Practicality of Gandhi’s vision of “education through the hands” today

“The old idea was… the craft was to be taken in hand wholy separately from education. To me, that seems a fatal mistake… The brain should be educated through the hands. Why should you think that the mind is everything and the hands and the feet are nothing?” Mahatma Gandhi said while addressing the teachers gathered in Wardha for a three week training program in February 1939¹. Is this still relevant today? Let’s explore.

Gandhi illustrated his point through the example of hand spinning. He said, “Take the instance of hand-spinning. Unless I know arithmetic, I cannot report how many yards of yarn I have produced on the takli… Take geometry next. What can be a better demonstration than the disc of the takli? I can teach all about the circle in this manner, without even mentioning the name of Euclid.” He said one could teach history through the history of cotton.

Gandhi’s address is more than 70 years old. So let’s first check if the basic claim still holds according to the state-of-the-art research. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman writes in his best seller Thinking, fast and slow, “As cognitive scientists have emphasized in recent years, cognition is embodied; you think with your body, not only with your brain².” For example, when you hold a warm cup of tea, you are more likely to think that the other person at the table is trustworthy after only a brief interaction. So looks like the basic claim still holds.

I feel that a more general principle underlying this vision is related to experiential learning. How do you create opportunities for students to experience the new concept through the body? In my lecture on introduction to design thinking at IIMB last week, each student re-designed a wallet for his/her partner. At the end, everybody prototyped their best idea using craft paper and got it validated from the partner. When students are learning about empathy, they actually interview shopkeeprs, people on the street or whoever is relevant to the topic. Case study method is another form of creating an experience, though it is somewhat weaker than “doing by hand” method.

What about literature? How do you create an experience? One low-cost medium is theatre. When you enact a literary piece, you are creating experiences especially for the participants. However, I am sure there are topics for which it may not be easy to create experiences, say for example, wave functions in Quantum Mechanics?

Gandhi held a strong view on this. He said in the same Wardha address, “I have said that all instruction must be linked with some basic craft. When you are imparting knowledge to a child of 7 or 10 through the medium of an industry, you should, to begin with, exclude all those subjects which cannot be linked with the craft. By doing so from day to day you will discover ways and means of linking with the craft many things which you had excluded in the beginning.” I feel that such exclusion is neither necessary nor practical.

For me the key take-away is this. For every concept that is being taught, I ask, “How can I create an opportunity for the student to experience the concept?”

Source:

1.     Gandhi’s address in Wardha is available online here. Also in “Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi” by D. G. Tendulkar, Volume 5 (1938-1940), The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt of India, pages 41-43.

2.     Kahneman’s statement is in “Thinking, fast and slow”, page 51.

3.    Photo source: www.mkgandhi.org

Related blog: Your hand is wiser than your head ever gonna be, August 11, 2012

Story of Gandhi’s 1920 Charkha challenge: A critical look

Vinoba Bhave carried an experiment for a year in 1916 in Nalwadi, Wardha to check the earning productivity of charkha spinning¹. He concluded that the maximum earning per day of a person cannot be more than two annas. Gandhi realized that this had to be significantly more. Hence, he announced an open challenge to design an improved charkha in 1920. How was the response to this challenge? What kind of ideas came? What was the outcome? To study this, I spent some time going through the Young India issues of 1920 at the archive section of Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad last July. In this article I will summarize the story first and then review the process of managing the challenge based on the 4 parameters Prof. Karl Ulrich of Wharton School has articulated in the book “Innovation tournament”.

Gandhi’s 3rd class railway travel during 1915 and 1917

“I have been in India for over two years and a half after my return from South Africa. Over one quarter of that time I have passed on Indian trains travelling 3^rd class by choice,” wrote Gandhi in his long letter to the editor of The Leader of Allahabad written from Ranchi on Sept 25, 1917. He travelled across the length and breadth of India - from Lahore to Madras and from Karachi to Calcutta. What was his 3^rd class travel experience like? Following excerpts from the book Mahatma Gandhi and the railways by Dr. Y. P. Anand gives a clue. Note that none of his peers, Jinnah, Motilal Nehru or even Gokhale dared to travel 3^rd class that time.

Indescribable filth: We do not know the elementary laws of cleanliness. We spit anywhere on the carriage floor, irrespective of the thought that it is often used as it; the result is indescribable filth in the compartment.

Getting roasted: Sometimes the compartments had no lights. From Saharanpur we were huddled into carriages for goods or cattle. These had no roofs, and what with the blazing midday sun overhead and the scorching iron floor beneath, we were all but roasted.

Ticket booking: (At Burdwan) As soon as the ticket window opened, I went to purchase the tickets. But it was no easy thing to get them. Might was right, and passengers who were forward and indifferent to others, coming one after another, continued to push me out. I was therefore about the last of the first crowd to get a ticket.

