COLLEGE HISTORY
CHAPTER 10
S. Thomas’ and Educational Influences in Ceylon
What has so far been said has been matter of fact, as accurate and as true as it could be made from the sources available. But as soon as the interpretation of facts begins, there must be an element of opinion; and so what follows has been separated from the chronicle of events, and set out by itself. Its purpose is to try and show the influences that have made up the historical background of the ordinary boy who goes to school today. For this purpose it is essential to understand something of the history of the country, and an outline of the history of Ceylon may therefore be of use to any who are not already familiar with it.
The Ancient Sinhalese Kingdom
The Mahavamsa, one of the oldest chronicles in the world, gives the story of the Sinhalese people from 483 B.C. to 1815 A.D., and it is the main source of knowledge about the ancient kingdom. From the Mahavamsa it appears that Prince Vijaya led one of several waves of conquest from Northern India, possibly Bengal, and settled with his followers in Ceylon, where they founded the city of Anuradhapura which became the royal capital of the Sinhalese nation. He found in the Island a people whom the chronicle calls Yakkhas (demons), but they seem to have had some sort of civilization, being ruled by a queen, and living in cities. The Yakkhas seem almost certainly to be the ancestors of the Veddas of the Ceylon jungle. Seligmann’s work on the Veddas records such of their customs and language as remained at the end of the last century, while it is held that today there is hardly a pure Vedda to be found. However that may be, the influenc of the Vedda race in the making up of the modern Sinhalese race should not be left unconsidered when more light comes to be thrown upon the subject.
The Sinhalese are belived to have brought Hinduism with them to Ceylon,* and it remained the principal religion until 247 B.C., when Asoka sent over the Buddhist missionary Mahinda. "Asoka", says Bishop R.S.Copleston in his book on Buddhism, "was a great man who found in Buddhism the great social, moral virtues of kindness to man and beast, peacefulness, truth, honesty that he wished to instil into his people."† Asoka gave Buddhism to Devanampiatissa, King of Ceylon, and the Buddhist philosophy with a strong Hindu bias upon it, became one of the greatest influences on the Sinhalese character.
Buddhism came upon a vigorous race; the race that built the cities of Anuradhapura, and later Polonnaruwa and Sigiriya, and made the water-storage tanks, which prove that their builders had great artistic sense, architectural skill, and engineering ability, not to say capacity for organization of labour. The cities and tanks still stand in the jungle as a witness to a great civilization.
Most writers on Ceylon History have pointed out how the priests established schools, but these schools do not seem to have been organizations of any permanence. Each saint or scholar gathered his disciples and taught them the Buddhist scriptures in the Pali language, the lists of places of pilgrimage, and the astrology that was needed for casting the people’s horoscopes; while the Brahmans still continued to teach Sanskrit. With the departure or death of a teacher his disciples would scatter to find new masters.
There are records of skill in surgery, of great poets, of Brahman scholars who taught arts and sciences under the patronage of kings; but the Mahavamsa is chiefly concerned with the Maha Vihara, or great monastery at Anuradhapura. Here the writer of the early part of the Mahavamsa lived. It was one of seats of learning, a Pirivena, a kind of university. But it is misleading to apply western terms to ancient oriental institutions. The whole idea of a fixed organization for worldly purposes was quite foreign to the Buddhist ideal. Perhaps something in the nature of Tagore’s school at Shanti Niketan would give a better idea of an ancient Pirivena. The students, assembled from many countries, studied in the open air under the shade of trees, and recited the verses they learned from their teachers’ lips. Manuscript books must have been exceedingly rare and precious. Nevertheless education for the higher castes seems to have been fairly universal, and covered a wide range of subjects for that age.
Buddhism rapidly became the national religion. Supported by royal favour, and led by men of really saintly lives, it took such a hold on the people that multitudes took vows of asceticism and lived upon the bounty of their fellows.
In these circumstances and with the pacific teaching of Buddhism, the king found it difficult to raise forces, for the defense of his coast, and to keep order in the interior, and into so he took his pay a body of Tamils form South India. "Of the foreigners thus confided in", writes Tennent, "two youths powerful in their cavalry, and navy named Sena and Guttika, proved unfaithful to their trust, and after causing the death of the King Suratissa, (B.C.237), retained the supreme power for upwards of twenty years, till overthrown in their turn and put to death by the adherents of the legitimate line.*"But the Tamils had now tasted of the wealth of Ceylon and they started by wave after wave of petty raids and conquests to establish themselves in Ceylon, especially in the North with their headquarters at Jaffna, and their influence stretching for to the south. In B.C .145, another Tamil, Elara, again held the throne for 44 years. The Sinhalese people then had a great revival under Dutu Gemunu, but it did not last long. In 642 A.D., Anuradhapura, the ancient capital, was practically deserted. In 1037, Polonnaruwa was seized by the Tamils. The Sinhalese capital moved steadily southward to Sigiriya, to Yapahu, to Kurunegala, to Gampola, to Kotte and to Kandy. Thus the Tamils were established in Ceylon nearly two thousand years ago, and they looked upon the island as their home, and had a long history in the North, centuries before the needs of the coffee, tea and rubber industries added to their numbers in Ceylon.
