4. The development of Anglo-Indian education in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Between 1681-1707, an East India Company official, John
Barker improved the educational facilities of the school
for Indians in Fort St. George, Madras. In 1696, George
Lewis an enthusiastic Chaplain and teacher employed by the
East India Company proposed the first single-sex English
language medium school in Madras. This met with no
response. So, instead, this entrepreneurial educationist
started a Free school with Portuguese as the medium of
instruction.
In 1713, a further East India Company Charter referred to
education. Schoolmasters had to be included in the
personnel who administered the garrison and factory
schools. In 1715, Stevenson changed the medium in the Free
School in Madras from Portuguese to English and renamed it
St. Mary's Charity School.
In 1731, Reverend Gervas Bellamy opened a charity school in
Calcutta and admitted girls in 1787; and by 1789 the
coeducational school was moved to Cossipore. Although
called Christian schools, the majority of the pupils were
from the Anglo-Indian community. (24)
It was during the eighteenth century that girls were
admitted to school, and the coeducational school in
Cossipore was innovative and successful. By the late
eighteenth century, the need for educated clerks had grown
along with the expansionist policies of the English.
In 1781, Warren Hastings recognised the problem of
providing efficient administrators for the East India
Company and started to promote education for all Indians,
not just the small Anglo-Indian minority. (25) His chief
motive was a political one, because he wanted the trust of
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