March 22, 2021 | Reflections
There has been a welcome rise in the exploration of environmental justice by STS scholars. Some scholars from other academic traditions, like environmental history and human geography, have pointed out the apparent lack of engagement with other eco-spiritual traditions which may offer alternative approaches towards sustainability and environmental justice. In this post, Sujit Sinha from Azim Premji University (India) offers an introduction to Nai Taleem (New Education), a model of education developed by Mahatma Gandhi. This post will encourage STS scholars from Asia (and beyond) to engage with regional traditions of environmental justice, so as to contribute towards a global environmental justice movement.
Gandhi’s education “Nai Taleem” originally formulated in 1937 and embellished by him subsequently can be stated as “Education through Productive Work for Swaraj”. Education according to Gandhi was the balanced development of the head, hand and heart. In other words it was the balanced development of intellectual, physical and spiritual-emotional. And what is the purpose of this Education? It is to attain Swaraj which means “rule over oneself”. Today one can say that according to Gandhian principles this is possible only in “just equitable, self-sufficient, self- governing, eco-sustainable, non-exploiting, rural and urban communities”. This automatically implies frugal living as exemplified by the well-known Gandhi quote “there is sufficiency in the world for man’s needs but not for man’s greed”. This also implies localized economy, appropriate technology and local self-government. This is the complete reverse of industrialism which has captured the whole world and is rushing towards catastrophic collapse like a madly rushing horse.
Gandhi’s pedagogy for such an “Education for Swaraj” was productive work which can be stated as hands on activities and socio-political engagement to solve real life problems of self, family, community, and the local region and learning all subjects through these activities and engagements. Let us see a few examples of what this Nai Taleem means in terms of Sustainability Education today.
Gandhi would have approved wholeheartedly an idea proposed by Aldous Huxley in 1962 in his last and utopian novel “Island” that Ecology lessons should be introduced as soon as a child has learnt multiplication and division. So from the elementary school onward, students and teachers should be spending a lot of time in the woods, fields, ponds, streams, in the village or town. Along with observation and documenting, he would have added suitable hands-on work in each location. In most parts of the world there has been so much degradation and pollution, that one should be able to design all kinds of practical work which different age groups can do, from middle school until college level.
Today one of the biggest crisis for humanity is the loss of Biodiversity. Barring a few exceptions, the making of People’s Biodiversity Registers (PBR) is either a non-starter or made by some “experts” defeating its very purpose. Students as part of their formal studies should tap into the knowledge of elders, forest dwellers, fishermen, pastoralists, healers, informal urban workers etc., and put it all together with formal knowledge which already exists. The Nai Taleem element is that students should be members of the local Biodiversity Committees and should be the main drivers of creating these registers. Based on this study they should come up with actual hands-on actions for the protection and restoration of biological resources along with the local community while also promoting livelihoods for local people.
Water Literacy is an absolute must today. Wipro Earthian, Bangalore did a water literacy program in several thousand schools all over India in collaboration with Centre for Environment Education, Ahmedabad. The Nai Taleem element was that students had to find out the amount of water their school uses, how much for which purpose, where does the water come from, where does the waste water go, what happens to it, the amount of leakage from taps , the quality of the water, the potential for rain water harvesting in the school. This resulted in plugging the water leaks in many schools. And some schools went ahead and built rainwater harvesting systems as an outcome of this study by students and teachers. Such water auditing and follow up actions should become part of school curriculum everywhere.
Energy audit and Waste audit in schools has been promoted by the Green School Program of Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi for many years also resulting in actual positive outcomes. Wipro Earthian also did this work of water and energy audit with many colleges all over India with appropriate level of sophistication. The challenge today is to come up with age-appropriate productive work for the above mentioned themes for different levels — middle school, high school, and college level; and then link those activities with the science concepts which are taught at those levels.
Some of the Sustainability themes for College level could be: Chemistry should involve measurement of different kinds of pollution of soil, water, air, food; Physics and Engineering in coming up with energy planning of local towns and villages including setting up of renewable energy systems; Bio-science and Agriculture involved in planning and implementing the shifting away from chemical to ecological agriculture in their local areas, doing water audit, building appropriate watershed structures; Geo-Sciences in producing proper local soil, water, land use maps, and coming up with sustainable plans for land and water.
The concepts of Planetary Boundaries and Ecological Footprint are fairly known today among environmental activists. It is high time that they became compulsory for all high school and college students from middle school onwards. They should be able to calculate their own ecological footprint, their family’s ecological footprint. At college level they should be able to calculate the community’s ecological footprint. The Nai Taleem element is that students should be part of local communities and local govt’s development planning where they can bring in this knowledge to envision a locality which is frugal ( practices the 4Rs—reduce, reuse, recycle, restore) and prosperous. And there is not much time left to do this. Let us have a million Greta Thunbergs.
Sujit Sinha teaches at Azim Premji University (Bengaluru, India). He is also the founder of Swanirwar, an NGO working in the area of rural development in West Bengal since 1986. Sujit began his career as a high school teacher at the Ramakrishna Mission School in Arunachal Pradesh and then spent a couple of years at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey as a post-doctoral fellow. He has a Masters degree from IIT Kanpur and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton University.
Image Courtesy: Sumita Roy Dutta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Published: 03/22/2021