Student Enterprising (SE) What and Why?

THE HARIJAN ARTICLES

In August, 1937 Mahadev Desai, editor of Harijan and Gandhi’s personal secretary, informed his readers that, from the moment the Congress had resolved to accept office, Gandhi had been ‘devoting all his waking hours to the problem of prohibition and mass educational’ (H 5:227). Between May and October 1937, through various articles on the subject and through his responses to letters and criticism, Gandhi proceeded to outline the basis of his plans for educating India. The views that he put forth at this time have since become known variously as ‘ nai talim’ (meaning ‘ new education’), ‘basic national education’ or, simply, basic education’. The purpose of this chapter is to present these seminal views as directly and lucidly as possible. A full contextual discussion of the scheme will be the subject of later chapters, but the present concern is rather to allow these texts to speak for themselves.

Holism: Body, Mind and Spirit

As a starting point, it is important to realize that Gandhi’s views on the development of the individual are essentially holistic. In an article written in May 1937, entitled ‘Intellectual Development or Dissipation?’, Gandhi develops the central premise that ‘ Man is neither mere intellect, nor the gross animal body, nor the heart or soul alone’. He goes on to assert that, ‘A proper and harmonious combination of all the three is required for the making of the whole man and constitutes the true economics of education’. Gandhi contends that the widespread neglect of this principle is everywhere evident, no only amongst the unlettered but also amongst the so-called educated. He finds in the villages that the endless mechanical drudgery of the laborers deprivers them of all scope for developing their mind and soul, and that they have hence’ sunk to the level of the beast’. Equally, in the schools and colleges of the cities, he finds that intellectual training, divorced as it is from physical work, produces an imbalance just as pernicious. And as for the faculties of the heart’ of such students, they are simply allowed to’ run to seed or to grow anyhow in a wild undisciplined manner.’ ‘The result,’ he laments, ‘is moral and spiritual anarchy’ Gandhi then proceeds to outline his vision of an alternative pedagogy:

As against this, take the case of a child in whom the education of the heart is attended to from the very beginning, Supposing he is set to some useful occupation like spinning, carpentry, agriculture, etc., for his education and in that connection is given a thorough and comprehensive knowledge relating to the theory of the various operations that he is to perform and the use and construction of the tools that he would be wielding. He would not only develop a fine, healthy body but also a sound, vigorous intellect that is not merely academic but is firmly rooted in and is tested from day to day by experience. His intellectual education would include a knowledge of mathematics and the various sciences that are useful for an intelligent and efficient exercise of his avocation. If to this is added literature by way of recreation, it would give him a perfect well-balanced, all-round education in which the intellect, the body and the spirit have all full pay and develop together into a natural, harmonious whole. (H 5: 104)

Manual training as Medium, or ‘Correlation’

Instruction through the medium of handicrafts thus became for Gandhi the ‘pivot and centre of education’ (H 5:130). For him this was an entirely new conception. ‘I must confess,’ he noted in 1937, ‘that up to now all I have said is that manual training must be given side by side with intellectual training. But now I say that manual training should be the principal means of stimulating the intellect’.⁴ Two of Gandhi’s own examples suffice to explain the psychology of this new principle, which has since been called ‘correlation’.

Questions may be asked how intelligence can be developed through the takli or the spinning wheel. It can to a marvellous degree if it is not taught merely mechanically. When you tell a child the reason for each process, when you explain the mechanism of the takli or the wheel, when you give him the history of cotton and its connection with civilization itself and take him to the village field where it is grown, and teach him to count the rounds he spins and the method of finding the evenness and strength of his yarn, you hold his interest and simultaneously train his hands, his eyes and his mind. (H: 5:130)

A carpenter teaches me carpentry. I shall learn I mechanically form him, and as a result I shall know the use of various tools, but that will hardly develop my intellect. But if the same thing is a taught to me by one who has taken a scientific training in carpentry, he will stimulate my intellect too. Not only shall I have become an expert carpenter but also an engineer. For the expert will have taught me mathematics, also the differences between different types of timber, the place where they come from, giving me thus a knowledge of geography and also a knowledge of elementary geometry and arithmetic. (H 5:246)

To conduct the essentials of education through manual training obviously relegated the importance of book learning. But Gandhi did not hesitate to assert that literacy in itself was no education; he maintained that it was neither ‘the end of education nor even the beginning. It is only one of the means whereby man and woman can be educated’ (H 5:197). Aside from its pedagogical worth, Gandhi also appreciated that manual training should be given pride of place for functional reasons. In India’s largely agrarian economy, schooling should be vocational, a view which he had explained in detail many years previously:

…whatever may be true of other countries, in India at any rate where more than eighty per cent of the population is agricultural and another ten per cent industrial, it is a crime to make education merely literary, and to unfit [ sic] boys and girls for manual work in after-life. Indeed I hold that as the larger part of our time is devoted to labour for earning our bread, our children must from their infancy be taught the dignity of such labour. Our children should not be so taught as to despise labour… It is a sad thing that our school boys look upon manual labour with disfavour, if not contempt.

