Indian Education Before British Rule: Village Pathshalas and Their Decline
Before British rule, India had a large network of village schools. British surveys from the 1820s and 1830s, including the Madras Presidency survey and William Adam's reports on Bengal, recorded tens of thousands of pathshalas teaching reading, writing and arithmetic to children from many communities.
In 1931, Mahatma Gandhi told an audience in London that India was more illiterate than it had been a hundred years earlier, and that the British had uprooted "the beautiful tree" of Indian education.
Chapters
00:00 Did the British really educate India?
01:01 How India's village schools worked
04:22 Who funded India's pathshalas?
06:18 What role did missionaries play?
07:40 The final blow
09:40 The legacy of British education in India
Read the full essay
How the British Destroyed India's Education System, with full sources.
