Finding peace by living naturally
Meenakshi Umesh
Today there is a realization that globalization has perhaps not had entirely positive impacts. That the greater the distance between the creator and the user, the more poverty it would mean for the creator and the more toxic the product. Our present-day lifestyle is partly the result of the contemporary education system, where in the name of health and hygiene we are using extremely strong medicines and toxic chemicals. To increase the production of food, we promote the use of artificial fertilizers and terribly poisonous pesticides that are systemic and are destroying ecosystems. Our needs for energy are increasing and the forest cover has decreased to abysmal levels.
Knowing fully well that our so-called comfort is causing deep discomfort to the planet and ill health to our children and ourselves, we continue to perpetuate the same myths about success, progress, and increased GDP through the education system. Many people are now slowly realizing that having more material goods does not mean more happiness. Many are seeing the connection between toxins in the environment and the illnesses in our bodies. Many people are moving towards minimalistic living and sustainable and regenerative farming, local markets, gift economy, and even local currency!
Gandhiji, feared that the physical comforts we gain would lead to mental discomfort and emotional imbalance. He realized that the problem of mechanization and industrialization would lead to dehumanization and destruction and cautioned that the use of machines would cost us our humanness. He wrote extensively in Hind Swaraj about how our lives would be impacted by our dependency on machines. Gandhiji perhaps intuitively knew that dependency on machines would mean dependency on the market and that would take away real freedom and sustainability from the villages and impoverish them further. He envisioned a new society where wisdom was gained in schools and spirituality was nurtured by engaging in meaningful and productive activities like farming, spinning, weaving, carpentry, cooking, cleaning, and maintenance to provide for our daily needs. His belief was that as long as we keep creating with our hands and meeting our needs locally, we will be able to exercise some control over our lives. Nai Talim was Gandhiji’s vision of an education system that was designed to integrate the heart, head, and hands. It is a way of life, not a pedagogy of education.
On his 75th birthday on October 2, 1944, he made this the theme of a major speech. Education, he said, must not be thought of as confined to schools. It must continue throughout life, “from conception to cremation;” it must touch every aspect of daily living and help every man and woman be a better citizen of their village, and therefore a better citizen of India and the world. It must aim at expanding their mental horizons; it must inculcate a spirit of neighbourliness, which would rise above narrower loyalties and do away with untouchability and with communal jealousies and suspicions.
Gandhiji was in fact calling for an all-round training in “non-violent democracy,” and developing the thought he had expressed earlier: “The real remedy (for exploitation and injustice) is non-violent democracy, otherwise spelled true education for all.”
Gandhiji’s belief in nonviolence and peace curated this system of education, where both children and adults learnt through engaging with their hands in creating products, services, and systems using their emotional connection with the material, their intuitive understanding of it, and their intellectual involvement in making life meaningful through service to other beings.
“There is no way to peace; peace is the way”. Education for peace means learning to live with peace, daily and hourly, wherever one happens to be. It means learning to tackle and resolve the tensions and conflicts of outlook and interest with prudence and fairness sensitively. These are a necessary and valuable part of human experience. To this learning of the way of peace, the principles and practice of Nai Talim have a great deal to contribute.
The three pillars of Gandhi’s pedagogy were its focus on the lifelong character of education, its social character, and its form as a holistic process.
Education is not simply putting in information, it is drawing out the hidden potential for good in each human being. It is not concerned only with the intellect, but equally with the body and spirit. Literacy is just a tool, a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. It is not always necessarily the best tool available for attaining the real end, which is the all-round development of the human being. It certainly is not the first tool for education, whose nature demands activity and purposeful work. Gandhiji wrote 80 years ago, “I must confess 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.” This meant that the manual training must be “scientific.” There must be full appreciation of the chosen handicraft in all its points of contact with natural science and human history, its standards of accuracy and beauty, the part it plays in the wellbeing of the people who practice it and in the enrichment of human life as a whole. Handicrafts taught in this way, far from being a mindless drudgery, could stimulate endless intellectual curiosity on a great variety of topics. They opened the door wide for research and discovery.
At Puvidham for the last three decades we found that every word of what he said is true!
I had a lot of questions about the life I lived in Mumbai. During my college education at Sir JJ College of Architecture, travelling in the suburban train from Ghatkopar to Victoria Terminus, opened my eyes to the disparity and meaninglessness of life in the city. The only freedom we had was the freedom to choose between the various products offered in the market. The air was polluted, the water was chlorinated, and the food was adulterated. When we visited our village in UP, Muzzaffarnagar that year, I realized that my life need not be trapped in the city. I could choose to not live in the city! What was stopping me was my fear, my inhibitions, and my biases. As I reflected on my schooling and my future, I felt that schools were designed to make us fit into the rat race of the city. I felt that all the problems in the society were because of the way the schools were. When I was 18, I had read Gandhi’s My experiments with Truth. I read it again and decided to experiment with my life. I had one chance to live and I decided to live it without the fear of failure or the aspiration to success.
I left the city, came to Auroville and slowly came to the conclusion that my life had to be connected with the land. I decided to farm to ensure that I got unadulterated food for myself and my children. We bought a patch of degraded land in Dharmapuri district and my education in complete Swaraj started. I learnt how to conserve soil and water. I learnt to identify the various trees and herbs to grow them in the nursery and plant them on the land, carry water to them and nurture them, to care for animals, and to heal myself with local herbs and homegrown food. As the children came one by one, I decided that I would home school them. They need not wait till the age of 25 to learn swaraj! They could learn as they grew. In fact, I found that each child is capable of self-rule in the way that Gandhiji wanted each human being to have agency over their own lives and serve others around them.
