jun 4, 1838 - Indigeneous education in Bengal

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Enquiry in Bengal – reports of missionary William Adams

The survey conducted in Bengal referred as more methodological compared to the reviews of Madras and Bombay. Rev William Adam, A Christian missionary spend enough time to conclude his observations. Hence his work is considered as the most reliable among the three.

In his reports, he highlighted the existence of the vocational as well as the domestic learning centers. A famous statement by Adams, now called the myth of 100,000 schools- is as below
“there are 100,000 such (indigenous) schools in Bengal and Bihar, and assuming the population of those two provinces to be 40,000,000, there would be a village school for every 400 persons”


He considered schools as any place where the elements of knowledge been shared. In his first report, he found that there would be at least a school for every four hundred population. Some of the historians are not considering Adams findings as reliable because of his definition of school. Most of them arguing that the numbers are overestimated, and he could not summarize the data clearly. In Adam's second report he covered the major parts of the district Rajshahi. Here he could estimate the population size, statistics of cast wise population, the number of villages, etc. A clear picture of the existed educational system also there in his second report. Adams third report has been considered as the most important one among the three. It gives us an idea regarding the statistics of the five districts, and he made some recommendations for the Indian educational system. He considered his third report as a underestimated document.

1. Adam's Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar (Calcutta, 1868)
by William Adam and J. Long

2. Naik, J. P., & Nurullah, S. (1974). Students' history of education in India 1800-1973. MacMillan company of India limited.

3. Dharampal. (1983). The beautiful tree: Indigenous Indian education in the eighteenth century.

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