BASIC EDUCATION
SCHEME OF MAHATMA GANDHI
Mahatma Gandhi was
very much aware of the needs of the country – illiteracy and poverty was
plaguing India and steps needed to be taken to ensure that the situation was
not the same in independent India.
According to him, a proper of system of basic education is the way out
to the vices that was gripping India and that would eventually come in the way
of its development. The series of article written in the Harijan on education
formed a basis of education that he had complete faith in. He realised that to have
a proper system of education, the nation had to have a strong monetary and
fiscal condition. In other words, education was dependent on money. To find a
constructive way out of this, he suggested that education to be
self-sufficient. Thus, education would be a two-fold policy. It would not only
provide literacy but also a self sufficiency that would be helpful to the
education system and also to the literate individual.
In 1937, at the
national conference at Wardha, under Gandhi’s leadership and in consideration
of his ideas, the following ideas were passed:
• Free and compulsory education must
be provided for seven years on a nation-wide scale.
• The medium of instruction should be
in the mother-tongue
• Some sort of technical training
should be provided so that the students would be able to become self-sufficient
in their future. The same craft practiced in the school would also help in the
sustaining of the school.
• Through a gradual but steady
policy, this system would also be able to cover the remuneration of the
teachers.
This scheme of
education also came to be known as the “Nai Talim” or the basic education.
“Nai” pointed out that it is the new way of education and “talim” stands for
apprenticeship. The students would be an apprentice and would master a craft
that would help the student to establish his own livelihood. Basic would also
stand for fundamentals. Thus this scheme of education was based on the national
culture and civilization of India.
Mahatma Gandhi
believed that education should be able to bring out the best of the child and
the man in the Body, the Mind and the Spirit. Literacy is not the end of
education but rather it is the way to which a sustainable way of education is
taken up – the road just begun and it continues as a person gets to know more
about oneself.
Education should help
the citizens of India to be self-sufficient. It should enable a boy or a girl
to develop a certain amount of self-reliance which would help in the earning of
a livelihood. This was the reason why Gandhiji placed so much stress on the
industrial training of the child so that he becomes acquainted with the real
life. He wanted the education to become the means of producing ideal citizens.
Seeing the epidemic of poverty that was plaguing India, he suggested that
education should be based on industrial training and the development of manual
skill and handicrafts.
Gandhiji believed
that education centres round the child. He impressed upon people that the
cultural aspect of education is more important than the literary aspect,
because it is through the cultural aspect that the child learns to develop his
character and ideals. He was a supporter of the ancient Indian ideals of
education. Gandhiji addressed the importance of thought, word and deed,
non-violence and truth.
It is clear from the
foregoing account that Gandhiji’s viewed education from a comprehensive or
broadminded standpoint. Any education that develops only one aspect of the
child can be dubbed as narrow and one-sided. Thus, Gandhiji states that education
must make the individual to live and earn his daily bread, to be the means of
his sustenance. In a way Gandhiji synthesized the individual and social aims of
education. Like Vivekananda, Gandhiji maintained that character formation and
manual skill were equally important. Gandhiji’s plan of education laid stress
on all types of education – physical, mental, moral, aesthetic and religious.
The scheme of the
basic education clarifies the means of education. According to Gandhiji, the
most important means of education in basic scheme was craft. About this means
of education, Gandhiji said “The principle idea is to impart the whole
education of the body and the mind and the soul through the handicraft that I
taught to the children. You have to draw out all that is in the child through
teaching all the processes of handicraft and all your lessons in history
geography, arithmetic will be related to the craft.” Thus, some handicraft was
necessary to be the centre of child’s education. Besides other craft recommended
were: weaving, carpentry agriculture gardening and other handicrafts and other
rural crafts.
It was pointed out that the following criteria should be followed
in deciding about the basic craft:
• Craft fulfilling individual and
social means.
• Craft based upon local requirement.
• Craft in tune with local conditions
• Craft favourable to the interest,
aptitude and the ability of the child
• Less expensive and simple craft
• Craft leading to all round
development of personality.
But Gandhi’s “revolutionary
educational policy” has been criticized as being medieval and impractical. One
of the first criticisms that faced this “Nai talim” was that there was a dearth
of teachers – teachers who were artisans and artisans who were also teachers.
And to create a new pedigree of teachers for India would be extraordinarily
difficult. Professor K.T. Shah who was a part of the Wardha conference and the
only member to oppose it made it quite clear that this scheme would require
huge amount business acumen of management of goods and their sale. An embargo
against foreign goods would be in keeping with the nationalistic feelings but
it this policy would also harm the existing professional artisans and give them
competition. In an article in Harijan an anonymous reader pointed out that this
would legalize child labour and schools and colleges should be places where the
young minds should be taught about the values rather than the prices.
Rabindranath Tagore pointed out that this teaching does not promote the child’s
aesthetic and creative powers and “assume that material utility, rather than
development of personality, is the end of education.”
The kind of social
transformation that Gandhi was calling for was primarily an inner moral
transformation, one which placed as paramount the need for a conscious
simplicity and self-imposed limitation. This limitation Gandhi’s scheme on the
intellectual, scientific, economic and even social spheres were therefore
clearly unacceptable to the modernist mindset. The question that was asked:
“who would seriously want to give up the manifold benefits of modern life and
take up a hard life of manual work?” In contrast to Gandhi’s radical policy of
change, his detractors of the educational policy would see it to be medieval
and conservative. But the dominant nationalistic feelings and to some extent
the politics of the dominant elite political class would combat the Gandhian
opponents and create a middle path for the basic education. But by the very act
of negating the voice of the Other, by trying to efface it, they contributed to
its recognition.
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