Abstract
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Woods Education Despatch is considered to be the Magna Carta of Indian Education. It controlled the Indian education field till the establishment of Indian Education Commission, 1882. The Despatch provided space to Christian missionaries by promising government’s gradual withdrawal from the education in favour of missionaries. It also facilitated the missionaries by offering system of ‘grants on aid’ to the private bodies. Consequently, the missionaries fancied to replace the government institutions in the Punjab and initiated their efforts to increase the number of their educational institutions. They tried to occupy the educational field by establishing more and more educational institutions. But after the Recommendations of the Indian Education Commission 1882, a change in their policy of numeric increase of educational institutions is quite visible. With the turn of the century, they are found to be eager to establish a few institutions with good quality of education. This paper intends to analyse different factors behind the change of their policy of quantitative dominance to qualitative improvement. It also attempts to evaluate how their change of policy worked and what steps were taken to improve the quality of their educational institutions. Following the historical method qualitative data comprising educational reports, missionaries’ autobiographies, Reports of missionaries’ conferences, and the other relevant primary and secondary sources has been collected from different repositories. The analysis of the data suggests that the attitude of the administration of the education department and the recommendations of Indian Education Commission were the major driving forces behind the change of missionaries’ educational policy in the 20th century. The missionaries, after adopting the new policy, worked on the quality of education in their institutions and became successful. |
Keywords
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Christian Missionaries, Indian Education Commission, Missionary Schools, Numeric Increase, Quality of Education. The Punjab, Woods Education Despatch |
Article
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Article # 69
Volume # 2
Issue # 4
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DOI info
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DOI Number: 10.47205/jdss.2021(2-IV)69
DOI Link: http://doi.org/10.47205/jdss.2021(2-IV)69
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