Commercial education in Punjab

IN our yesterday’s issue, we pointed out the half-hearted support given by the Punjab Government to Punjabi students to enable them to pursue their studies at the Roorkee Engineering College. But that is not the only sphere where the government has failed to show proper appreciation of the necessity of vocational instruction of the youth of the province. There is no government arrangement within the province at present to impart commercial education to young men. The only College of Commerce which the Punjab Government opened some years ago was closed before it had been in existence for even an experimental period. To say that an institution should be closed down because it failed to attract a large number of students during the extremely short period it was in existence is to argue on a false basis and lose sight of the process of development of human needs. If the same argument had been applied to other educational institutions within two or three years of their starting, perhaps there would have been no educational institution in the province at this time. There are persons living in our midst who remember the time when all sorts of attractions had to be offered to young boys to come to schools. But now that some time has elapsed since the college was closed, even this argument has lost its weight. For, if figures are collected of the number of Punjabi students who go at great personal expenditure and inconvenience to undergo a course of commercial education in Bombay and other places, it will be found that the number is large enough to indicate the great necessity which people feel for commercial education.