The years 1937 and 1938 are of pivotal importance with regard to Gandhi’s activities in the realm of education. At no other time did he write and talk more about this topic.438 As he wrote in October 1937: ‘what I have seen through the glass darkly for the past 40 years I have begun to see now quite clearly under the stress of circumstances’.439 In a series of articles, beginning in May 1937 in his journal Harijan, he presented his ideas on education and a debate about his suggestions among those who were involved in the search for ‘nationalist’
education concepts. In various articles, Gandhi presented his ideas on an education concept geared towards the needs of the villages and based on manual work, thereby drawing on his personal experiences with the education institutions he had founded. He argued that if education took place in the vernacular languages, the time taken to teach the current curriculum for primary and secondary education could be cut from eleven to seven years, thus limiting the
‘wastage’ of time spent learning a new language.440 This seven-year model of education should, in his view, be made available to everyone, and ‘education should be so revolutionized as to answer the wants of the poorest villager instead
438 This is the result of my own analysis of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, according to the keyword ‘education’.
439 CWMG Vol. 72, pp. 285-6.
440 Ibid., p. 205.
of answering those of an imperial exploiter’.441 When asked about the role of the urban population and whether this kind of education should also be implemented in cities, he argued that it was important to first concentrate on rural India, since it had been neglected for so long, and said that ‘if we take up the question of the cities along with that of the villages, we will fritter away our energies’.442
The most important aspect, for him, was that education should be centred on manual work. He thereby pointed to the importance of ‘holistic’ education, echoing the ideas of the Progressive Education Movement – of educating the
‘head, heart and hand’:
I hold that true education of the intellect can only come through a proper exercise and training of the bodily organs, e.g., hands, feet, eyes, ears, nose, etc. In other words, an intelligent use of the bodily organs in a child provides the best and quickest way of developing his intellect.443
The production of crafts as part of the education process was, for Gandhi, the most important element in his concept. This was believed to serve multiple purposes. On the one hand, he argued that because education introduced under British rule did not provide practical knowledge and was merely based on ‘book learning’, the younger generation had difficulty finding employment: ‘talents are being wasted and the fact that thousands of young people who leave schools are good for nothing except clerkships is indicative not of intellectual development but of intellectual waste’.444 Thereby, Gandhi also saw his ideas supported by the Wood–Abbott Report on the restructuring of education in India, published in 1937, which lamented the low standard of vocational education.445 Referring to the report, Gandhi argued that it ‘recognize[d] the value of manual work as important part of rural education’ and that he was glad that his ideas were
‘supported by reputed educationists’.446 His ‘new’ idea thereby was that:
441 Ibid., p. 148.
442 Ibid., Vol. 75, p. 50.
443 Harijan, 8.5.1937, in: CWMG Vol. 71, p. 122.
444 Ibid., Vol. 72, p. 116.
445 See also an abbreviated version of the report in: Bhatt & Aggarwal, Educational Documents in India, 1813-1968.
446 CWMG Vol. 72, p. 206.
not vocation cum literary training, but literary training through vocational training was the thing. Then vocational training would cease to be a drudgery and literary training would have a new content and new usefulness.447
The production of crafts and education in different subjects should not happen in isolation from each other, but manual work should be the primary means of imparting knowledge in other subjects – as Gandhi called it: ‘making the handicraft the principal means of imparting literary training’.448 He also called it the ‘scientific teaching of crafts’.449 The keyword for this idea of using crafts as a
‘vehicle of education’,450 common after 1937, was ‘correlation’. As Gandhi outlined:
The principle idea is to impart the whole education of the body and the mind and the soul through the handicraft that is taught to the children. You have to draw out all that is in the child through teaching all the processes of the handicraft, and all your lessons in history, geography, arithmetic will be related to the craft.451
One example of this ‘correlated’ teaching that Gandhi gave in 1937 was teaching about Indian history, British colonization and India’s economic dependence on foreign-made cloth while children used a hand-spindle (takli).452 He was convinced that ‘one imparts ten times as much in this manner as by reading and writing’.453 Another important effect for Gandhi was achieving economic
452 ‘Look at takli (spindle) itself, for instance. The lesson of this takli will be the first lesson of our students through which they would be able to learn a substantial part of the history of cotton, Lancashire and the British empire. How does this takli work? What is its utility? And what are the strengths that lie within it? Thus the child learns all this in the midst of play. Through this he also acquires some knowledge of mathematics. When he is asked to count the number of cotton threads on takli and he is asked to report how many did he spin, it becomes possible to acquaint him step by step with good deal of mathematical knowledge through this process. And the beauty is that none of this becomes even a slight burden on his mind. The learner does not even become aware that he is learning. While playing around and singing, he keeps on turning his takli and from this itself he learns a great deal.’ Excerpt from the address by Mahatma Gandhi at the Wardha Education Conference, 22 October 1937 [translated from Hindi, Hindustani Talimi Sangh, 1957, pp. vii–viii], quoted in: NCERT, “Position Paper National Focus Group on Work and Education”, (2007), http://ncert.nic.in/html/pdf/schoolcurriculum/position_papers/work&education.pdf.
(retrieved 10.10.2014).
453 CWMG Vol. 72, p. 79.
sufficiency in schools when imparting education through the medium of rural crafts:
But as a 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.454
Against a background of enormous financial constraints, Gandhi saw this as the only feasible way to provide at least seven years of education to all children in India. Also, there had been an ongoing debate, especially among supporters of the Temperance Movement, about using the income from alcohol taxation on public services such as education, and this was seen as dependence on an ‘immoral state’.455 Gandhi, as a convinced proponent of this movement, argued that this became a moral dilemma, as the more alcohol consumed the better for public finances. In his view, therefore, education should be self-sufficient instead of being financed by alcohol taxation revenue.456
The most controversial issue criticized even before the Wardha Conference was the danger of exploiting children in connection to the goal that schools should be self-sufficient.457 Gandhi reacted to this criticism with the argument that, as long as education was ‘well done’ and the teachers ‘good’, it was absolutely impossible for such exploitation to happen: ‘Well done education cannot lead to exploitation.
In fact I would reject a teacher who would promise to make it self-supporting under any circumstances.’458 However, these doubts about the proposed concept remained, already foreshadowing the controversial debate that was to follow regarding the practicability of his ideas. Gandhi tried to reassure critics by saying:
‘the children will not do this as children used to do under the whip in the early days of the factories. They will do it because it entertains them and stimulates
454 Ibid.
455 On the Temperance Movement in India see also: Robert Eric Colvard, “‘Drunkards Beware!’:
Prohibition and Nationalist Politics in the 1930s”, in: A History of Alcohol and Drugs in South Asia, ed. by Harald Fischer-Tiné & Jana Tschurenev (London; New York: Routledge, 2013). On Gandhi’s role see: David M. Fahey & Padma Manian, “Poverty and Purification: The Politics of Gandhi’s Campaign for Prohibition”, in: The Historian 76 (2005) 3, pp. 489–506.
456 Harijan, 17.7.1937, in: CWMG Vol. 72, p. 35.
457 See, for example, the critique of ‘a professor’ (not further specified) in Harijan, 18.9.1937, in:
Ibid., p. 231.
458 Ibid.
their intellect.’459 For him, the swift realization of his envisioned concept was of pivotal importance, and he argued that the achievement of independence from Britain would be accelerated ‘if we could educate millions of our people through an intelligent exercise of their respective vocations like this and teach them that they live for the common good of all’.460