CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 15 



But in these modern days of earlier and earlier schooling 

 even then beginning, a boy's home freedom soon ends ; 

 and even with his fifth year Jagadis was sent to school. 

 There were two schools in Faridpur : one vernacular, 

 established by Mr. Bose for the children of the people ; 

 the other the Government school with its instruction in 

 English ; and to this practically all destined for a more 

 advanced education were sent from their earliest years. 

 But here Mr. Bose, defying the local public opinion and 

 the shocked remonstrances of his friends, and even of his 

 own clerks, whose sons were at the English school, insisted 

 on sending his boy to the vernacular one. And this with 

 outspoken expression of his two reasons, educational and 

 social that a child should know his own mother tongue 

 before beginning English ; and further, that he should 

 first know his own people, and not be kept apart by that 

 false pride which nowadays in India tends to separate 

 the prosperous classes from their less fortunate brethren 

 here following the disastrous example set by England, 

 which for two generations has been so deeply influenced by 

 ' Tom Brown's Schooldays/ yet has missed their earliest 

 and perhaps most truly educative prologue, telling of Tom 

 in the little village school before going to the great public 

 one. Jagadis' companions were the sons of fisher-folk and 

 peasants, and a natural comrade to and from school was 

 the son of his father's orderly. So to this day, though the 

 formal teaching of the school has long faded from memory, 

 there survive many lively impressions of the peasant-life, 

 and with enduring sympathy, perhaps most vividly of 

 all, the stories of the fisher-boys, of their fathers' experience 

 of the river, with its incidents and dangers. All these the 

 boy eagerly wove into his imaginative world of the wonders 

 of nature and the romance of man ; moreover, these went 

 well with the dacoit servant's adventures already mentioned. 

 This little Faridpur school essentially of the ' Three 

 R's ' seems to have been already moving into that well- 

 conventionalised dullness which has been so characteristic 