It was a long time before the Tamil raids were seriously felt and that interval was marked by the greatest days of the Sinhalese Kingdom. In the time of King Vijaya Bahu III, (1232 A.D.), education was greatly encouraged, and the Buddhist priests were directed to teach the children in every village. Of King Vijaya Bahu III, the Mahavamsa says : "Now in his faith the Sovereign set about rendering helpful service to the Order (priesthood) of the perfectly Enlightened One (the Buddha). If one asks how this was done, the account runs thus : "Deeply grieved in his heart that in the island of Lanka so many books that dealt with the true doctrine had been destroyed by the alien foe (Hindu Tamils), the Ruler called together laymen endowed with good memory and knowledge, pious, well instructed, free from indolence, and skilled in quick and fair writing, and along with these, many other writers of books, and made all these write down in careful fashion the eighty-four thousand divisions of the doctrine, and made over to them in accordance with the number of the divisions the like number of gold Kadapanes."* This passage shows how education was not confined to the priesthood and how, as in Europe at the same time, men still looked backward to past ages for inspiration, and found it chiefly in religion. If the priestly writer meant to hint at the decadence of the priesthood, the insinuation was not unjustified. Again and again he condemns the laxness of his brethren. Royal patronage and accumulated wealth very soon had their effect upon the original deep sincerity of the Buddhist leaders.
The long Tamil wars forced the peace-loving Buddhists to become soldiers and they founded military schools where youths could learn "archery, management of the elephant and fencing with swords." But in course of time war brought another deadly enemy upon the ancient kingdom. While men were away fighting, the great lakes and vast irrigation systems of former years, were left untended and they became choked, or burst their bounds, or the bunds were cut by the enemy, and the water lay in stagnant pools across the land. The inevitable result was malaria. When it came is not known, but when the first Europeans reached Ceylon, the jungle had taken possession of the ancient cities and Ceylon was divided into a number of petty kingdoms almost too obscure to have left any records of their existence. Years of war and bloodshed, and the often selfish, and sometimes weak, rule of a long line of absolute monarchs had tended to crush the originality in art and the progress in society that had once made the race great.
The ancient kingdom left a legacy of thought, and so of language and customs impregnated with Buddhism. It left a caste system divided according to crafts, and strictly graded, with an aristocray and an absolute monarch at its head. No great quantity of Sinhalese literature or learning survived, though what did survive was of importance and was constantly added to in the following centuries : but respect for learning never died out, and that respect was to be turned to an entirely new and very different culture from anything the people had known before.
The Portuguese Era
When Vasco da Gama found his way round the Cape of Good Hope (1497), it was not long before his countrymen established themselves at Goa in South India, and from Goa they came to Ceylon and built a fort at Colombo, where they came in conflict with the long established trading interests of the Moors. They came to trade, and to spread Christianity, but they were soon forced by circumstances to become conquerors. The Portuguese showed in Ceylon, as the Spanish showed in Mexico and Peru, an incredible mixture of courage and endurance, with an unscrupulous lust for gold. They married Sinhalese wives and the children of these alliances were admitted to full citizenship, one of the them becoming Commander –in-Chief in Ceylon. They wished the people to accept the laws of Portugal and they offered to the Sinhalese nobility the same rights and privilages as the Portuguese nobles enjoyed. "But the people’s delegates declined to submit to such wholesale assimilation, pointing out that they were Sinhalese brought up from their youth in the laws which they knew and observed, and that it would be a very grave matter for them to abandon those laws and take others in their place."*
The Portuguese followed the policy of supporting one Sinhalese prince against a rival, so that the hundred years of their supremacy became a duel between the Low Country under the Portuguese and the Hill Kingdom under the Kings of Kandy who remained independent. Three times did the Portuguese burn Kandy, and each time their army found itself cut off in the midst of the enemy, so that it was twice annihilated in the wild rocky ravines leading back to the coast. Twice did Raja Sinha of Sitawaka, almost win his way over the walls into the city of Colombo. Amidst the rapine and disorder and bloodshed of this period it was no wonder that Buddhism declined in the Kandyan Kingdom. The people were forced to put up with the despotism of their kings because the king’s power alone would protect them from the Portuguese.
But the bravery that marked the Portuguese soldier was not lacking in the Portuguese missionaries. St. Francis Xavier’s life is a typical example of their daring and enterprise. He preached in India, China and Japan, a perfectly marvellous achievement for those days. It was no mean feat that he found his way into kandy when his countrymen were at war with that kingdom. Education was entirely in the hands of the Church. The Franciscans, the Jesuits and the Dominicans all started Colleges and Schools in the towns, while the village priests, scattered over the Low Country, taught the people in the Village Schools. With the rare psychological insight which has always characterized them, the Jesuits encouraged teaching in the Vernacular, while other orders used the local corrupt Portuguese. The Village Schools taught Sinhalese reading and writing.
The Portuguese left a very enduring mark upon the people of the Low Country. As late as 1846, Bishop Chapman read services in Portuguese, a very corrupt Portuguese it is true, but enough to show the firm hold that the language had taken, and to account for the many Portuguese words that have been absorbed into Sinhalese. The great vigour of the Roman Catholic missions in Ceylon is a legacy of the Portuguese, and they were responsible for giving the Sinhalese and Tamils their first contact with European ideas and European education. The Portuguese left too a legacy of romantic valour, coupled with greed and treachery, which did little good to the country.
The Dutch Era
In 1656 the Dutch captured Colombo, and the Reformation reached Ceylon. The Dutch avoided war with Kandy as much as possible, to the great benefit of the people of Ceylon, and turned their energies principally to trade. For this purpose, according to the usual practice of the time, they endeavoured to establish government monopolies in their dominions, in which the people of the country only shared indirectly.
