On February 2nd, 1835, Thomas Macaulay, a British politician and historian, delivered a speech entitled “Minute on Indian Education.”  In this speech, he described his discussions with other scholars on the topic of Indian education. The chief question was if instruction in schools should occur in the native Arabic or Sanskrit, or the foreign English.  Macaulay disagrees with many arguments cast forth - including those regarding the history of India, the fact that Indian religious texts were written in Sanskrit, and the comparatively poor sales of Sanskrit books.  This speech, and his later work in India, would become the foundation of Western institutional education in India.

His Minute on Indian Education contended that, “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. This imperialist philosophy that Macaulay held is strongly shown in both his writings and his life's work. The approach to education that he advocated for sought to create "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect".  His ideas came to fruition in the same year, when the Council of India passed the English Education Act of 1835, which enforced the teaching of Western curriculum in English.