Ten years before Independence, Mahatma Gandhi put together a set of ideas on education called Nai Talim which was actually a culmination of several decades of thinking and experimenting on education. An early experience was Gandhi’s Tolstoy Farm in South Africa where he and his associate Kallenbach educated children including Gandhi’s own who came from at least four different linguistic and religious backgrounds.
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Gandhi’s Nai Talim was put into practice by many Gandhian volunteers. Congress governments that had come to power in the 1937 elections tried to implement some of his ideas too. After Independence, there was a serious attempt to bring Gandhi’s ideas to reality in education but the march of modernity took its toll and soon enough India had little use for Nai Talim.
Gandhi, in his own novel ways, sought to address key issues of education in India at that time: equity, access, as well as quality of education and results. The National Education Policy 2020 says that predecessor policies were more focused on equity and access whereas it’s now time to address the growing needs of a nation aspiring to be a developed economy. But the route it takes has only a few tenuous links to Gandhi’s vision although the Ministry of Education has sought to point out distinct parallels between the two.
Frugal, self-sufficient education
As could be expected of Mahatma Gandhi, education was a highly ethical endeavour. The ideal product of his Nai Talim was a simple living, high thinking individual who was dedicated to serving others, always stood for harmony and cooperation, was very good with manual work and took to it, and was committed to peace and non-violence. He or she was also an expert craftsman. Gandhi’s system of learning was by doing.
Gandhi, for all his religiosity and mixing of religious themes with the freedom struggle, did not want religious education. His focus was the village and promotion of handicrafts.
At a time when the costs of social services provided by government had to be met largely through liquor revenue, Gandhi, who abhorred liquor consumption, advocated that all primary education institutions should be self-sufficient and pay for themselves. He wanted wealthy donors funding medical colleges and big industrialists such as the Tatas paying for engineering colleges.
Schools had to be self-sufficient too. The expenses were to be minimal. Students themselves were to maintain and run their schools with teachers also serving as active manual workers. Gandhi’s school was frugal.
And he wanted his schools to earn by creating value through handicrafts that students would learn and do. These handicrafts were to be context-driven just as most other aspects of his Nai Talim were. In practice, however, such vocationalization seemed to reinforce hereditary occupations of the caste system.
Gandhi, however, greatly stressed on the dignity and equality of all forms of manual labour. Work was worship and all students and teachers had to clean the school premises including bathrooms and latrines. This was Gandhi’s caste-busting measure.
For Gandhi, Swaraj meant autonomous, self-sufficient and empowered Indians who were not constrained by state power. The village was to be practically a republic. Self-sufficiency was the acid test for a Nai Talim school.
Gandhi sought to achieve “literary” goals of education though work and action. He saw English education as producing clerks for government jobs. Over the years, however, India has decisively moved away from these notions.
Claims of convergence
The Union Ministry of Education has sought to draw parallels between Gandhi’s Nai Talim and the NEP 2020. It has pointed out that the NEP advocates education in mother tongue just as Gandhi did. In South Africa, Gandhi sought to teach Gujarati children in Gujarati and Tamil children in Tamil.
Just as in Nai Talim, the NEP wants school students to learn another Indian language that Gandhi preferred to be Hindi. NEP advocates the learning of several languages, more than just two or even three.
The NEP has stressed on how to learn rather than just creating the content for learning. Content is available freely in today’s world and what is important is how is the content to be learned.
Just as Gandhi would have liked, the NEP and the general thrust of the current BJP government seeks to de-emphasize institutions and promote cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional learning as well as non-classroom methods such as online courses. For Gandhi, classrooms were tyrannical.
Another thrust of the NEP and the government has been towards vocationalization of education. Gandhi inverted the equation and advocated education based on doing. But the current orientation is towards producing a skilled and productive workforce, not necessarily one that is highly literary through and through.
But where the NEP and Gandhi markedly differ is the overall goal of education. There is no mention of peace or non-violence in the NEP. While the document talks of regard for diversity, inclusiveness and respect for traditions and traditional knowledge, it is silent on a higher ethical focus for India as a nation and how education will serve that.
The intent of the NEP is not to imbibe selflessness, tolerance and love for fellow human beings in Indian students. The goal is to produce a skilled, knowledgeable and empowered worker.
Published - October 02, 2024 04:08 pm IST
