The “unfinished business” of Basic Education

Jane Sahi

Often Gandhi’s ideas about education are dismissed as out of date, obsolete, or he is accused of having failed because the government quickly gave up trying to implement Basic Education as a model for schooling.

Krishna Kumar, in his paper, “Listening to Gandhi” appeals to us to follow Gandhi’s own ideals of flexibility, openness, and persistency in re-examining the fundamental ideas of Basic Education. Gandhi himself spoke of “waiting upon Truth” because it is an unending process of discovery. He stresses that it is important to “keep oneself open to the winds of change…and to be undogmatic.” So it would be a mistake to only look backwards and see Basic Education as something fixed and that happened in the past.

Particularly in the early period (between 1937-1941) of the growth of Nai Talim, Marjorie Sykes, an English educationalist who worked closely both with Gandhi and Tagore, vividly describes the questioning, discussion and honest searching that went on as people experimented and put into practice some of these ideas. For example, she describes how in 1941 a frank discussion took place, about the function of art in education, and the problem of the enrolment of teachers…whether they should be qualified or not. Marjorie Sykes later laments that because of the political turmoil and tensions, the imprisonment of leaders, and the interference of the colonial government there was much “unfinished business” in seriously working through many aspects of basic education, that had newly begun to take shape.

The subsequent failure of Basic Education, as a state policy to attract people was partly because the government after Independence clearly saw Basic Education as education for the poor. It was implemented as an option only up to the fifth standard, which was never what Gandhi intended. In fact, just the opposite, he wanted a comprehensive education for all beyond caste, class, and religion. But this does not prevent us from re-looking at the essentials of his ideas of Basic Education.

Basic Education grew out of a longing to find an alternative to the explicit and hidden violence of normal schooling. A system of schooling that re-enforces inequality and injustice by deliberately rejecting the weak, economically or academically, is a kind of violence. It promotes an attitude of survival of the slickest and marginalization of the poor. A schooling that takes no account of each individual’s gifts and potential, nor the needs of the community is destructive for both the individual and the society. Learning that dries up originality, reflection, imagination, and compassion is deadening. When a child is transplanted to an unfamiliar, artificial and hostile environment that is disconnected from home, family and familiar language, it is a violent uprooting.

Much of what is accepted as normal is in fact very abnormal – to herd young children together and to confine them in a limited space; to learn an alphabet of a language when you have no grasp of basic vocabulary, to spend long hours sitting with very restricted use of hands or feet are all signs of being against nature.

One striking aspect of Gandhi’s experiments in schooling was to see education as an organic and integrated process. There was no contradiction between the vision of the whole and the smallest detail of the running of the school. He wrote, “For me the smallest work is as important as the biggest. For me whatever is in the atoms and in the molecules is in the universe.”

Just now there is a lot of stress given to value education but I think children very quickly can gauge the gap between what is preached and what is practiced, and they notice what are the teachers’ real priorities and agenda, despite what might be said in the morning assembly or in classes of moral instruction or written as pious platitudes on the walls.

Gandhi was very attentive to creating an atmosphere of caring and simplicity where nothing was wasted – not even a used match stick. For Gandhi, school was not separated from life; school was not only a place to learn lessons, but it was a place to learn the arts of responsibility, compassion, and sharing. Gandhi said, “Let us rescue education from the walls of the classroom.” Gandhi wanted to build on and extend what the child knows of an actual place and living relationships.

It was this active and direct learning that made Gandhi so critical of the uniform textbook, which he felt was somehow secondhand, and unrelated to the child’s immediate experience. Gandhi boldly stated, “Books are there not as a substitute for life and action, but as an aid to a fuller life, and more effective action.” It was not that Gandhi was against literacy, but he recommended that books be approached in a spirit of discovery and enjoyment. He rejected a textbook mentality that promotes undigested, potted learning oriented only towards exams.

Gandhi wanted to involve the whole person in learning, not just the memory, but the eyes, hands, feet, voice, and mind. His ideas on correlation have often been interpreted in a rather narrow way. It is true that he did envisage a single craft – such as the spinning and weaving of cloth – as a vehicle for learning measurement, history, geography, and science. However, in the process of actual teaching this can naturally be extended to using the child’s environment to learn about many topics such as house-building, the flora and fauna of the locality, food and its relation to health, etc.