But the race that had so lately fought for its religion in Europe with such wonderful courage and endurance was equally ardent in its missionary labours in Ceylon, and the missionaries were responsible for the establishment of schools. The Dutch system of education seems to have been elementry but widespread. At one time there were 70,000 children in the schools. The Dutch Governors agreed with Baldaecus, their Minister of religion and historian in Ceylon, that oral instruction in the fundamental truth of the Gospel in as few points as possible was best.* In this the Dutch followed the same principal that prevailed in the elementary schools of their own country and in most countries of Europe at that time. The schools were nearly all taught in the Vernaculars, and not much was done to extend the Dutch language, though a large number of Dutch words have passed into the Ceylon Vernacular languages. Girls were taught with boys in the schools, which was a great advance. Where their influence was strong enough, the Dutch sent round inspectors, always clergymen, who saw that the children stayed at school until the progress made was satisfactory. Efforts were made to improve the standard of teachers by the Seminaries founded in Colombo and Jaffna after 1696 : but by 1743 these Seminaries had reached University standard and had largely lost touch with the village Schools.
The schools were unpopular in some districts, partly because of Buddhist and Roman Catholic opposition, and partly because they interfered with local customs, especially marriage customs. It seems undeniable that a large number of those who received baptism at the hands of the Dutch missionaries did so out of interest and were only nominal Christians : yet it would be unfair to underrate the Dutch educational system as a whole. It is interesting to find how many people in the villages were able to read the tracts that were poured out of the missionary presses in Jaffna and Kotte in the early days of the nineteenth century, and the Dutch school had a share in the development of literacy which seems always to have been high in Ceylon. The schools also continued to undermine the caste system as the Buddhists, and the Portuguese conversions had done, and so far they helped to advance common schools and common education.
The Dutch left an important Burgher element in the population, nearly all English-speaking today, and all conscious of a distinction of race from the rest of the people around them.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the historical background of a schoolboy of today is to examine the names in a school list. There will be found ancient Sinhalese names many of them civil and military titles and names derived from districts or villages where families have held sway ; Sinhalese names with portuguese names added ; Ceylon Tamil names, and English and American names taken at Baptism; Indian Tamil names; and a very large number of Portuguese names. In 1934 there were in St.Thomas’ 50 boys named de Silva, 47 named Fernando, 30 named Pereira, 14 named Pieris, 10 named Rodrigo, 10 named Dias, 8 named de Soysa and 7 named de Mel. There were also Moor names : and a number of Dutch names.
In 1795 the Dutch surrendered Colombo, and shortly afterwards the Kingdom of Kandy came under British rule.
English Education and the Vernacular
In the early days of British rule the Dutch school system was allowed to decline. Compulsory attendance was abolished and schoolmasters’ salaries were no longer paid by Government. The system was gradually replaced by Baptist, Wesleyan and American Mission schools, and by the C.M.S., while the education of boys in the Buddhist temples continued as it had done for centuries past. The C.M.S.missionaries learned Sinhalese or Tamil themselves, and used it in their work, and in the elementary schools they founded.
In the Christian Institution at Kotte, which the C.M.S. started in 1827 "for the higher instruction of native teachers" the Vernaculars were an essential part of the training, and a version of the Bible in Sinhalese was produced.*
But while vernacular elementary education was thus gradually developing in the villages, the wealthier classes of Sinhalese and Tamils, and especially the Burgher population, were eagerly learning English. In 1835 the Government decided to found a school to impart higher education, and for this purpose, they took over a private school founded by a C.M.S.missionary, the Rev. J.Marsh, who became the first Principal. This was the first of the English Secondary Schools in Ceylon which have been responsible for the spread of English Education. It was known as the Colombo Academy, and has come to be called the Royal college. ‘In the general routine of the College’ says the history of Royal College written by the boys of the school in 1933, ‘the subjects taught were Logic, Elements of English law (Blackstone’s Commentaries), Principles of Natural, Philosophy, Astronomy, Sinhalese, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. * When, in 1859, the Colombo Academy was affiliated to the Calcutta University the vernaculars seem to have dropped out of the curriculum.† Mr.Harward, who became Principal in 1892, was a keen Sinhalese scholar, and introduced the Vernaculars, Sinhalese and Tamil, into the curriculum; while Mr. Hartley, Principal in 1903, went a step further and introduced Ceylon History in the three upper forms further and introduced Ceylon History in the three upper forms in 1907.‡ But as time went on the vernaculars seem to have lost their place amid the increasing number of subjects, and they were not again introduced until quite recently.
When Bishop Chapman founded St. Thomas’ College in 1851, the subjects for study were Cornelius Nepos, Virgil, Greek Delectus, Arithmetic, General History and Geography, Algebra, Euclid, Mensuration and Mechanics, Scripture, Analysis, English reading and Composition. Provision was also made for instruction in the Vernacular Languages, and the Rev. G.R.Muttukistna and the Rev. C.Alwis were appointed Tamil and Sinhalese pundits. Yet in a list of school subjects for 1855 the Vernaculars are not mentioned, and they did not regain their position until 1918. Ceylon History did not gain a place in the curriculum until even later.
