|
Mahatma Gandhi came up
with a novel manner of imparting education.
Even though, the
system of education in the country was too nervous to experiment with
his ideas at the national level, in pockets his method, called Nayi
Talim is being followed to yield impressive results.
Two introductions need to
be made. The first one is easy. Meet Mohandas Karamchand Ganghi, the
greatest leader of the twentieth century. The second one is to the
method of teaching as enunciated by him. He called it Nayi Talim,
which literally translated means New Education. As you go through
the ideas that form the basis of Nayi Talim, you realize, Gandhi had
indeed loved and understood children and the learning process.
I will begin my relating
my first encounter with Nayi Talim. I had gone to Kausani. This is a
small quiet hill station in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north-east of
Delhi. The majestic Himalayas as the backdrop and valleys hurling
down as surprises were filled with stories of dynamic enterprising
village women. They had protested against the opening of a liquor
shop at one village. At another they had resisted deforestation. And
the women were as conversant with the written as well as the spoken
word.
The most revealing
encounter was on one of our treks. We met two young women who had
come in the traditional attire including the scarf on their heads.
They also carried with them was carrying some bramble too. With the
spirit of reformation high in city-bred me, I asked them if they were
literate. They said they were not and that they did not see why they
should study. For one hour I explained to them why. At the end of it,
they casually revealed they were doing their Masters in Sociology.
They were home on vacation! Imagine my shock and a feeling of utter
foolishness. Ti took some time to reflect on the fact that all their
education had not alienated them from their roots.
As I followed the source
of such spirit in these women I was led to an uphill climb. No
vehicle went up, you just had to trek it. It went up so many steps
that I felt I would soon reach the heavens, and in a sense I did. I
was at Laxmi Ashram at Kasauni. It was set up in 1946 by Katherine
Helliman, better known in India as Sarla Behn, an ardent follower of
Gandhi. Working with the people while building an awareness for the
fight for independence, Sarla Behn noticed the amount of hardship a
woman from that region underwent. She decided, under Gandhi’s
encouragement and insistence, that this was where an institution
based on Nayi Talim should be set up. Beginning with three students,
Lakshmi Ashram began imparting education to the people along Gandhian
lines. Today the names of some of our major reformers and grass root
workers figure in the school’s alumni.
When we entered the
complex that is spread over many acres of open land, we saw some
students and their teachers preparing a bed for vegetable sowing. One
student, far out across the hill, was out grazing cows. A few others
were in the kitchen making breakfast. Within half hour when we had
gone around the neat but Spartan complex, we came across yet another
student. This time she was with a teacher trying to record the
temperature from a barometer. The diverse activities wee too
distracting to the mind that went to see an ordinary school. So I
sat down to hear and read about Nayi Talim, which was what the school
was all about.
Gandhi, on his return to
India from South Africa, was struck by the failure of the modern
system of education. He argued that beginning with the language in
which children were and continue to be taught, the school syllabus
based on Macaulay’s system, was irrelevant to the country’s
context. After accessing that kind of education, it alienated the
student from his or her motherland and culture. Yet it did not make
him vocationally any worthier. The student community that dominated
the thinker leader’s mind comprised eighty percent of India’s
rural folk.
As he ruminated the
problem in his mind, he decided the way to go about education, true
education, was to give literary training through vocational training.
Quoting Gandhi, I hold that true education of the intellect can only
come through a proper exercise and training of the bodily organs. In
other words, the intelligent use of the bodily organs in a child
provides the best and quickest way of developing his intellect. He
went on to elaborate his idea with the example of a takli. The takli
is the most primitive form of the spinning wheel. It is actually a
tool that must have been fashioned before the discovery of the wheel.
The use of the wheel for spinning came later in history. The initial
taklis could have been fashioned out of clay or wet flour, dried and
a bamboo splinter passed through it. In some parts of Bengal and
Bihar, this kind of tool is spin is still used. Most cloth in India
was made of the takli yarn and the cottage industries still uses it
for finer counts of textiles.
There you are-that was
just Gandhi’s idea. Talk about the takli and you have perforce
to talk of the wheel, science, the coming of mill cloth, the dying
out of taklis, the regional variations of taklis, the areas where
cotton is grown and so on. History, geography, science and arithmetic
are all taught through practical experience.
The education system
should go to the people, should lure them for its value, both
economic and intellectual. He argued that primary education should be
spread across seven years and should contain the entire syllabus that
children study till they leave school. In addition they will pick up
one vocational skill. The takli was an example, it could be anything.
Another quote from Gandhi’s writings would be in order: Then as
to primary education, my confirmed opinion is that the commencement
of training by teaching the alphabet and reading and writing, hampers
their intellectual growth. I would not teach them the alphabet till
they have had an elementary knowledge of history, geography, mental
arithmetic and art. Through these three I should develop their
intelligence. Question may be asked how intelligence can be developed
through the takli or the spinning wheel. It can to a marvelous degree
if it is not taught mechanically. When you tell a child the reason
for each process, when you explain the mechanism of the takli, when
you give him/her 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 the village field where it is grown and teach
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 the yarn, you hold his interest and simultaneously train his eyes,
hands and mind. I should give six months to this preliminary
training. The child is now probably ready for learning how to read
the alphabet and, when he is able to do so rapidly he is ready to
learn simple drawing and when he has learnt to draw geometric figures
and the figures if birds et.., he will draw not scrawl the figures of
the alphabet. I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by
imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning
of learning..
Gradually vocation should
serve a dual process; it should pay for the students course and also
develop his skill. Land, building and equipment are not to be covered
by the student’s labour. All crafts that are widely practiced in
India can be taught with minimal investment. The self supporting
aspect of Gandhi’s New Education formula was in his opinion the
only way to carry education to the crores of children in India
awaiting education.
Higher education should
be left to private enterprises and for meeting national requirements.
The state universities should be purely examining bodies.
So when I looked up and
saw the child returning from grazing the cows, I wondered what she
would have associated with it-different types of greenery, love
towards animals, the food cycle, milk, dairy farming… or the
young women emerging from the kitchen, what would they have learnt
about fire, cooking, nourishment, nutrition, agriculture and the
growth of rice and pulses. A new desire seemed to sprout in me. I
wished I could go back in time and sit amidst nature to learn.
| 
