The Integration of Work and Education

I had earlier reviewed Marjorie Sykes’s The Story of Nai Talim about Gandhi's idea of education which I dismissed with one word: “romantic”!  I said the idea was romantic because the education system started by Gandhi’s failed to survive the economy of post-independent India which is an infant version of our current overtly commercialized capitalism.  Besides, I thought of the possibility of having such a school in the city and considering the kind of space it required, I thought it was practically impossible. 

Now looking back on my argument, I was too focused on the infrastructure aspect and not on the ideology of education.  If we take a good look, there is an integration of work and education at all level, and it cannot be separated.  The only thing absent is that raising the consciousness that the thing that we do everyday involved as many knowledge as available to use, the only thing is we are not aware of the knowledge we use, and we don’t know how to categorize them.

For example, a farmer integrated many knowledge in his day life.  He knows about the season, the rains, the pattern of cloud, how crops grows, what crops will be good in the type of soil, how to tilt his land and what to do with pest.  In other words, he knows botany, holti-culture, geography, language, applied science, etc. 

What we can do about the integration of work and education in our school is that, we don’t need a field where they can grow crops, or rear cattle, all we need is a room where we can store all sorts of things and give the freedom to children to do whatever they want to do with it.  For e.g. in the book “To the principal with love”, the author mentioned that we can collect old and used cycles and cycles part and store them in one room, children should be free to bring their own cycle and repair it, or build a new one from the parts that are available.  They should be allowed to tinkle with it, play with it.  We can do the same for computer parts for those of our children who want to be a computer/ hardware engineer, old (but clean) clothes for those of our children who want to be a designer.