culture. Much of the Indian encounter with education was
automatically equated with qualifications-earning and
professional careers. It did not appear to be ritualistic,
tedious, suffused with boredom or destructive of curiosity
and imagination. The English language was the means to
acquire powerful positions in the professions of law,
medicine and education. The Indians were disinterested in
Christianity.
Through this enhanced and increased educational encounter
with Christian missionaries, Anglo-Indians were further
induced to accept the culture, traditions and beliefs of
the colonialists, who owned and controlled the wealth in
India. The encounter with a transplanted education in the
classrooms of Anglo-Indian schools and the domination of
the Anglo-Indians by the few Europeans continued the
culture of subservience.
The classroom conditioning was unequal, non-participatory
and undemocratic and was not conducive to social and
economic equality in the nineteenth century. Missionaries
preached a doctrine which supported personal development -
be it spiritual, physical or cognitive - but the
Anglo-Indians had no capacity to control the conditions of
their lives.
The increase in missionary educational activity, and the
effect that this was having on the Anglo-Indian community
did not go unnoticed. The Anglo-Indian community itself
started to take an active interest in the education of its
young people.
The next section describes the group consciousness that
developed in the Anglo-Indian community in the early part
of the nineteenth century, partly as a response to this
domination. Anglo-Indians were becoming aware of the
importance of education in the community and the next
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