Postcolonial research has often assumed that colonial education fell victim to the forces of nationalism, like other areas of Raj governance in the early twentieth century. However, European-led education that aspired to reach the general population had already failed a generation earlier, at least in north India. This was after highly imaginative and expansive systemic village schooling experiments had been attempted in the 1850s. A poorly conceived but well-meaning crusade against female infanticide, a linguistically tenuous curriculum, a drive for Middle School English instruction and a policy of "decentralization", which handed "lower-order" schooling to apathetic local committees, all played their part in a progressive disengagement between populace and department over the next three decades. Finally, the 1882 Hunter Commission demonstrated to Europeans that they had permanently lost their earlier educational initiative. (Contains 78 footnotes.)