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EDUCATION.

past a history, literature, and culture of their own, will
probably be wrong in dealing with a population just
emerging from barbarism. But they can only be answered
at all by one who has actually studied the effects of the
Introduction of an alien education among people of varying
 types. Ceylon on a small scale and British India on a
large scale are perhaps the best object-lessons that such a
dtudent ean have before him. Certainly in the history of
British India no event, not even the Mutiny, has had such
vast and momentous consequences to the country as the
decision to introduce education of the European type.
InCeylontheobject-lessonisrendered more picturesque,and
Perhaps not less valuable, by the fact that more than seventy
years passed after the British occupation before any extensive
8ducational policy was organized by Government ; and even
then want of funds and other causes prevented the carrying
out of any complete scheme dealing with the whole populafion
 of the Island. The result is that Ceylon at the present
time shows a fine assortment of contrasting systems working
side by side. From the higher colleges, where you have
Seen boys working at conic sections or Euripides, you can
pass to the seminary for Buddhist priests, where the matter
and manner of the teaching are much the same as they were
ander Parakkrama the Great, where no English is understood,
and where you will still see classes studying the Buddhist
scriptures in their primitive ola manuscripts. In one street
you will find a Mission girls’ school with Ceylonese children
Playing Kindergarten games and being taught in English by
a thoroughly trained English lady; in another, not many
yards away, you will hear the interminable chant of the
Tamil verandah school, with its crowd of urchins squatting
on the ground and learning the Tamil alphabet with no other
apparatus except their own fingers and the sand of the floor.
In raral districts you will find similar contrasts, though
they are fast disappearing. In one Sinhalese village you
will gee a well-appointed Government school, attended by
two or three hundred boys, with desks, blackboards, wall
aps, object-lessons, time table, physical drill, and perhaps
an admirable school garden. The boys wear petticoats
instead of trousers, and talk Sinhalese instead of English,
but the whole organization is much the same as that of 2 good
slementary school in England. Go ten miles further on
nto the jungle, and perhaps you will come to a group of
villages which neither Government nor Mission bodies have
Provided with a school ; here education iseither non-existent
Or it is confined to what is called the Pansala school. 7.e., the
ichool attached to a Buddhist temple.

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