Mother Tongue

In time with most other Indian nationalist thinkers, Gandhi saw that it was natural and indeed essential for Indian children to be educated in their various mother tongues: ‘We have to make them true representatives of our culture, our civilization, of the true genius of our nation’, he noted (H 5:324). Gandhi believed that instruction in English had cast upon the educated class ‘a burden which has maimed them mentally for life and made them strangers in their own land’. He also maintained that its effect had been to create ‘a permanent bar between the highly educated few and the uneducated many’ (H 5:282). In his view, English-medium instruction was entirely superfluous and unnecessarily time-consuming. It is for this reason that he believed the course of schooling could be made much shorter, with children beginning their education at age seven and completing at age 14.

He stated:

I should combine into one what you call now the primary education and secondary or high school education.. If you cut out English from the curriculum altogether, without cutting out the subjects you teach, you can make the children through the whole course in seven years instead of eleven. (H 5:246)

English-medium instruction was only one of the many perceived defects of the British system of education, and the significance of the colonial system as a backdrop to Gandhi’s views shall be discussed in due course.

Self-Support

In his deliberations over compulsory mass education, rightly or wrongly, Gandhi initially raised the matter in connection with the issue of prohibition, which had been a Congress priority since the 1920s. The dilemma was whether it was possible to have both: ‘The cruellest irony of the new reforms,’ he wrote, ‘lies in the fact that we are left with nothing but liquor revenue to fall back upon, in order to give our children education. That is the educational puzzle’ (H 5:222).⁵ Gandhi’s proposed solution was without precedent in the world history of education. Instead of being paid for from excise revenue, he believed that Indian’s national system of education could and should be made self-sufficient:

But as nation, we are so backward in education that we cannot hope to fulfil our obligations to the nation in this respect in a given time during this generation, if the programme is to depend on money. I have therefore made bold, even at the risk of losing, all reputation for constructive ability, to suggest that education should be self-supporting… I would therefore begin the child’s education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it to produce from the moment it begins its training. Thus every school can be made self-supporting, the condition being that the State takes over the manufactures of these schools. (H 5:197)

Whether it was unavoidable or not, it is quite clear, however, that this early connection of educations with the problem of prohibition was less than helpful, since it leads some to believe that the scheme was constructed simply out of financial expediency. In September, therefore, he felt it necessary to clarify his position, and dismissed the idea that self-supporting education sprang from the necessity of achieving total prohibition as soon as possible; ‘Both are independent necessities’, he wrote (H 5:261).

In Gandhi’s mind, self-supporting education was therefore an important option for other reasons. For a start, he believed that the proposition, although ‘startling’ was’ perfectly feasible and eminently reasonable’ (H 5:181). In an article written in Harijan in September 1937, Narhari Parikh, a teacher at the Harijan Ashram at Sabarmati, provided a table of figures as an empirical defence of self-supporting education (see Appendix I). Along with other pursuits, girls at the Harijan Ashram had been devoting three hours a day to the activities of spinning, carding and weaving. At this rate, Parikh found that twenty-five ten-year-olds were able to make an average of 12 annas⁶ per month, thus supporting his assertion that ‘s class of students of the age of ten years and above can be made very nearly, if not altogether, self-supporting through spinning’ (H 5:243). Later that month Gandhi displayed a quiet confidence in these results; ‘They are not conclusive,’ he remarked, ‘they are encouraging. They supply good data to an enthusiast’ (H 5:265). But elsewhere he had expressed his convictions regarding self-support rather more vociferously. ‘Public school must be frauds and teachers idiots, if they cannot become self-supporting’, he proclaimed; and he went on:

…corporate labour should be, say after the first year of the course, worth one anna per hour. Thus for twenty-six working days of four hours per day, each child will have earned Rs.6-8-0 per month … We should be intellectual bankrupts, If we cannot direct the energy of our children so as to get from them, after a year’s training, one anna worth of marketable labour per hour.

