 Jyotirao Phule contributed immensely to the aspects of higher educations in India. The cry of the entire country has been to provide ample support to the higher education. To some extent this cry is justified, although the classes directly benefited by the higher education may not readily admit it.
It was unanimously decided that the people of the country must get the get a better system of education; hence it was thought that government should make moves to provide better facilities of education. It was largely perceived that education in India was still in its infancy, and any withdrawal of State aid from higher education could but be injurious to the spread of education generally. A taste of education among the higher and wealthy classes, such as the Brahmins and Purbhoos, especially those classes who lived by the pen, had been created, and a gradual withdrawal of State aid was possible so far as these classes were concerned; but in the middle and lower classes, among whom higher education has made no perceptible progress, such a withdrawal would be a great hardship. He believed that in case of such withdrawal, boys will be obliged to have recourse to inefficient and sectarian schools, much against their wish, and the cause of education cannot but suffer. Nor could any part of such education be entrusted to private agency. For a long time to come, he felt, the entire educational machinery, both ministerial and executive, must be in the hands of Government. Both the higher and primary education required all the fostering care and attention which Government can bestow on it. The withdrawal of Government from schools or colleges would not only tend to check the spread of education, but would have seriously endangered that spirit of neutrality that has all along been the aim of Government to foster, owing to the different nationalities and religious creeds prevalent in India. Withdrawal might, to a certain extent, created a spirit of self-reliance for local purposes in the higher and wealthy classes. With regard to the question as to educated natives finding remunerative employments, Phule felt that the educated natives who mostly belong to the Brahminical and other higher classes were mostly fond of service. |
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