CEYLON BRANCH — ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. 105 



THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENTS OF THE 

 DUTCH IN CEYLON. 



BY THE REV. J. D. PALM. 



(Read November 6, 1846J 



The State of Government Schools for the natives of 

 Ceylon during the period that the Netherlands' Chartered 

 East India Company had possession of this Island appears, 

 at present, to be a subject more of conjecture than of cer- 

 tainty. While on the one hand the old school-houses in 

 many villages of the Maritime Provinces tell the traveller 

 that "in the Dutch time," native education was not lost 

 sight of, nobody, on the other hand has, to my knowledge, 

 collected any statistics of schools, nor undertaken to point 

 out the character and amount of instruction imparted at 

 that period. As native education occupies so prominent a 

 place in the present scheme of colonial improvement, it 

 may not be uninteresting to know what our predecessors 

 did in the cause. In the archives of the 1 Consistory of the 

 Reformed Dutch Church at Colombo there are two volumes 

 of minutes of a meeting called the Scholar chale Vergadering, 

 embodying annual reports from Inspectors of schools in the 

 Colombo District from 1712 to 1727 ; also in official letters 

 of the Colombo Consistory to the 17 Representatives in 

 Holland of the East India Company, and in other ecclesi- 

 astical papers references occur to the number and progress 

 of schools throughout the Island. These documents, writ- 

 ten in the old fashioned half German and half Italian char- 

 acters are in several places hardly legible. The time and 

 patience bestowed on them are however amply compensated 

 by the insight they give into Church matters, and the state 

 of Christianity among the natives, which, if worth the 

 hearing, or rather, if coming within the range of topics 

 sanctioned in this society, shall be made the subject of two 

 more papers. 



The notes for the present paper may be classified under 

 the following heads: 



1. The Scholarchal Commission. 



2. Native Schools in the Colombo District. 



3. Native Schools in the Galle and Matura Districts. 



4. Native Schools in the Jaffna District. 



5. The Seminary and Normal School at Colombo. 



O 



