The Minekhine Sayadaw was commisioned by the Pakhan Sayadaw to write a treatise on whether or not the monks could teach secular subjects to the students at the monasteries. He concluded in the treatise that monks should not teach secular subjects, including the sciences, because they fall into the category of lokāyata knowledge, or materialistic, worldly knowledge.
I haven’t read this treatise, and I don’t know if there is an English translation of it (as I don’t speak Burmese), but it would be interesting to see if anybody here who has read it agrees with the conclusion and whether or not this kind of teaching is excluded by Vinaya.
The Minekhine Sayadaw was unable to edit it before passing away, but his draft of the treatise was published in 1913, and it became the main impetus for monks abstaining from teaching secular knowledge to the students.
The end result of this decision was that secular British schooling was strongly encouraged in various ways by the British, and the secular schools took over the main role as the primary educational institutions for children, causing the attendance at the monastic schools and the influence that monks had on education to drop significantly.
Now whether teaching secular knowledge is impermissible as per Vinaya - as the Minekhine Sayadaw claimed it was - or not, refusing to do so caused the British to strongly push for their secular schools and caused those schools to replace the system of monastic schooling as the primary places of education. I argue that this was preventable as the British already respected the high literacy rates and educational system of the Burmese and tried to get them to add secular education to their own system. The Burmese, however, refused to take on secular education in their own schools when pushed to do so. The predictable result, of course, was the British establishing and pushing secular schooling with a very strong emphasis on British secular education for young Burmans, including only half and hour per day of traditional Buddhist education.
The Buddhist education was so poor in these schools that many Burmese school children did not even understand the meaning of the precepts - precepts which they themselves took on occasion. The Buddhist education of the majority of the youth became puerile. In a matter of decades it departed from becoming literate in Burmese and Pāli and then learning and memorizing many Buddhist texts including the Maṅgala Sutta, Sigālovāda Sutta, Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the whole Dhammapada, many Jātakas, as well as various other texts and treatises, to having a very non-serious Buddhist education where many did not understand basics, nor even the meaning of the precepts they took.
Now, I very much praise the monks for doing their best to try and preserve Buddhism (the Minekhine Sayadaw and all the monks involved in not teaching secular subjects), but the cold hard fact is that Burma had already been militarily defeated by the British, and the monks still had influence, but not true power. The Konbaung Dynasty lost during the Anglo-Burmese wars. The First Anglo-Burmese War resulted in Burma losing Arakan, Manipur, Assam, and Tenasserim. The Second Anglo-Burmese War resulted in the British conquering Lower Burma. And the Third Anglo-Burmese War in which the Brits captured Mandalay, resulted in the entire country being annexed and becoming part of British India. At this point, you have to make some concessions. Perhaps these were not made because the Sayadaw had hope that Myanmar would gain independence soon? At that point, Myanmar was still part of British India, the nationalist uprising of 1930 led by Saya San was still seventeen years away, the resulting separation of Burma from British India by the British was still twenty-four years away, and the beginning of WWI, which would result in the Labour Party who favored decolinzation coming to power in Britian six years after that, was still twenty-six years away. Anyone who thought that the British would not continue to rule for at least a few more decades was sorely mistaken.
The decision not to teach the secualr subjects in the monasteries where the monks could at least ensure that the children received a substantive Buddhist education in addition to learning the secular subjects resulted in a significant decrease in the general population’s understanding of Buddhism as a whole, as well as a decrease in their ethical conduct, neither of which are helpful if you are trying to preserve the Buddhist Sāsana, or Burmese culture under Colonial occupation and rule.
In Saving Buddhism Alicia Turner reports that after the secular schools rose in influence, many Burmese complained that children no longer respected their parents, drinking and opium smoking became much more rampant, as did gambling, billiards playing, boys parading around using coarse language and harrasing girls, as well as using peashooters and stones, partying, and even stabbinging each other. And that this was being reported regularly in journals and newspapers. Secular society, unsurprisingly, was not nearly as moral as the previous religious one had been.
After WWII, the British Empire was significantly weakened, and the Burmese finally won their independence in January of 1948, and power was handed over to the AFPFL, a democratic administration that won in a landslide victory. Their control only lasted from 1948 until 1962, which is only a mere fourteen years.
The fact that the Burmese chose to go with a democratic government is very interesting, considering the fact that before British occupation, there were monarchies in place for a very a long time. It shows the strong influence of the education in the secular schools, removed from Buddhist learning, and where Buddhist history could also have been taught.
After a long line of monarchies in Burma that lasted for nearly 1,000 years, in just 100 years of British rule, the Burmese chose a Western system of government when they finally became free even though the average length of democratic states is around 50 - 150 years with only 5% of democracies having lasted more than 200 years, and the average lifespan of Kingdoms is 200 - 300 years with some lasting from 500 - 1,000 or more years (the longest lasting over 1,700 years). Not to mention that the religion that the people were separated from in the secular schools tended to thrive under Buddhist Kings who built many temples and pagodas, provided royal support, etc.
Renaldo