BASIC EDUCATION AND GANDHIJI.

 

All along Mahatma Gandhi favored drastic changes in country’s basic education.

The core of Mahatma Gandhi’s proposal was the introduction of productive handicrafts

In school curriculum. The idea was not simply to introduce handicrafts as a compulsory

subject, but to make the learning of a craft the axis of the entire teaching program. It

implied a radical restructuring of the sociology of school knowledge in India, where

productive handicrafts had been associated with the lower class of people.

Knowledge of the production processes involved in crafts, such as spinning, weaving, leatherwork, pottery, metal-work, basket-making and book-binding, was the specialty of the poor class of society.. Many of them

belonged to the category of untouchables. India’s indigenous tradition of education and

the colonial education system had emphasized the skills such as literacy

which the upper castes had a monopoly.  

Mahatma  Gandhi’s proposal

intended to stand the education system on its head. The social philosophy

of basic education thus favoured the child belonging to the lowest stratum of society.

It implied a program of social transformation. It sought to alter the symbolic meaning

of education and thereby to change the established structure of opportunities.

The rationale Mahatma Gandhi proposed for the introduction of production processes in

school was not as startling as this interpretation. The rationale he proposed was that it

must be self-supporting, as far as possible, for two reasons. One was purely financial:

that a poor society could not provide education to all its children unless schools could

generate the physical and financial resources to run them. The other was political: that

financial self-sufficiency alone could protect schools from dependence on the State and

interference by it. As values, both self-sufficiency and autonomy were close to Mahatma  Gandhi’s heart.

They belonged to his vision of a society based on truth and non-violence. Financial  self-sufficiency was linked to truth, and autonomy to non-violence. An individual

that did not participate directly in the process of production for survival could afford

to truth for long. Such an individual or institution would have to depend on the State to

extent that would make violence, in one form or another, inevitable. A State system of

education was a contradiction of Mahatma Gandhi’s view of education. The possibility of

developing the resources for its own maintenance showed a way out of this anomaly.

The idea of productive schools clearly came from the two communities Mahatma had

established in South Africa. Phoenix  Farm, started in 1904, and Tolstoy Farm,

established in 1910, provided him with a lasting interest and faith in the potential of life

rural commune. The first of these experiments was apparently inspired by John Ruskin’s Unto this Last.

Mahatma Gandhi drew three lessons from this book, or rather, as Louis Fischer has explained,

Mahatma Gandhi read three messages into the book.

 

 The first message was that the benefit of all is

what a good economy is all about; the second was that earnings from manual work su

that of a barber have the same value as mental work such as that of a lawyer; and the

one was that a life worth living was that of a laborer or craftsman. Mahatma Gandhi in

autobiography that he decided to put these messages into practice as soon as he had

read Ruskin’s book on a train journey.

The kind of life that Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘basic education’ proposal projected as the ‘good’ life

was first practiced by him at Phoenix Farm and, somewhat more rigorously at

Tolstoy Farm a little later. As the name indicates, by the time of this latter experiment,

He had read the works of, and had established contact with, the Russian writer and thinker Leo Tolstoy.

The inspiration Mahatma Gandhi received from Tolstoy spanned a wide range of

concerns. Prominent among them was to fight the sources of violence in human society.

Tolstoy’s celebration of the individual’s right to live in peace and freedom, negation of

all forms of oppression, brought him close to Mahatma Gandhi.

The right to autonomy that Mahatma Gandhi’s educational plan assigns to the teacher

of the school’s daily curriculum is consistent with the libertarian principles he shared

with Tolstoy. Mahatma Gandhi wanted to free the Indian teacher from the slavery of the bureaucracy.

The schoolteacher’s job had come to be defined under colonial rule as one transmitting

elucidating the forms and content of knowledge selected by bureaucratic authorities for

inclusion in the prescribed textbook. Exposing the link between the mandatory use of

textbooks and the feeble position of the teacher, Mahatma  Gandhi wrote: ‘If textbooks

are vehicle for education, the living word of the teacher has very little value. A teacher

who teaches from textbooks does not impart originality to his pupils.’

 

 Gandhi’s basic education

plan implied the end of the teacher’s subservience to the prescribed textbook and the

curriculum. For one thing, it presented a concept of learning that could not be fully

implemented with the help of textbooks. More important, however, was the freedom and

authority that the basic education plan gave to the teacher in matters concerning the

curriculum. It was a libertarian plan inasmuch as it denied the State the power to decide

precisely what the teacher must do in the classroom. In accordance with his wider

philosophy of social life and politics, this aspect of Mahatma Gandhi’s educational plan implied a dramatic reduction of state’s sphere of authority.