School weathers the storm to continue basic education

Nearly eight decades after its inception,  Vidhya Bhawan Society, one of its kind in Rajasthan, has been braving all odds and continues to impart  basic education to its students. The education scenario has been witnessing a sea change in terms of teaching methods and imparting skills. But this society has weathered all of them and still sticks to the tenets of basic education.

The institute commenced its work nearly a decade and a half before the country gained independence. Its ideals were lofty and was way ahead of times when it began operations in 1931. The oldest society in southern Rajasthan pioneered the cause of secularism and education with equality and the same policies continue even today.

Vidhya Bhawan Society, set up by educationist Mohan Singh Mehta, had started with a small school that offered co-education and was open for all strata of society. The school had deliberately worked for creating space for quality education for children from deprived sections of society by making it affordable.

 It was a radical idea in a conservative society of that time, particularly in the tribal-dominated Mewar region in south Rajasthan.

Another landmark in the history of Vidya Bhawan Society was opening of another school in Udaipur in 1941 that educated children on the idea of Gandhian concept of basic education. Gandhi's idea of education looked for creating space within the school system that did not look at education as only an exercise for mind but education that believed in proper coordination of mind and hand to create a citizen who understood the importance of hand and mind for all productive purposes.

“It wanted to do away with the myth that those educated work with mind and those who work with hand need no mind and those who have mind need not work with hand. It wanted to challenge the structure of  society that created the idea of mind-hand dichotomy to justify the existence of a hierarchical society,” said Principal Sujan Sharma.

In 1941, Vidya Bhawan Basic School, inspired by Gandhi’s philosophy, developed  a curriculum that brought vocational education on a par with so-called formal education. Basic school has been conducting regular vocational classes along with classes on mathematics, language and science. Children in basic school have to attend formal education classes as well as vocational classes as a part of their regular period in the school.

The school continues to have a strength of 400 students and most of them come from nearby villages. The school, which is located on the outskirts of Udaipur,  has not only carried forward the idea of Gandhian education but also through it brought in new dimension in the basic education philosophy.

The school clearly examined the role of vocational training with cognitive development of students. Skills learnt in the trade of carpentry, sewing and agriculture formed basis for building understanding on mathematics, language and science.

Children, through discourses, were taught to use the skills learnt in formal classes in their vocational education and vice versa. This dimension was new to the world of basic education.

Prasoon Kumar, co-ordinator of the education programme of Vidhya Bhawan Society, said: “Post-independence the meaning of quality education slowly got identified with English medium education and it is not easy to swim against the tide. Since Vidya Bhawan  School had originally deviated from an ideal Gandhian school, Gandhi’s idea of a school was embedded in a village; Vidya Bhawan School was in that sense away from village and not a village school.”

The teachers in Vidya Bhawan School are not from a village but from a cadre of regular trained teachers. Over a period of time, these teachers, both by training and by virtue of being a member of a society, looked at vocational education merely as a part of skill-building exercise in students.

Since basic school has been a Hindi medium, it further clouded their ideals. The entire understanding on Gandhian ideal of village school, along with the need to teach children to work with hand, about the fact that working with hand created in children a respect for manual labour lost much of its relevance for the teachers and the parents of children studying in the school.

He said Vidya Bhawan Society made another effort in early 90s to revive the philosophy of basic education; it still continues to do it by building a discourse on the need to reinterpret the philosophy of basic education and look at it with mainstream education.

Against all these odds that even society at large did not see relevance in teaching children working with hand as they saw mushrooming of schools that focused on creating a work force for white-collar jobs. The challenge for philosophy of basic education is to find space for it in the mainstream education, added Prasoon.