Trinity College, Kandy, was founded by the Rev. J.I.Jones in 1857, and became a secondary school taking the Calcutta Examinations in 1876. The list of subjects studied in the Upper School in 1860 included Scripture, Euclid, Algebra, Arithmetic, Latin, Greek, Geography, History of India, History of England, Astronomy, English Grammar, Poetry, Drawing; ‘and the Principal added two extra classes after school hours for the teaching of Sinhalese and Tamil.’ # There seems to be no other mention of the Vernaculars until the coming of Mr. Fraser in 1904, when Sinhalese and Tamil were again taught and ‘Ceylon History was revived as a school subject.’
Kingswood, Kandy, started in 1891, and its founder and first Principal, Mr.L.F.Blaze, writes in his ‘Story of Kingswood, ‘Sinhalese did not form part of our curriculum.’
The question arises, when the missionaries who originated both the elementary and secondary school with the full support of government, and with every willingness and intention to teach the Vernaculars, why the Vernaculars either disappeared or held only a subordinate place in the English Schools.
The answer is not far to seek.
The Sinhalese Classics were little know either to the people of the country or in Europe. They were written in Pali, or High Sinhalese, which only a handful of scholars understood. Macaulay’s famous minute on the Indian Classics, written in 1835, condemned them for purposes of education as altogether too fabulous. Moreover the Ceylon Classics were almost entirely Buddhist in outlook, and so did not recommend themselves to Christian missionaries
But this alone would not have established English education. The East had almost universally worn out the inspiration of its ancient social and intellectual systems, and the intelligent Easterner could not fail to see the value, material and intellectual, of the new knowledge from the West. It was not English education, as such, that he wanted, but the universal element in education which the English missionaries offered to him. The teachers and the books were at hand, and the Ceylon parent paid the school fees, and enrolled his sons, and later his daughters, under the new system.
There were other incentives to English education. Although much of the ancient Ceylon system of local government was retained, the legal, medical, educational and other government departments were English in character, and gave openings to English-speaking Ceylonese, of which, those who could afford the new education, were quick to take advantage.
Of the policy of Britain at this time Wyndham writes in his book ‘Native Education’, "With the arrival of the 19th century a remarkable cycle of assimilation was opened. The new movement was inspired by high humanitarian the motives, by faith in the beneficent influence of individualism, by a conviction that European civilization was the best for all mankind." Under this policy, the old caste organization of society was almost entirely done away with, and so the old officials lost much of their ancient power. In 1828 it was decreed that in future no Headman should be appointed who could not read and write English.
"English education," says Father S.J.Perera in his History of Ceylon, "became the hall mark of gentility, it alone was considered secondary education, and very few of those who were educated in English schools had any knowledge of Vernacular grammer or literature."*
Under such circumstances it was inevitable that the Vernaculars should fall into discredit, in spite of the efforts of some schools to keep them in to the curriculum. Moreover, as living languages, they were purely colloquial. The learned wrote and conversed in the learned languages. It was impossible to translate the new ideas into the Vernaculars, for these languages lacked the vocabulary to express them.
As Wyndham says, "scarcely any subject referred to in a newspaper could be studied in a vernacular work." So the Vernaculars got left behind and only the most ignorant could not make shift to read and write some kind of English.
English the Universal Language of the East
The development of English Education in Ceylon was part of a great wave of English Education that swept over the East. It penetrated all the well-to-do classes in India, Ceylon and Malay States : famous schools sprang up under its influence in Singapore, Sarawak, British North Borneo and Hongkong: the S.P.G., the C.M.S., and the American missionaries founded Colleges in China and Korea where English was the medium of instruction, and Japan put English into the curriculum of her schools.
This spread of the English tongue makes an interesting comparison with spread of Latin. Leach in his book, "English Schools at the Reformation" says:
"The learned professions required a competent knowledge of Latin far more directly then than now. A need for Latin was not confined to the Church and the priest. The diplomatist, the lawyer, the civil servant, the physician, the naturalist, the philosopher wrote, read, and to a large extent spoke and perhaps thought in Latin. Nor was Latin only the language of the higher professions. A merchant, or a bailiff of a manor, wanted it for his accounts; every town clerk or guild clerk wanted it for his minute book. The sea-captain had to study for his voyages in Latin. the general had to study tactics in it. The architect, the musician, everyone who was neither a mere solider nor a mere handicraftsman, wanted not a smattering of grammar, but a living acquaintance with the tongue, as a spoken as well as a written language."
The parallel is very striking. Every word of this passage might be applied to English in most of the countries in the preceding paragraph.
The Government Education Committee of 1867 declared the ‘English should be to natives of Ceylon what Latin is to the natives of Great Britain’.
Has it been so?
The Effect on Ceylon Boys of being Educated in English
In his introduction to Tagore’s "Letters to a Friend", C.F.Andrews says, "Early in the nineteenth century the burning question in Bengal was whether the spread of the English Language should be encouraged or not. Macaulay poured contempt on the Sanskrit Classics; he treated Bengali literature as useless. In expressing these opinions he committed egregious blunders. Yet strangely enough, in spite of his narrow outlook, his practical insight was not immediately at fault. The hour for indigenous revival had not yet come. A full shock from without was needed, and the study of English gave the shock required.
