THE INDIAN STUDENT.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LVIII, Issue 14344, 24 October 1910, Page 7

THE INDIAN STUDENT.

Speaking at the Missionary Conference at Calcutta, Dr. Garfield Williams, a missionary of the highest repute and experience, and in profound sympathy with the natives of India, made the following remarks about Indian students : The conditions and environment of the student in Calcutta are such as to make the formation of character almost impossible. . . . He is not a student in the best sense of the word, for he has not the scholarly instincts of a student—l speak, of course, of the average student, not of tho exceptional one. His parents send him to the University to pass one or two GKaminatious, and these have to bo passed in order to enable him to attain a higher salary. . . . His work is sheer “grind.” The acquisition of good notes for lectures is the first essential for him, and the professor who gives good clear-cut notes so that a man can dispense with any text-books is the popular profossor—and for two reasons ; first of nil, it saves tho expense of buying the text-book, and thon, of course,

it helps to got through the examination. That is a nsiara why two boys of tho same village will go to different colleges bocai iso they can then “swap” notes. It is a very rare thing for a student to have money enough to buy more than ono of tho suggested books on a given subject for examination. Ho learns by heart ono book and the notes of lectures of two or three of the favourite professors in Calcutta. There is many a man who has oven got through his examinations without any text-book of any kind to help him, simply by committing to memory volumes of lecture notes. ... I know of no student who labours more strenuously than tho Bengali student. The question is how to prevent this ridiculous wastage of students; how to prevent the production of this disappointed man who is a student only m name. Ho never had any desire to bo a student in nature; ho was brought up without that desire . . t*nd indeed, if he bo a boy with real scholarly instincts and he happens to fail in his examinations, it makes it all the worse, for his parents will not recognise those scholarly instincts of his —all they want is a quick return for tho money spent on his education, and ho will have to make that return from a Rs.3o salary instead of a Rs.so ono. THE STUDENT’S DAILY LIFE, Can there bo anything more pathetic and more alarming than the picture that Dr. Williams draws of tho student’s actual life ? He gets up about 6, and having dressed (which is not a long process) he starts woz*k. Until 10, if you go into his mess, you will see him “grinding” away at his text-book under tho most amazing conditions. for work—usually stretened out upon his bod or sitting on the side of it. The room is almost always shared with some other occupants, mostly engaged in the same task if they are students. At 10 the boy gets some food, and then goes off to his college for about four or five hours of lectures. A little after 3 in the afternoon ho comes, homo to his mess, and between 3 and 5 is usually seen lounging about his room, dead tired but often engaged in discussion with his room-mates or devouring tho newspaper, which is his only form of recreation and his only bit of excitement. At ohe will go out for a short stroll down College Street or around College Square. This is his one piece of exercise, if such you can call it. At dusk he returns to his ill-lighted, stuffy room and continues his work, keeping it up, with a short interval for his evening meal, until he goes to bed, tho hour of bedtime depending upon tho proximity of his examination. A very largo percentage when they actually sit for their examinations are nothing short of physical wrecks. Dr. Williams proceeds ’to quote Dr. Mullick, an eminent Hindu physician who has devoted himself to helping young students; — . Tho places where the students live huddled up together are most hurtful to their constitutions. The houses are dirty, dingy, ill-ventilated, and crowded. Even in case of infectious sickness . . . they lie in the same place as others, some of whom they actually infect. Phthisis is getting alarmingly common among students owing to the sputum of infected persons being allowed to float about with the dust in crowded messes Most of them live in private messes where a hired cook and single servant have complete ‘ charge of his food and housc-kcoping, and things are stolon, foodstuffs arc adulterated, badly cooked and badly served. Dr. Williams, who states emphatically that “it is not exaggeration to sav that tho student is often half-starved, goes on to deal with the moral drawbacks of a life which is under no effective supervision and is not even under the restraints, implied in the term “good form,” that play so important a part in universities where there is a real collegiate life. When you segregate your young men by thousands in tho heart of this “city of dreadful night,” amid conditions of life which are most antagonistic to moral and physical well-being tho result is' a foregone conclusion, and it does not only moan physical degeneration, it also moans moral degeneration, and it becomes a most potent predisposing factor in political disease. Of that there can be no shadow of doubt.