EDUCATION/ RE-EDUCATION / REVALUATION OF VALUES

 

Problem:   Alienation from others caused by the educational process. Education which merely fosters maximum gathering of information and competence. Education which is based on an antagonistic spirit of competition. Education which fosters a random, casual, egotistic, happy-go-lucky approach to civic realities and responsibilities.

 

Nonviolence is something which has to be instilled in us by careful and thoughtful education. Gandhian education — as practiced in the various schools and colleges founded by Mahatma Gandhi since the 1920s — develops three aspects of the individual: the mind, the heart, and the skill to use one’s hands. The child knows with his mind, loves with his heart, and creates with his hands. Unless we provide outlets for all three and training in all three areas, the child has a lopsided education.

The competitiveness which pervades most Western and Asian schools is excessive. Reacting against this, Gandhi said that unless and until we learn to get away from that spirit of competition and create a dynamic and cooperative spirit, we are not educating others or ourselves in the best sense of the term. If anything, contemporary American education is even more narrowly professional and specialization-oriented than British and Indian schools in Gandhi’s time, and it is clear that Gandhi did not approve of such an approach.

Children in Gandhian schools don’t accumulate learning as many people accumulate assets or riches — they don’t learn for the purpose of being first or winning a competition, at the expense of others. Rather than being acquisitive/competitive, Gandhian education is cooperative. It prepares the individual to fit into a non-exploitative social structure. While it endorses the development of intellectual abilities, Gandhian education agrees with Albert Schweitzer that love is the supreme knowledge, and views as the highest value the creation of a non-exploitive and loving framework of relationships with others.

Also, whereas the mainstream culture is markedly argument-oriented in its teaching and fostering of opinionated debate and polemics, the Gandhian strategy requires that we do not espouse such an adversarial practice, but rather foster agreement-oriented dialogue, conducive to the establishment of harmony. Beyond a clear and frank initial statement or acknowledgement of differences, all the energies of those engaged in dialogue should go toward solving or overcoming these differences, rather than harping exclusively on the originally perceived divergence.

Gandhian “Basic Education” (or “New Education”— Nai talim) fosters self-sufficiency. With that aim in mind, students do their own laundry, work in the kitchen, sweep and scrub, practice gardening, weaving, pottery, carpentry — as well as learn the three R’s (чтение, письмо, арифметика) and acquire knowledge of essential academic subjects. In summation, “Basic Education” is: 1) child-centered or learner-centered; 2) dynamic; 3) cooperative; 4) nonviolent; 5) geared toward acquisition of self-sufficiency.

Education is given to children for definite and specific purposes, but as adults we have to continue training and educating ourselves. Part of that training could be the fostering of the specific disciplines which Richard Gregg advocates in The Power of Nonviolence — the practice of reading and discussion; silent meditation; manual work (aimed at developing Gandhian self-reliance); music and group singing (a category under which we could foster the “freedom songs” of current times); the systematic practice of nonviolence in small, everyday matters; the cultivation of sentiments which lead to nonviolence (tolerance, patience, humility, love of truth, love of people, faith in the ultimate possibilities of human nature). Martin Luther King also felt strongly about the need for us to undertake a revaluation of values or a reconditioning of our minds and hearts in the light of a commitment to love and nonviolence.

From a Gandhian viewpoint, education is a benefit to which all should have access — and in this realm as well, sharing with the destitute (that cardinal precept of Gandhian ethics) applies. Those who are “destitute” (Gandhi’s term) or “disadvantaged” (King’s term) are referred to as “the oppressed” by the contemporary theoretician of education Paulo Freire. For Freire, “the oppressed” are those who are subjected to repressive or violent treatment — including repressive or non-liberating pedagogical approaches. What Freire refers to as an authentic or liberating type of education is in effect what Gandhi advocated — nonviolent education. For Freire non-repressive or liberating education is dialogue oriented, is education as the practice of freedom — as opposed to education as the practice of domination and violence.

The comradeship or communion with the oppressed which Freire advocates in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is akin to Gandhian identification with the destitute. When Freire says that true solidarity the oppressed — or “conversion to the people” or “committing oneself to the people” — is achieved only in an act of love toward them, he is expressing a feeling that is central to Gandhi’s approach. According to Gandhi, such solidarity with the oppressed and destitute needs to be practiced in every sphere of action, including education.

All of these endeavors should be viewed as necessary components of an integrated and efficient training in nonviolence — of a training in the Law of Love. A fair measure of training along these lines is essential if we want to achieve the extent of personal and societal transformation required of us today for our world to achieve greater sanity, and to ensure our survival.

In the mainstream of day-to-day living within just about any context or country, there has been and is an overwhelming tendency for individuals and groups not to see their own faults and to blame others. Training in nonviolence means training in countering this tendency, training in achieving understanding of mutual diverse positions, and training in solving conflict. As has been pointed out in a contemporary formulation of the nonviolent approach such as the message of the Beyond War movement, if we are to survive, then a complete reorientation of our psychic energies is necessary to enable a continuing, global process of education and re-education. This would be the most monumental educational endeavor ever undertaken by the human species.

 

Solution:   Foster humane and balanced teaching. Develop mind and heart and skill in using our hands. Teach youngsters and other learners to think logically, ask questions, criticize, and recognize untruth. Re-educate and retrain ourselves. Develop intentional, systematic training in nonviolence, based on Gandhian practices. Practice shared responsibility training.

 

I would develop in the child his hands, his brain, and his soul. The hands have almost atrophied. The soul has been altogether ignored.

— Gandhi

 

 

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