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.