But the new life which first appeared was not altogether healthy. It led immediately to a shaking of old customs and an unsettlement of religious convictions carried often to a violent and unthinking extreme. The greatest disturbance of all was in the social sphere. A wholesale imitation of purely western habits led to a painful confusion of ideas. It was a brilliant and precocious age, bubbling over with a new vitality; but wayward and unregulated, like a rudderless ship on a stormy sea."*
This is a sound statement of the effect of English Education, and to it may be added Tagore’s own words in a lecture delivered in India. He says:
"The European vernaculars first woke up to life and fruitful vigour owing to the impact of foreign thought power. The same thing is happening in India. European culture has come to us, not only with its knowledge, but with its velocity. Though our assimilation of it is imperfect, and the consequent aberrations numerous, still it is rousing our intellectual life from its inertia of former habits into growing consciousness by the very contradiction it offers to our mental traditions."
It is safe to say that Tagore is among the greatest of living poets, and he is admittedly a product of the stimulus of English education. His verdict on the teaching of the Vernaculars in his Reminiscences is therefore of peculiar value. It applies to all children who speak nothing but the Vernaculars in their earliest years. He says:
"It was because we were taught in our own native tongue (Bengali) that our minds quickened. Learning should as far as possible follow the process of eating. When the taste begins with the first bite, the stomach is awakened to its function before it is loaded, so that its digestive juices get full play. Nothing like this happens, however, when the Bengali boy is taught in English. The first bite bids fair to wrench loose both rows of teeth-like a veritable earthquake in the mouth! And by the time he discovers that the morsel is not of genus stone, but a digestible bonbon, half his allotted span of life is over. While one is choking and spluttering over the spelling and grammar, the inside remains starved, and when at length the taste is felt, the appetite has vanished. If the whole mind does not work from the beginning, its full powers remain undeveloped to the end." †
Father Perera gives the following estimate of the effects of the English Education System. He says:*
"This system made education synonymous with a knowledge of English and denationalized the English educated classes of the island. A system of education without knowledge of the mother tongue and severed from historical associations of the people, led to results as unexpected by the Government as by the people. The Ceylonese imbibed English political ideas and soon elbowed out the European colonists from the political fields and demanded a form of government consistent with their self respect. But the system of education under which they were reared enabled the Government to contend that the demand was a demand of a minority, out of touch with the great mass of their countrymen. Thus the demand for political reform and the refusal were both the outcome of a misguided policy."
The committee’s Report on English Education in 1867 said that it had done little more than to produce "a class of shallow, conceited, half-educated youths who have learnt nothing but to look back with contempt upon the conditions in which they were born and from which they conceive that their education has raised them, and who desert the ranks of the industrious classes to become idle, discontented hangers-on of the Courts and Public Offices." If this state of things ever existed it has long since passed away. But the fact remains that boys who were separated from their village or from the working classes by their knowledge of English and English customs did develop a certain contempt for the ‘villager’, a contempt very unworthy of themselves and very undesrved by the villager.’ The ‘villager’ on his part followed his superiors and preferred a school for his children which taught the merest smattering of parrot-learned English to one which taught only the Vernaculars.
It is clear that the problems of the Ceylon boy and of the Bengali boy are not the same : it is also true that many men educated in English schools worked in every part of the country in the professions, or managing estates, and that they were upon intimate terms with the villagers and put a proper value upon them and their work. Yet the passages quoted above help to show the effect of English education on Eastern boys, especially upon town boys who formed the great majority in the schools. They show how social and literary ideals receive new power from outside; they show the danger of unsatisfied thinking in one language caused by the imposition of another at too early an age; and they show the danger of separating the educated minority from the mass of the people.
So far then English had begun to do for Ceylon what Latin did for England. With all its dangers it had given new thought, and new vocabulary, and had been the means of opening up the knowledge of the world to the people of the Island.
But there were other and more subtle effects in which English education in the broadest sense, that is including language, customs, art, religions and social ideas, games, and so on, had a part. Nobody could ask for better promise than was shown by the children of Sinhalese and Tamil stock, but centuries of sometimes weak and selfish, and often foreign kings after the first greatness of the Ceylon kingdom passed away, the long lust-stained wars of the Portuguese, and the rule of the Dutch Merchant Company had had a depressing effect. Though British rule, helped by the new democratic principles which were spreading over the world, had done wonders for the people of Ceylon, it supplied most of the initiative and leadership that were so sorely needed. History makes the psychology of a people and the roots of man’s nature stretch far back into his past. It is all stored in his subconscious mind, and will find its way into his thoughts and actions. The history of the people of Ceylon had long been an almost continual suppression of mental energy and that energy had found outlets of its own.
English education had had its full share in that suppression. By replacing the indigenous culture and setting itself up as a superior culture it had diverted the native energy of the people and repressed native leadership. It had given a sense of inferiority, and encouraged the putting of the responsibility of preserving society upon an extraneous government.
The problem before educators in the early years of St. Thomas’ College was how to remove the obstructions, how to turn the energy into natural channels, and to sublimate a force strong enough to bring about a ‘renaissance’ in the new generations.
The rest of this chapter is intended to show very briefly some ways in which educators in St. Thomas’ and elsewhere tried to take their share in solving this problem. It should of course be borne in mind that elementary education in Town, and Village, and Estate Schools, which is at least as important as education in English Secondary Schools, was being developed at the same time, and has expanded very widely.