(H 5:256)

Gandhi’s confidence in the practicality of self-supporting, although abrasive, was not ill-founded as we shall see when we examine the historical development development of his views. But the question of why he believed in it so fervently is a more complex one. Part of his motives were undoubtedly financial; the task of educating India’s millions would be an undertaking of colossal propositions for which there were simply no funds. By one estimate, the extent of literacy I British India at the time was no more than 10%, and less than 2% among women.⁷ This issue of sheer coverage, let alone quality, was brought to the attention of Harijan readers by Mahadev Desai:

The Director of Public Instruction, C.P. [Central provinces], who saw Gandhiji, said that in C.P. for 40,000 villages in the province there were only 5,000 schools which were within reach of 16,000 villages. The remaining 24,000 villages were without any school or educational facility within reach whatsoever. How can this mass illiteracy be liquidated? (H 5:251).

A second reason for Gandhi’s belief in self-support was that to produce saleable items would be a kind of quality control, a check put a place to ensure that the education imparted had been truly vocational. His scheme of education can also therefore be understood as facilitating a form of economic planning. In answer to a questioner who asked why self-support was necessary, Gandhi’s reply was:

That will be the test of its value. The child at the age of 14, that is a after finishing a seven year’s course, should be discharged as an unit … You impart education and simultaneously cut at the roots of unemployment

The third reason why self-support is essential to Gandhi’s theory of education is the most critical to its success, but at the same time is paradoxically the most ill-defined by Gandhi, his contemporaries and subsequent writers. We have already seen how, in Gandhi’s holistic conception of the individual, the body, mind and spirit must all develop together, and how the medium of handicraft is to be employed to that end. We have also through to light Gandhi’s understanding of how both the mind and the body can be trained effectively through craft. Yet the crucial linkage between the craft-medium and the spirit, the third point in this triadic relationship, is never properly or explicitly outlined. The closest Gandhi comes to an explanation is that craft training results in ‘the conservation of the intellectual energy and indirectly also the spiritual’ (H 5:130, italics added). This conception has its corresponding opposite in his earlier assertion that, under conventional education, the ‘faculties of the heart’ are simply allowed to ‘run to seed or to grow anyhow in a wild undisciplined manner’ (H 5:104). But a proper explanation of the crucial link is still missing. How indeed does craft training develop one’s spirituality? How does it make one a better person? Here are three writers, one a contemporary of Gandhi, attempting to grapple with the problem.

[craft work] incidentally makes the boy more ‘peaceful’ and assiduous; being productive work, it relates the boy’s activity to his environment and the society in which he lives; and, lastly, by imparting instruction through some serious craft not only the boy’s practical intelligence is trained but he gets the conception of labour as a moral force. (N.R. Malkani, H 5:332)

A sharp intellect can be cultivated through other methods, but then it may not be socially developed. On the other hand, an intellect developed through the medium of socially useful manual labour must of necessity become an instrument of service. Mere intellectual training ordinarily makes a child individualistic. But education through work and activities brings him in contact with other children in cooperation with whom he has to work. (Avinashilingam 1964, 63)

From the beginning [Gandhi] had seen that the vigorous manual work to meet the needs of a family or community was the basis both of physical health and of an ethic of generous sharing and mutual respect. (Sykes 1988, 34)

But still the link is not there. It is this: the reason why self-support is vital to Gandhi’s scheme of education is because it is a moral obligation. To support oneself means that one will not exploit one’s neighbors. And so the reason, and the only reason, why craft work can be a ‘spiritual’ activity is because it enables, and so hopefully encourages, the child to become self-reliant. The causal sequence becomes: craft work – self-support – moral development. Self-support is intimately connected with the nonviolence of Gandhi’s world view, and this is theme to which we shall return when we discuss the implications of his educational vision.

Higher education

Higher education was effectively left out of Gandhi’s proposed scheme of education, since he felt it could be left to private enterprise:

I would revolutionize college education and relate it to national necessitates. There would be degrees for mechanical and other engineers. They would be attached to the different industries which should pay for the training of the graduates they need. Thus the tats would be expected to run a college to training engineers under the supervision of the State, the mill associations would run among them a college for training gradates whom they need. Similarly for the other industries that may be named. Commerce will have its college. There remain arts, medicine and agriculture. Several private arts colleges are today self-supporting. The state would, therefore, cease to run its own. Medical colleges would be attached to certified hospitals. As they are popular among monied men they may be expected by voluntary contributions to support medical colleges. And agricultural college to be worthy of the name must be self-supporting.

The above is one of the only pronouncements on higher education that Gandhi made at this crucial time in the development of his scheme. His call for no public or state intervention in this area received considerable criticism. However, this lack of attention is an indication that his overriding concern at this stage was instead the pressing needs of India’s predominantly poor.