Gandhi’s educational plan, Sevagram’s ‘Basic Education’ became an inspiration for children and showed his concern for the practical needs of masses. The two teachers who helped Gandhiii in his endeavor were previously associated with Tagore’s Indian Centre for International Education at Shantiniketan.
Tagore’s philosophy of a complete life has endorsed him linking up vocational training with mental development leading towards a broad-based culture seeking to unite the mankind.
Gandhi seems to have gone a step further than Tagore in revolutionizing his educational concepts. His interest in education did not radiate from a passion for art or literature, but from his general concern as a human being for the millions of villagers. Further, Gandhiji’s objective was, in a fundamental sense, directly ‘political’ rather than ‘cultural’. He began creating the conditions under which a sense of political responsibility could emerge.
In the Sevagram Plan, which originated for children between seven and fourteen years of age, each pupil became a productive unit in his own village, learning, reading, writing, arithmetic and history, while actively serving the need of the community This meant developing a special sense of regional responsibility, which led to vitalized methods of instruction.
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Girls and boys learnt to spin and weave cotton into cloth, adding considerably to the family income. A sense of self-reliance develops apace with a sense of responsibility too, for the children feel that they can, if necessary support them on a small plot of land without recourse to external aid.
Gandhiji’s education was designed to make each student a self-producing unit in the village with the economic sphere. His system ran parallel to America’s approach of education through practical work. Gandhiji was more concerned with the present than with the past or future.
He was a practical personality. He believed that one must first be devoted to his people and through this he should cultivate sense of national responsibility everyone happened to be a child of the society and in fact, owes a considerable debt to the society, he believed.