I went to see the latest rave film ‘Lage Raho Munna Bhai’ just after the Mahatma’s birth anniversary. The film is a very enjoyable comedy woven around the Mahatma’s philosophy of Ahimsa.  I got home from the Cinema in time to see various politicians on TV praising the Mahatma and as usual pledging to be guided by the his principles - Something they have singularly failed to do ….

 

In education we have entirely ignored Gandhi’s teachings. Gandhi wanted to free education from interference from the government and state bureaucracies. The Mahatma valued self-sufficiency and autonomy, and the more financially independent the schools were, the more politically independent they could be. He argued that for a poor country like India schools should generate their own resources, and they would do this by having sellable handicrafts at the centre of their curricula. 

 

Gandhi believed in the freedom of the teachers in the matter of curriculum. He was against the idea of the teacher having a prescribed job based on what the authorities wanted the children to learn, and he was against proscribed textbooks, because a teacher who taught from a textbook did not “impart originality to his pupils”. What teachers taught and what they did should not be influenced by the state, but by the village, and their own intellect and conscience.

 

In other ways Gandhi wanted radical changes from what is common in education today.  Though he was the product of western education in English he did wanted education to be in English but in the vernacular, and he was very concerned with the influence that Western ideologies had over India. He argued that the materialistic values of the British had to be replaced with the values of ancient Indian civilization with its perceived emphasis on village communities that were self-sufficient and self-governing.

 

He opined that many people have no idea what education truly was and that under the British we had been indoctrinated to seek “only such education as would enable the student to earn more”. Long before today’s consume all society, Gandhi was arguing that education had been turned into a commodity and that “we assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market”.

 

Later in his life Gandhi was to declare that “real freedom will come only when we free ourselves of the domination of western education, western culture and western way of living which have been ingrained in us …….. Emancipation from this culture would mean real freedom for us”.

 

The irony of all this is that today, as India clings to it’s centralized, text book, employment opportunity driven education, Britain and the west have moved towards many of Gandhi’s teachings.

 

In the west there has been a major move to teaching and learning in the vernacular,  Proscribed text books have been consigned to the dustbin, local authorities, schools, and teachers  have been given far more autonomy over what is taught, and education is not seen simply as a ticket for careers…  

 

Politicians being guided by Gandhi’s principles? That would be good news for all of us - but given the politician’s record over the last 60 years, the consumer classes need not get too concerned.