Modern education in India was implemented through various acts. It completely denounced the traditional method of education prevailing in the Indian subcontinent.
CHARTER ACT, 1813
The English missionary activists, such as Charles Grant and William Wilberforce, compelled the East India Company to give up its policy of non-intervention in education. For the first time, the British Parliament included in the 1813 Charter Act, a clause, under which the Governor-General in Council was bound to keep a sum not less than one lakh rupees, for education.
The Company used this fund for promoting the Indian language and literature. The Charter allowed the Christian missionaries to spread their religious ideas in India. The greatest importance of the 1813 Act was that the Company for the first time acknowledged state responsibility for the promotion of education in India.
ORIENTALIST-ANGLICIST CONTROVERSY
The General Committee of Public Instruction consisted of ten members. Within the committee, there were two groups, the Orientalists, who advocated the policy of giving encouragement to Oriental Literature and the Anglicists or the English party, which favoured the adoption of English as a medium of instruction and imparting Western education.
As a member of the Executive Council, Lord Macaulay wrote his famous minute on Educational Policy in 1835, which favoured the viewpoint of the Anglicist party. The Government of Lord William Bentinck in the Resolution of 7th March, 1835 accepted the viewpoint of Macaulay that, in future, the object of the Company’s government should be the promotion of European literature and Sciences, through the medium of the English language.
LORD MACAULAY’S EDUCATION POLICY, 1835
In 1835, Lord Macaulay was made a law member of the Governor-General in Council. As the President of the Committee of Public Instruction, he put forward his education policy to Governor-General in Council on 2nd February 1835, which ended the orientalist-Anglicist row. Under the Macaulian System of education (approved by Governor-General, William Bentinck). Persian was abolished as the court language and was substituted by English
There was curtailment in the fund for oriental learning, while English education received more funds. The approved Macaulian System was an attempt to educate a small sector of the upper and middle class, thus, creating a class “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” who would act as interpreters between the government and masses and would enrich the Vernaculars by which knowledge of Western Science and Literature would reach the masses. This was called the Downward Filtration Theory.