The Progress of English Education and its relation to St. Thomas’
Bishop Chapman was one of an army of pioneers of many races who believed in education as a redeeming force, and who opened up new systems both in England and on the continent of Europe, and in almost every other part of the world. In one of his letters the Bishop acknowledges his debt to Dr. Arnold of Rugby; and his long contact with Eton both as a boy and as a master had a strong influence upon his work in Ceylon. But he went further than his teachers. He founded a school upon the same general principles as he had known in England, and, in addition, a College working upon University standards. The idea of a preparatory school which has since done so much to give individual attention to younger boys was in Chapmen’s day only contained in the despised private schools, and it formed no part of his scheme. The Victorian gentleman believed in the dignity of age and position, and in the efficacy of a hard and simple life, and so he put his work -people into slums, and gave his children a hard barrack life at school. Bishop Chapman was a thorough Victorian. He believed in his own dignity and in the dignity of the Warden of his College, but he spared neither himself nor the boys under his care. He offered them a simple life of hard fare, and hard work, and promised them in return the best education that could be had from his own and his masters’ patient care and teaching, long experience and distinguished university qualifications.
So far as we know Bishop Chapman never sat for an examination in his life. He took his degree from King’s College, Cambridge, in the days before examinations were made compulsory. But the great improvements that examinations had brought about both in Universities and in the Public Schools where they had been instituted, had won the confidence of the public for them, and the Bishop had his own examinations and his own certificates for his school and his College.
When Bishop Chapman thought of education he thought very definitely of Christian education; and the purpose of offering the Christian faith to the people of Ceylon was never out of his mind. His College was primarily intended to educate young men so that they might afterwards become priests in the Church if they wished; but he nevertheless opened the School and the College, from the first, to any who wished to take advantage of the education that they offered.
The nature of his school reflected the nature of the Public Schools of his boyhood. There was the long room with the various classes each in view of the other, and each attended by its usher, while all were under the vigilant eye of the master at his desk at the head of the room. Set lessons were learned, and the cane was the recognized treatment for any kind of disorder or bad work. Supervision out of school hours, though it was much greater than had prevailed in the English Public Schools before Arnold’s time, was very small when compared with the present time, and consisted more in punishments for offences than in supplying legitimate outlets for boyish energy.
The plan of the Founder is made quite clear by the report of Warden Baly written in 1854. He says: "The design of this institution is to introduce into Ceylon such a complete system of education, preparatory to the study of particular professions, as may render it unnecessary for young persons who wish to acquire the higher branches of instruction to leave the island."
But this idea could not be completely realized because the glamour of a Calcutta degree proved too strong for it.
In 1859 the Academy was affiliated to Calcutta University and Queen’s College was founded to prepare some of the best boys at the Academy for Calcutta degrees. In 1863 St.Thomas’ was forced to follow suit, and it was also affiliated to Calcutta; so that Chapman’s idea of a University for Ceylon in Ceylon died, and has never been realized to this day.
Calcutta degrees were a great spur to higher education and gave a new opportunity to those who could afford it to take a degree in a recognized University. But Calcutta was far away and did not belong in any way to the country. Ceylon education had begun to lean upon foreign Universities and a great opportunity was missed.
For the next fifteen years St. Thomas’ continued to prepare boys for degrees in the Indian University, and it was not until the time of Warden Miller that the Cambridge examinations began to replace those of Calcutta. When the Government University scholarships were transferred to Cambridge and awarded on the Cambridge examinations, the transformation soon became complete, and once again Ceylon education leaned upon an outside University even more remote and more foreign to the character of her people than Calcutta had been.
Ceylon secondary education was now following the examination scheme of the English Public Schools but with an important difference. The examinations were a great stimulus to work and they brought everybody up to a certain standard of efficiency, but still they were the invention of a machine-turning age, confining all boys in practice within a very limited range of subjects and showing little mercy to individual talents or individual weaknesses. They brought every boy up to a certain pitch of education, but where there was nothing beyond them for a boy to aspire to, they tended to clip the wings of those who were capable of flying high. There was little danger where the examinations led on naturally to a University, but where the chances of University education were few they were not without danger to education as a whole.
The fault, if fault there were, did not lie with the Cambridge authorities. It was chiefly due to lack of money. "The root weakness of the (English) schools was poverty." Says Mr.L.J.Gratiaen.* "Very few of them had any endowments. In the colleges, the salary of the missionary Principal usually came of mission funds, but little other help was given. The schools relied mainly on fees and grants. The average grant per pupil had varied from Rs.5.33 to Rs.6.82 before retrenchment. From 1885 it fell. It was as low as Rs.3.30 in 1892 and never reached Rs.5 again till the next century….. The fees usually ranged from 50 cents or Rs.1.00 in Standard I to from Rs.2.00 to Rs.5.00 in Standard VIII." Hence it was that although Cambridge offered to examine candidates in a great variety of subjects, the schools could not afford to pay masters in more than a few, and so the boys were limited to those few.
At their first coming the Cambridge examinations were a great stimulus. For the cleverer boys there were the English University Scholarships to prepare for; to parents and employers they gave a certain standard of education guaranteed by the name of a great University; to school masters they gave something definite to work for, which parents approved of, and which gave a clear and tangible result for their boys to aim at. The Calcutta examinations and the early days of the Cambridge examinations produced many of the best scholars, novelists, Ceylon historians, essay writers, antiquarians, translators and writers on Ceylon, that this Island has seen amongst her English educated sons: and they produced also a distinguished company of doctors, lawyers, Churchmen, schoolmasters, politicians, and Civil Servants. The harvest of those days was very rich.
