The Vice President of India has said that the New Education Policy follows the ‘Nai Talim’ of Mahatma Gandhi by giving importance to the mother tongue as the medium of instruction at the school level.

What is Nai Talim?

• The phrase Nai Talim is a combination of two words- Nai Means ‘New’ and Talim – a Urdu word-means ‘Education’.
• In 1937, Gandhiji introduced the concept of Nai Talim in India. It aimed to achieve Gram Swaraj (liberation of villages).
• In short, Gandhiji dreamed to make all villages independent; and self-reliant.
• It is an approach to the total personality development of body, mind and spirit and was based on four principles namely:

1. Education or learning in mother tongue along with handicraft work,
2. Work should be linked with most useful vocational needs of the locality,
3. Learning should be linked with vocational work, and
4. Work should be socially useful and productive needed for living.

Gandhiji and Education

• Gandhi’s first experiments in education began at the Tolstoy Farm ashram in South Africa.
• It was much later, while living at Sevagram (Wardha) and in the heat of the Independence struggle, that Gandhi wrote his influential article in Harijan about education.
• In it, he mapped out the basic pedagogy (or teaching) with focus on:

1. Lifelong character of education,
2. Social character and
3. A holistic process

• Thus, for Gandhi, education is ‘the moral development of the person’, a process that is by definition ‘lifelong’.
• He believed the importance of role of teacher in the learning process.

Try this PYQ from CSP 2020:

 

Q. One common agreement between Gandhism and Marxism is

(a) The final goal of a stateless society

(b) Class struggle

(c) Abolition of private property

(d) Economic determinism

 

 

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