English Education Act 1835

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English Education Act was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed in 1835. By the 1835 English Education act, the teaching of English was taken out of native language schools – because learning English as a language, while retaining the native medium of education would allow the natives to understand the British on their own (native) terms. This is because a native brought up thinking in their own language and merely learning English as a foreign language, would be able to objectively study the British, outside of the colonial framework presented to them as objective and neutral. Thus the change of medium, and the establishment in the native mind of an English based class structure, was a necessary part of the colonizing mission.

That argument is entirely wrong. The English Education act was an act of parliament passed in 1835, but it was to INSTITUTE the teach of English in colonized states. English was a medium through which the British could exercise control and construct a positive image of themselves.

Both of the aforementioned interpretations have some partial historical truth. Governor-General William Bentinck's 1835 Act restricted the teaching of English to specific institutions devoted only to English studies. So, it is true that English was taken out of native schools, like Sanskirt College, but the act also fundamentally established English education in India. The controversy, according to Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest, was British concerns that Indian youth were not learning English (or anything for that matter) in schools where instruction was divided into three or more languages at once. The ideological motivations are both that partial English education, divorced from the moralizing value of a full English education, might induce a rebellious nature in Indian students but also that a full English education would serve the cultural hegemony of the British and therefore uphold colonial rule.