In St. Thomas’ Warden Miller was careful not to allow examinations to throttle his best boys. He kept the idea of the scholarships always before them; he and his Staff took an active interest in the Debating Society and kept it to a high intellectual standard; he gave much of his spare time to coaching his most promising boys; in the days before Science was a regular school subject he gave lectures in Physics; he extended the library and brought it more within the scope of boys’ minds; he started a workshop with a forge and lathes; and one of his boys started the Natural History Society, while the College Choir gave some musical training to its members.
For the backward and average boys he used the Cambridge examinations as a stimulus. It was said of Thring of Uppingham that he took such care of every boy, clever, average of backward, that parents used to send him their less promising sons because they knew that he would make the most of them, while they sent their clever children elsewhere. Miller followed his master Thring in, believing that there was no such thing as a dull boy.
With regard to leadership, Miller started prefects in the College. The prefect system is a scheme by which the Headmaster or Principal consults with certain senior boys – Arnold consulted with his Sixth Form – and communicates to them what he wishes to be done in the school, and what he wishes not to be done, and sends those boys among their fellows to carry out what has been settled between himself and them. The prefects are the Headmaster’s special care. He himself, commends, restrains and stimulates their efforts as the need arises, and removes from office those who are incompetent or fail in their duty. The boys give their advice, and then maintain the rules of the Society and guide its activities under the immediate care of the Headmaster. Warden Miller did not introduce the complete system. He had prefects only in the Boarding Houses and their duties were limited to the small circle of boys within their own houses, but his aim was none the less to give them experience in the art of handling their fellows and of social responsibility. Though not himself an athlete, the Warden was careful to be present during games, and his Staff took an active part in school games and lived on intimate terms with the boys.
Warden Stone continued Warden Miller’s plan with regard to prefects, and development was slow. It has been pointed out that with boys the idea that a thing is hard upon an individual is stronger than the ideas that it is hard upon community. The man and not the principle counts. This is due to a lack of a developed sense of responsibility for the community, and it greatly adds to the difficulties of leadership. Even where a boy has personality and natural powers of leadership, it is hard for him to lead if his fellows resent following. Remembering the difficulties that were caused by the starting of prefects in other countries, it is not surprising to find that progress was equally slow in Ceylon. Perhaps the best prefect system in Ceylon has been that of Trinity College, Kandy a legacy of the work of Mr. Fraser.
Mr. Fraser became Principal of Trinity College in 1904 and his influence upon the English schools helped to cause the next development in education. Mr. Fraser’s finger was upon the pulse of the times, and he was a great missionary, so that the effect of his work upon St. Thomas’ was peculiarly strong. His policy is thus laid down in the Trinity College History:
"We intend to make a serious effort –
First, to train Christians in Ceylon so to preach Christ that their hearers may realise. He is no foreigner, but the real and true fulfillment of all that is highest in their aspirations and past.
Second, to make our pupils good citizens of their own land –
(a) By carefully relating all that is taught them to the needs, problems and language of their own people;
(b) By deliberately striving to foster and encourage their sense of responsibility and readiness to act, and so work for leaders.
Modern education in the East is still largely an experiment, and we are
still ignorant of most that we should know. So we propose –
1. The appointment of three capable and accomplished students to devote themselves to the study of education in India and Ceylon, and to Hindu and Buddhist apologetics….
2. The establishment of a good Training College for Christian teachers in the Vernacular and English (Anglo-Vernacular) and the creation of a ladder from the village school, where there are so many Christians, to the College with its possibilities of leadership. We hope by basing our education on the Vernaculars whilst teaching English thoroughly to make the transition from village schools to college easier, and to instruct more readily and more intelligently from the basis of their own knowledge.
3. The efficient prosecution of higher education on the lines of the Japanese code or of the Arya Samaj in its national gurukulas, i.e., education in their own classics combined with that of the West and modern science.
4. In all we hope to devolve responsibility more and more on the people themselves, strictly to limit the number of our pupils that each may have individual attention, and that there may be close contact between teachers and taught."*
That was Mr. Fraser’s vision of nationalist democratic Christianity, and it is astonishing how much of it he made into reality. Mr. Frazer was strongly influenced by the nationalist movement in India, and it was that same nationalist movement that became a new force in education in Ceylon. As a result of it, nearly every English School in the Island, St. Thomas’ among the rest, found a larger place for the Vernaculars in the curriculum, and developed a new interest in Ceylon History. Warden Stone started the Vernaculars in 1918, Warden McPherson did much to improve Vernacular work in 1926, and Warden de Saram added Ceylon History to the curriculum in 1933.
But meanwhile as the numbers of schools, and the numbers of pupils increased, the opportunities of University education became less and less adequate and the Cambridge Senior Certificate became more and more the goal of a pupil’s ambition. Warden Stone was himself too keen a scholar to allow what he called the "flat iron of the Cambridge Senior" to have too levelling an effect, and his work and that of his Staff produced many scholarships and a harvest of honours and distinctions. The examination results of 1914, 1915 and 1916 were very creditable to the College, but they were nevertheless becoming too good. The standard was too low to be the final test of those who had prospect of going to a University, and it kept the best boys below their proper degree of attainment. Those who were responsible for the examinations realized this to some extent and the standard was raised. It was also realized that two University Scholarships to England were not sufficient, and a step of the utmost importance to Ceylon education was taken in 1911 when "the Government appointed a committee to inquire into the question of Secondary and Higher Education in Ceylon". The result was the founding of the University College in Colombo in 1921 as a half-way house to a University. This gave a fresh spur to education in every direction, though the new College still looked outside the country, and prepared boys for the London University degrees. The College gave a new opportunity and a new ambition to schoolboys, and with the Training College for teachers, which had been started some years earlier, it enabled those who wished to become schoolmasters to qualify themselves without leaving the Island.