Correlation can be extended to finding a unity in every social and practical aspect of life and learning. School often separates, for example, work and play, lessons in the classroom and manual skills, or local history and geography from social studies as a subject. Art and religion are often treated in isolation and not integrated in other areas of learning. Correlation could be understood as creatively balancing these different dimensions to make a more holistic learning space.

Fundamental to Basic Education are the ideas of cooperation and mutual aid, as against cut-throat competition which is often taken for granted as the inevitable norm. Competition has crept into almost every aspect of school life. I have even heard of prayer competitions!

The normal school often serves to separate children and limit the interaction between children of different ages and abilities. Whereas this can be an invaluable learning experience on all sides. Children, for example, could be encouraged to share and
work together on projects in an atmosphere of acceptance and respect for the other. It is a way of learning to understand other people’s skills, temperaments, strengths, and weaknesses. Linked to the idea of cooperation is the acceptance of diversity, whether in age, ability, community, religion, or gender.

One of the most controversial of Gandhi’s ideas was that of the role of work in school. This was especially because Gandhi linked productive work and the cost of running the school, which he even termed as “the acid test” for evaluating a viable school. From the very beginning Gandhi was accused of setting up sweat shops of child labour, “like the semi-slave plantations of Ceylon”. Krishna Kumar suggests that Gandhi’s insistence on self-sufficiency was to avoid a dependence on revenue from liquor shops, and that it is possible to re-look at the positive aspects of work in school.

Karl Marx himself said, “If the element of exploitation could be removed from it, child labour ought to become an essential part of education.” Work can be seen as an effective way of fostering self-sufficiency in acquiring life skills, and attitudes of responsibility and discipline. It can be a training in concentration and care, and give a sense of satisfaction of a job well done. Rather than rewards. In the home it is very naturally a part of a child’s life to contribute in small ways to the well-being of the family.

At present, school tends to lead to de-skilling and despising manual labour. However, purposeful work and the learning of skills such as vegetable gardening, stitching and mending, cooking, practicing first aid, and knowing appropriate home remedies, etc., help to make children feel independent and capable. Self-sufficiency includes giving opportunities for children to access information – whether it is using a dictionary, reading a map, looking something up on the Internet or reading a timetable.

Gandhi described his ideal to “keep the child rooted to the soil with a glorious vision of the future”. This is not being romantic, but comes from a desire to encourage reverence and sympathy for all forms of life. The dominant school system tends to isolate the child from people and nature and to encourage only one kind of growth, that of achievement in examinations, so that there is a danger in cultivating parasites.

When Gandhi speaks of “rooting children in the soil”, he is, I think, referring to giving children real values and an awareness of self that can be the beginning of a resistance to dangerous forces that dehumanize. Practically speaking, in school this process of preparing the child to meet the hard realities of life, might mean encouraging children to be, on occasion, alone and quiet, or supporting the ability to make things and to enjoy play that does not require complicated ready-made materials. It might also mean a critical appreciation of literature so that readers can connect their lives with what they read and enter imaginatively into others’ lives.

I have mentioned just a few of Gandhi’s key ideas: cooperation, the significance of work, schooling for all “unto the last” and the vital link between home, school, and community. These are all aspects of an organic kind of education that fosters life, growth, and sympathy with nature and the community. The “unfinished business” to put these ideas into practice is the need of here and now and it becomes all the more urgent in the face of the present education system that continues to play a role in widening the gap between the rich and the poor, despite the legal structures that have been put into place. What Basic Education stands for is the possibility of realizing an education in which all have an equal chance to learn, work and play, and the institutional violence of
economic differences is in that way somewhat mitigated.

Gandhi had a way of getting to the heart of things and Basic Education for him was rooted in a value system that was inclusive and grounded. He said, “To see the universal all-pervading spirit of truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself.”

The author has been working in an alternative school near Bengaluru for the last 30 years and has also been involved in sharing resources in art and language with government primary school teachers. She can be reached at janehelensahi@gmail.com.