Much of the raw material pressed into secondary schools was quite unsuitable, and little or no attempt was made to sift it in the rough.

Numbers therefore began to drop out somewhere on the way, disappointed of their more ambitious hopes and having acquired just enough new ideas to unfit them for the humbler work to which they might otherwise have been brought up[17].

On the other hand, whilst schools and colleges, chiefly under private native management, were multiplied in order to meet the growing demand, the instruction given in them tended to get petrified into mechanical standards, which were appraised solely or mainly by success in the examination lists.

In fact, education in the higher sense of the term gave way to the mere cramming of undigested knowledge into more or less receptive brains with a view to an inordinate number of examinations, which marked the various stages of this artificial process.

The personal factor also disappeared more and more in the relations between scholars and teachers as the teaching staff failed to keep pace with the enormous increase in numbers.
All these deteriorating influences, though they were perhaps not then so visible on the surface, were already at work in the 80's, when two important Government Commissions were held whose labours, with the most excellent intentions, were destined to have directly and indirectly, the most baneful effects upon Indian education.