Woods Dispatch

• In 1854, Charles Wood prepared a dispatch on an educational system for India. This document was the first comprehensive plan for the spread of education in India so considered the “Magna Carta of English Education in India”.
• It recommended English as the medium of for higher studies and vernaculars at the school level.
• It laid down that the education imparted in government institutions should be secular. And recommended a system of grants-in-aid to encourage private enterprise.

Other provisions of despatch:

• It asked the Government of India to assume responsibility for the education of the masses, thus repudiating the ‘downward filtration theory’, at least on paper.
• It systematized the hierarchy from vernacular primary schools in villages at the bottom, followed by Anglo-Vernacular High Schools and an affiliated college at the district level, and affiliating universities in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.
• It laid stress on female and vocational, education, and teachers’ training.

Source: NCERT