The Cambridge examinations continued as before, and in 1923 honours were abolished, and distinctions in 1933. With the coming of the University College the London Matriculation became more popular in schools.
In January, 1929 the Report of the University Commission was published. The report says :* "There are manifest objections to encouraging secondary schools to adapt their curricula to syllabuses controlled by distant authorities which may not be, and often are not, appropriate to the needs and characteristics of the students of the country. The system under which a private student attempts to follow a degree course unaided and without the guidance and inspiration which a University can give, has obvious limitations." The work that the University would undertake, and relative importance attached to the various subjects, is indicated by the following table.†
Professors. Readers. Lecturers. Assistant Demons-
Lecturers. trators.
English .. .. 1 1 1 2 -
European Classics .. 1 1 1 1 -
(Latin) (Greek)
Oriental Classics. .. 2 - 4 1 -
Philosophy & - - 1 1 -
Psychology (to assist in
education)
History .. .. 1 - 2 - -
(One for
Oriental History)
French and German... - - 2 - -
(Pass work only)
Econmics .. .. - 1 1 1 -
Geograhy .. .. - - 1 - -
Law .. .. 1 - 2 - -
(one full time)
(one part time)
Mathematics .. 1 - 2 2 -
Archaeology .. - 1 - - -
Education .. .. 1 - 1 - -
Chemistry .. .. 1 - 1 2 2
Physics .. .. - 2 2
Botany .. .. 1 - 1 1 2
Zoology .. .. 1 - 1 1 2
Physiology .. .. 1 - 1 1 2
Anatomy .. .. 1 - - 1 2
Agriculture .. .. 1 - 2 2 -
(Third year onwards) (Pathology) (Pharmacology)
(full time)
15
(part time)
Engineering .. .. 1 1 2 2 3
Full time .. .. 17 6 26 19 -
Part time .. .. - - 16 - 15
It will be seen ample provision was made for the teaching of the Vernacular languages and Classics, and for English, that Ceylon History was not forgotten, and that the claims of Agriculture were to be recognized more fully than they had been in the past. It looked as though the hopes of the greatest educators of the country through the years were at last to be realized. But the University question was set aside, and the recommendations of the Commission were shelved. Secondary Education which had been planned to lead up to a university was still to be a headless trunk as far as the problems of Ceylon were concerned.
With the delay in the establishment of the University the leaders of education had to turn to other fields, and the cry of "back to the land" became popular once more. That it was not an empty cry is shown by the work that Old Boys of the English Schools, many Thomians prominent among them, have done both privately and publicly for agriculture. Trinity College had shown the way in 1909 when it obtained land to make agricultural work possible amongst the boys, and later made the Trinity College farm for the same purpose. Warden McPherson started Botany at St.Thomas’, and Warden de Saram added an extensive Botany garden. Many Old Boys opened up land in various parts of the country and Warden de Saram initiated a scheme to obtain a tract of land for agricultural purposes near Anuradhapura for the benefit of boys after they had left school. The St. Joseph’s College farm where boys could receive agricultural training was another experiment on the same lines. Irrigation and the development of agriculture became a new and increased factor in the public and private budget.
At. St.Thomas’ after 1930 the Vernaculars continued to hold their place in the curriculum, and the Sinhalese and Tamil Literary Associations encouraged boys to study them more carefully. Pictures of Ceylon architecture and art were collected in the library and the collection of books upon Ceylon History and Geography and other subjects pertaining to the country was greatly increased so that research in those subjects was made possible. The house system was greatly developed and scope was found for developing many talents, intellectual and physical, that boys possessed. The prefect system was extended. School prefects was instituted and house prefects were given more definite duties, so that few boys, at least among the boarders, left school without some training in leadership and responsibility.
When the College moved from Colombo to Mount Lavinia it was hoped that there would be a new chance of getting in touch with the real life of the people of the country outside the great cities, but with the coming of the College and the expansion of Colombo, the suburbs soon shut the School in on every side, and the atmosphere of the town closed round it once more. Even so it enjoyed more freedom than had been possible in the last years at Mutwal, and the boys had not far to walk to be in the country. To help them to take an interest in social problems of the town and the country the Social Service League was started. The League began the study at home within its own compound and it had extensions in the villages round about.
The present aim of English Education for the Ceylon boy would seem to be this : to make the English he already possesses a source of culture, to make it an international language and use it to keep before his mind the idea that many branches of knowledge are common to all nations, and that each should make its contribution to the general progress of knowledge. English must be used, as Tagore suggests, to revive indigenous culture and to give a stimulus to new developments in the arts of the race. English must give the incentive, the Ceylon classics must give the models, and the aim must be a new literature and a new life. The Vernacular languages and the history of the country must be set before boys as something precious and worthy of every care and study. And lastly its aim is to see that the boys and girls of the future are not deprived of the benefits of a University which would help to bring all these things to pass, and through which they could make their contribution to the world’s culture.
