ABSTRACT
Lord Bentinck’s educational policy was warmly reprobated in certain quarters. The Asiatic Society of Bengal characterised it as destructive unjust unpopular and impolitic and compared the prospective injury to scholarship from its operation with the incalculable loss caused by the destruction of the Alexandrian Library. The General Committee of Public Instruction tried to allay the suspicion by a clear statement of their views in their annual report for 1835 “They are deeply sensible,” so ran the report, “of the importance of encouraging the cultivation of the vernacular languages. The control of schools and colleges in Bengal had been entrusted so far to the Council of Education. The strength of the educational system lay in the fact that it introduced to the Indian mind the great ideas in Western literature and the principles of physical science. The exclusion of the classical languages of India from the list of compulsory subjects for the Intermediate Examination in Arts was also unfortunate.
