80 



financing of education, how it could be done, who is going 

 to pay for it, and how you could raise the money. He was 

 very good at that. 



The report of the Education Commission is an enormous 

 work. I never was able to find out what they really 

 recommended. The recommendations were made by the Indian 

 members of the commission, not by the foreigners. I wrote a 

 lot of stuff for it, and so did the other foreign members, 

 but in the long run the recommendations were all made by the 

 Indian members . 



Sharp: What were some of your recommendations? 



Reveller Well, for example, I felt strongly that we should have 

 agricultural universities that give a general, liberal 

 education, like [UC] Davis. It shouldn't be just technical 

 subjects. I wrote a good deal about agricultural education, 

 particularly geophysical and geological, soil chemistry, 

 biological part of it. There should be a lot of basic 

 research and basic courses as well as the very practical 

 courses. In other words, the agricultural education should 

 be integrated with the liberal arts, with a general 

 education. And of course I was very much in favor of and 

 wrote about the problems of general [education.] ## 



Sharp: One of the issues starts much further down the 



educational scheme, literacy. The literacy level was very, 

 very low in India when you were on the commission. 



Revelle: Yes, it was. 



Sharp: I wonder if you had some ideas, if you made some 



recommendations about the education of the lower levels? 



Revelle: Not really. I mean, we all had to concentrate somewhat. I 

 concentrated on university and graduate education. I didn't 

 feel I knew enough about elementary, pre-school and high 

 school education. I had never been involved with that in 

 the Dnited States, so I didn't try to do that. 



Sharp: Were there other people on the commission who were focusing 

 on a lower level? 



Revelle: Oh yes. Particularly the French educationist, who was, I 

 thought, a first-rate man, a very good man. He had been 

 much involved in the reform of the education system in 

 France. France had this very rigorous system too. In the 

 old days every student in a French school, in a certain 

 grade in a French school, every student in the country was 

 studying the same thing on a particular day. It was 

 programmed conpletely, all over the country. He took a dim 

 view of that and reformed it in France. 



The Englishman I never met, the English educationist. 

 I met the Russian and the Japanese one, and I spent a lot of 

 time with the Frenchman. We both stayed at the Clarendon 

 Hotel, one of the old-fashioned hotels in Delhi. A nice 

 hotel, very nice. I'm sorry to say I can't remember his 



