Doing, Not Idle Thinking – Mahatma Gandhi

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar, Professor, Editor and Linguist

Gandhi International Study and Research Institute, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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Doing, Not Idle Thinking – Mahatma Gandhi

 

Dr. G. S. Arundale sends me an advance copy of an article he has written for the Orient Illustrated Weekly with the following covering letter: You have expressed a wish that education should now begin to be real in this country and not artificial as it has been for so many years. As one who has been active in education in India for more than thirty years, I send you an article which is appearing in the Orient Illustrated Weekly. Maybe it represents in some degree your own views. I do feel that there should be a national scheme of education which every National Minister will do his best to express in his particular Province. There has been a good deal of independent tinkering. I feel it is urgent that the note of the great principles should be sounded without delay so that there may be a common bond and a common effort in which public and Government alike shall join. I take from the article the most important and relevant extracts. After dealing with the question of how to proceed, he says: I have no space here to suggest the nature of the principles which should underlie national education.

But at least so far as both boys and girls are concerned in the school sphere I hope we shall gradually eliminate the absurd distinctions of ‘school’ and ‘college’ the note throughout must be that of Doing. However much thought may be stimulated, it is valueless save as it mellows into Doing. The same may be said as regards the emotions and feelings, so dangerously neglected in most modern systems of education. India needs her youth to be workers workers whose character is such developed through education that it naturally becomes translated into work, into practical capacity, into service. India needs young citizens who can do well in whatever department of life to which they may be called by environment and by heredity. Every subject of the curriculum is to the end of right living. Every subject discloses the Law, the Order and the Purpose of Life. Teachers must never forget this as they tend to grow submerged in the hardness of so-called facts. They should remember that in the world of our intelligence there are no facts, but only conventions. It was well said by Sir Arthur Eddington that science has taken the great step forward of moving from certainty to doubt. Our education must, therefore, cause all its ‘facts’ to rest lightly in the minds of its pupils, and use them beyond all else for the development of that character which is the only safe foundation both for individuals and for nations. And once character stirs, the desire to do will intensify, in the directions both of self-support and of self-sacrifice.

There will arise the desire to draw as close as possible to the Earth our Mother, to worship her in the ritual of agriculture, and to become as little as may be of a burden to her by simplicity of need and purity of desire. Indeed, I hold that no child of Mother Earth should be unable to draw from her some direct sustenance, and I would have as part of all education some measure of direct contact with her, even in town educational institutions. We must tear ourselves radically away from those educational conventions which have made education so largely futile today. We must begin, under the existing favourable auspices of the national ministries, a system of real education which is not instruction. We have become imprisoned in the ruts and grooves of out-of-date educational forms and fetishes, and I heartily welcome Gandhiji’s adumbration of an education which is self supporting. I am not quite sure if we shall be able to go quite as far as he suggests. I entirely agree that a young citizen after finishing a seven years’ course “should be discharged as an earning unit”. I myself feel that everyone should, partly through education, become conscious of his creative capacity, for he is a god in the becoming and therefore possesses the supreme attribute of God—the power to create, to do. If this power be not awakened, of what use education? Then indeed is it instruction and not education. There is as much brain in the hand as there is in the head. For long the intellect in the head has been our God. Intellect has been our tyrant, our dictator.

Under the new dispensation it must be one among our many servants, and we must learn to exalt all that makes for simple living, that draws us near to the beautiful simplicities of nature, all that helps me to live with my hands manual work of all kinds, of the artist, of the artisan, of the agriculturist. I know I should have lived a happier and more effective life had I so been educated. What I have been saying as a layman, for the lay reader, Dr. Arundale has said as an educationist, for the educationist, and those who have in their charge the moulding of the youth of the country. I am not surprised at the caution with which he approaches the idea of self-supporting education. For me it is the crux. My one regret is that what I have seen through the glass darkly for the past 40 years I have begun to see no quite clearly under the stress of circumstances. Having spoken strongly in 1920 against the present system of education, and having now got the opportunity of influencing, however little it may be, Ministers in seven Provinces, who have been fellow-workers and fellow-sufferers in the glorious struggle for freedom of the country, I have felt an irresistible call to make good the charge that the present mode of education is radically wrong from bottom to top. And what I have been struggling to express in these columns very inadequately has come upon me like a flash, and the truth of it is daily growing upon me. I do, therefore, venture to ask the educationists of the country, who have no axes to grind, and who have an open mind, to study the two propositions that I have laid down, without allowing their preconceived and settled notions about the existing mode of education to interfere with the free flow of their reason.

I would urge them not to allow my utter ignorance of education, in its technical and orthodox sense, to prejudice them against what I have been saying and writing. Wisdom, it is said, often comes from the mouths of babes and sucklings. It may be a poetic exaggeration, but there is no doubt that sometimes it does come through babes. Experts polish it and give it a scientific shape. I therefore ask for an examination of my propositions purely on merits. Let me restate them here, not as I have previously laid them down in these columns, but in the language that occurs to me as I am dictating these lines: 1. Primary education, extending over a period of 7 years or longer, and covering all the subjects up to the matriculation standard, except English, plus a vocation used as the vehicle for drawing out the minds of boys and girls in all departments of knowledge, should take the place of what passes today under the name of Primary, Middle and High School Education. 2. Such education, taken as a whole, can, and must be, self-supporting; in fact self-support is the acid test of its reality.

 

Reference:

Harijan, 2-10-1937