the danger to learn English

In 1890, the colonial administrator Frank Swettenham wrote in his Annual Report on Perak:

"The one danger to be guarded against is to teach English indiscriminately. It could not be well taught except in a few schools, and I do not think it is at all advisable to give to the children of an agricultural population an indifferent knowledge of a language that to all but the very few would only unfit them for the duties of life and make them discontented with anything like manual labour." 

The colonial government considered English highly dangerous to allow all walks of life to learn it because it would give them delusions of grandeur and create the semblance of unity, unrest and insubordination. After all, English education to all was a potentially threatening undertaking.



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Ref.: 
Adeline Koh's "Educating Malayan Gentlemen: Establishing an Anglicized Elite in Twentieth-Century Colonial Malaya", BiblioAsia, 3:1 , pp. 10-15. 
Adeline Koh, "Asian Bodies, English Values: Creating an Anglophone Elite in British Malaya," in James H. Williams, Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng (eds.), (Re)Constructing Memory: Textbooks, Identity, Nation, and State (Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2016), pp. 177-198