There can be no turning back, and salvation lies not in doing less for Indian education, but in doing more and in doing it better.
Four very important features of the system deserve to be noted at the outset:--( 1) Following the English practice, Government exercises no direct control over educational institutions other than those maintained by the State, though its influence is brought in several ways indirectly to bear upon all that are not prepared to reject the benefits which it can extend to them; (2) Government has concentrated its efforts mainly upon higher education, and has thus begun from the top in the over-sanguine belief that education would ultimately filter down from the higher to the lower strata of Indian society; (3) instruction in the various courses, mostly literary, which constitute higher education is conveyed through the medium of English, a tongue still absolutely foreign to the vast majority; and (4) education is generally confined to the training of the intellect and divorced not only, absolutely, from all religious teaching, but also, very largely, from all moral training and discipline, with the result that the vital side of education which consists in the formation of character has been almost entirely neglected.
To make the present situation intelligible, I must recapitulate, however briefly, the phases through which our Indian system of education has passed.

The very scanty encouragement originally given, to education by the East India Company was confined to promoting the study of the Oriental languages still used at that time in the Indian Courts of Law in order to qualify young Indians for Government employment and chiefly in the subordinate posts of the judicial service.

After long and fierce controversies on the rival merits of the vernaculars and of English as the more suitable vehicle for the expansion of education, Macaulay's famous Minute of March 7, 1835, determined a revolution of which only very few at the time foresaw, however faintly, the ultimate consequences.

Lord William Bentinck's Government decided that "the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of English literature and science, and that all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed in English education alone." Another influence--too often forgotten--had at least as large a share as Macaulay's in this tremendous departure.

That was the influence of the great missionary, Dr.Alexander Duff, who inspired the prohibition of suttee and other measures which marked the withdrawal of the countenance originally given by the East India Company to religious practices incompatible, in the opinion of earnest Christians, with the sovereignty of a Christian Power.