At that time, I did not know about Gandhiji’s Nai Talim. As I observed my children grow, I found that they loved to do whatever I was doing. If I was in the field weeding, they were helping with weeding, asking if they were pulling out the right weeds. If I was watering the garden, they brought water in vessels. When I was collecting firewood, they picked up sticks and took great pride in carrying their bundle on their heads. When I was cooking, they wanted to cut vegetables and make chapatis. For them there was no difference between work and play. They did with joy whatever activity needed to be done. I intuitively felt that my children would learn more directly from observing nature and working (playing) with their hands creating knowledge than from textbooks.
Gradually, as neighbours began sending their children to our home to learn English, and as the school began to take shape, I decided that dignity in labour was the most important lesson I had learnt during my education towards complete swaraj. So, growing our own food, cleaning and maintaining our spaces, caring for animals and birds, became our basic curriculum. All subject learning was integrated into the activity of gardening. Starting with counting plants, measuring the garden area, weighing the produce, measuring the volume of water and the growth of plants, we could do all our math in the garden.
Science was even easier! Soil formation, understanding the minerals, materials, simple machines, tools and tool design, PH of the soil, chemical reactions that create all food, human biology, disease and cure, botany, zoology, study of insects and food chains all was easily integrated and understood through live interaction with the elements. Social science was integration of mapping of the plot of land, of the school, locating all the trees, etc., going to the village to do a survey about what crops were grown 20 years ago, how the transport facility had impacted life in the village, the history of the village and who the first inhabitants were and how it grew; civics was learnt when the children themselves started forming governing bodies and a judiciary to resolve conflicts.
Children learn by observing, and so it is up to us to resolve our conflicts peacefully. They are more forgiving, more considerate, and more compassionate because the adults around them trust the children to make good decisions and be fair. I slowly learnt that for the children who came to Puvidham, I was the role model and so I actually needed to work only on myself to be able to influence and inspire them. And the same applied to all the adults on campus. We began to observe ourselves and correct our behaviour. And the children learnt how to live in such a way as to cause least harm to Mother Earth. My focus was on sustainability and minimalistic living, on creating forests and food so the children imbibed these values.
Nature has created all creatures with a specific place in the cycle of life and death. All microbes, grasses, herbs, bushes, creepers, climbers, shrubs, trees, animals, birds, insects and worms have a function in the food chain and the process of creation of soil and forests to support more life and evolution of life into more stable ecosystems. Humans need to find their purpose in nature. The fact that humans have the ability to observe the various processes and cycles in nature and enhance them through the ability of logical, analytical, and critical thinking to reduce the tendency toward entropy and seek stability and permanence indicates that humans are creative creatures that cannot remain human if they cannot create, or are not able to create, or are not allowed to create.
The contemporary education system is designed to dehumanize and disorient children. They are not allowed to create knowledge. They are expected to swallow it. And they cannot digest it or use it. Parents are made to believe that their children will not have interpersonal skills if they do not go to school. In fact, when children are separated from their parents before five years, they suffer from fear, stress, and frustration. All this amounts to extreme violence and leads to violent behaviour in children. This separation from parents also ensures that the parents are no longer the inspiration. Peers become the attachment and inspiration and therefore there is a lot of dissonance in the child’s character. The child is unable to learn discretion and inculcate wisdom for living a good life by observing its parents. Essentially, the child is lost and ends up following whoever provides the attachment need. While it is true that some parents themselves are clueless about what a good life is and therefore may be unable to provide inspiration for the same to their children, at least the attachment is retained and the child follows the parent instead of being available for manipulation by disruptive forces like advertisements and fascism.
When I came to know about Nai Talim, I was thrilled that common sense had led me to the same conclusions about the education of my children. Children should be with their families and learn whatever trade their families are engaged in and learn to make other products while in the NAI TALIM facility, was Gandhiji’s vision. He said that learning to produce is value added to the child as well as the family, especially in economically challenged situations. He envisioned that all the subjects deemed necessary to learn by the education system prevalent then could be integrated with the various crafts and made relevant to the child while also providing opportunities to create products with their hands, bringing peace within their heart and creating knowledge in their mind!
By this time we had created our own integrated curriculum based on the five elements of Sun, Water, Air, Space, and Earth; SWASE – Breath. We had already included spinning, weaving, stitching uniforms, making our own natural colours, cooking, baking, and carpentry into our activities to build self-reliance.
As Dr. Zakir Hussain said at the second National Basic Education Conference in April 1941, “A work-school is a society working for a common end. In its cooperative pattern of labour, the mistake of one may mar the work of the rest. The quick will not be able to leave the slow behind. It teaches its members how to cooperate in spite of their differences of ability and temperament, it teaches them to accept responsibility for their social duties. But the school, like the individual, must work for something more than itself, or it will merely substitute corporate greed for individual greed. The small society of the school must serve the larger society around it.”
References
https://home.iitk.ac.in/~amman/soc748/sykes_story_of_nai_talim.html
Meenakshi Umesh started Puvidham Learning Centre (www.puvidham.in), based on Gandhi’s Nai Talim after she decided to move to Dharmapuri, a village, from Mumbai. Her move came after she realized that city life was harming her and her children. She can be reached at director.meenakshi@puvidham.in.
