapter IV The System In Action, 1S70-1S85 P®ge 59 Chapter V Text Books - Their Authors and Publishers page 94 Chapter VI Text Books on the Approved List page 119 Chapter VII Conclusions page 183 Bibliography page 201 Glossary page 213 Appendix A Three versions of a section from the Hitaw-padetha page 214 Appendix B Three versions of the 'Cock and Jewel' in 'Aesop's Fables' fPhaedrus III, 12) page 216 1 Chapter I - Introduction. "What has been written about the development of an educational system in Burma under British administration generally seems to assume that the local officials developed their plans almost in a vacuum, under no constraint to consider anything but what they thought to be in the interests of their administration. In fact, they were under a tight control from the government of India at all times - slightly less tight perhaps than the control exercised in more accessible provinces, but distance would be counterbalanced by the greater difficulty which a mere Chief Commissioner would find in arguing with a Governor General than would a Presidency Governor who had no career in India to consider. The government of India, in their turn, were coming under ever-tightening control from the British government; what happened in Burma was the result of policies settled in London. In England the nineteenth century, and particularly its second half, was a period when all aspects of education attracted enormous interest, Its principles and purposes were endlessly argued over, and great changes were brought about. In 1858 the ’Christian Observer’ wrote, "Education is the fever of our times. Even good men speak of it as though it were the long-wanted panacea for all our ills." In 1904? looking back over fifty years, A.V. Dicey of the Working M^n’s College wrote of the changes that had taken place In 1854 reformers laid unlimited stress upon the virtue of self-help... in 1904 the tendency of opinion is to lay immense, some may think excessive, emphasij upon the duty of the state to help its individual members. At the beginning of this period the literacy rate In England was very probably no higher than it x^as in Burma; ift> I84I, 33$ of the men and 49$ of women signed the marriage registers with a mark (including some school-teachers) and in 1871 the proportion was still 19$ of men and 27$ of women. By 1880 elementary education had become compulsory for all, but it is not until nearly the end of the century that the scene begins to look familiar to us. Writers who belittle what was done for education in Burma during the 1870s tend to look at the activity from the point of view of what is considered normal today, without considering that today’s norms developed out of battles fought out during the period described. It is hardly fair to judge actions by moral norms not yet established, even if they have come to seem self-evident to the judge. ^ Quoted by J. Llewellyn Davis - "The Working Men's College 1854-1904" — (4' o'A-j€\' 4 cii Kv kVNCvWi'd '^> 2 . Naturally education in Burma was strongly affected by this avalanche of change in progress in England, not leqst because the influence of those whose work earlier in the century had set off the avalanche was very strong on many of those concerned with education in the East. Macaulay, whose action did much to determine the general course of educational policy, was the son of atfather who had been a close associate of Wilberforce,’ the chief mover in the very first legislation touching on education in India - the Act of 1813; Macaulay’s mother had been a favourite pupil of Hannah More. Thomas Arnold’s son was Director of Public Instruction in the Panjab, and his pupil Woodrow in East Bengal; Bishop Cotton of Calcutta was Arnold's associate at Rugby and a protege of Vaughan's at Harrow. Peter Hordern, Burma’s first effective Director of Public Instruction, was Cotton’s relation and pupil. Aside from the evangelical tradition, the Mills were a power at the India Office - James, the associate of Brougham and Bentham, until his death in I838, and his son John Stuart until 1858. All this added up to a tradition in which education was a matter to be taken veryseriously indeed. Apart from this rather general influence, changes in England led directly to changes in the East. The revised code of 1862 which set up a system of payment by results as the main basis for government support of schools was followed closely by similar codes in India and Burma. Again, when in 1872 Ashley Eden reckoned it right to encbarage local Committees of Public Instruction to 'stir up the pongyis’, he must have been thinking of the school boards set up by the Education Act of 1870 to compete with and to put on their mettle the voluntary religious societies. The parallel between the school boards and the Local Committees must be kept in mind as an indication of the way it ms hoped that the Committees would develop. The problem was how to persuade the Sangha to behave a little more like the National Society. In the middle of a period of vigorous change, heated discussion and violent disagreement in the educational world in England, it could not be expected that the English would immediately set up an immaculate system in their Eastern Empire. Everything would be at least as experimental and as provisional as similar arrangements in England; this was clearly recognised in Burma at the time - when the acting Director of Public Instruction, Ferrars, used his annual report to launch a vigorous 3 . attack on all that was being done in the educational field, in 1878, the Chief Commissioner replied: While on the one hand there are and must be many shortcomings, the failures that have occured hitherto are such as were to be expected in a new and untried field of operations, and afford no good ground for discouragement or for sudden and radical changes. No one claimed to be perfect.
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