Getting shoved in from a window: My bitterest experience was from Lahore to Delhi. It was impossible to find a place in the train. It was full, and those who could get in did so by sheer force, often sneaking through windows if the doors were locked… I had almost given up when a porter discovering my plight said, “Give me twelve annas and I’ll get you a seat.” “Yes,” said I. The young man went from carriage to carriage entreating passengers but no one heeded him. As the train was about to start, some passengers said, “There is no room here, but you can shove him in if you like. He will have to stand…” I readily agreed and he shoved me in bodily through the window. Thus I got in and the porter earned his twelve annas.

Gandhi concludes, “Is it any wonder that plague has become endemic in India. Any other result is impossible where passengers always leave some dirt where they go and take more on leaving.”

I will be traveling III AC from Bangalore to Kolhapur by Rani Chennamma this weekend. I booked my tickets over the Internet. My compartment will be, in all likelihood, clean and it will be cleaned again at Hubli. Is there any chance of me understanding the plight of the man traveling in unreserved compartments? It is not surprising that Motilal Nehru couldn’t even understand the power of “salt march”. His telegram to Gandhi said, “What will lifting a pinch of salt do?”

Mahatma Gandhi and Right to Experiment (RTE)

Mahatma Gandhi was a master experimenter. However, when we ask, “How good was he in building experimentation capacity?” the answer isn’t so obvious. To begin the exploration, it makes sense to start with the basic requirement of building experimentation capacity – Right to Experiment (RTE). It is about giving permission to others to perform experiments.

Why is right to experiment important? Experimentation is at the heart of innovation. If you want to foster a culture of innovation, you would need more people come up with ideas and the perform experiments to test various assumptions associated with the ideas. How did Gandhi view this in his Ashram? Let’s start with his first Ashram – Tolstoy Farm in South Africa.

Tolstoy Farm operated under strict rules. What to eat and what not to eat, what mode of transport to use to go outside the farm, what time to sleep etc. was already decided. The rule was that if are traveling outside the commune for an errand or shopping trip for the commune then you could travel by train, third class. However, if you are going out for personal reason, it had to be walking. Gandhi still had legal cases and used to walk 21 miles to visit Johannesburg.

In one incident a young man made fun of two girls at Tolstoy Farm. Gandhi ‘as a warning to every young man’ cut long hair of the two girls. Manilal, Gandhi’s son, was already a teenager. He hadn’t undergone any formal education. And he wasn’t permitted to either. In fact, in a letter written to Manilal from a prison in South Africa, Gandhi justifies his position. Gandhi writes, “I know too that you have sometimes felt that your education was being neglected. … I have been reading Emerson, Ruskin and Mazzini. I have also been reading the Upanishads. All confirm the view that education does not mean a knowledge of letters but it means character building”. Note that the person preaching this is himself educated in England. In the words of Gandhi’s biographer Louis Fischer, the letter effectively said, “Your life remains tied to mine; you cannot go your own way.” Manilal, in fact, wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor. In short, you had little scope of experimentation if you were at Tolstoy Farm. Gandhi was by then 40 years old.

Fast forward a decade and now Gandhi and his followers are living at Sabarmati Ashram. Gandhi writes about his wife Kasturbai, “Ba takes tea in spite of the fact that she lives with me. She also takes coffee. I would even lovingly prepare it for her.” So looks like there is some change in the attitude. Maganlal Gandhi was running a laboratory performing khadi experiments at the Ashram and reporting his findings at Young India newsletter. In fact, an open challenge was announced in 1919 for “the spinning wheel capable of turning out yarn five times the quantity turned by the common wheel”. The winner was to get Mr Rewashanker Jhaveri’s prize of Rs. 5000. Six entries were received from places like Baroda, Sialkot, Beneras etc.

Fast forward a couple of more decades and now the khadi movement had evolved into All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA). On December 30, 1938, Gandhi went to Wardha to inaugurate Magan Museum. Apart from khadi-related models, the exhibits included miniature models of various types of oil presses and contraptions used in paper making and oil-pressing and leather tanning industries. Gandhi said, “I would like you to regard the Magan Museum and the Udyog Bhawan not as the old curiosity shop, but as a living book for self-education and study”.

Looks like Gandhi’s view on RTE evolved. It started with no RTE at Tolstoy Farm to a couple of selected disciples experimenting at Sabarmati to a group experimenting at AIVIA. However, it never became his forte. I haven’t come across his concern that not enough people at his Ashram or in India are experimenting. But I could be wrong. Perhaps it is difficult to excel as a solver and a capacity builder at the same time. What do you think?

Sources:

Louis Fischer, The life of Mahatma Gandhi, HarperCollins, 2009.

D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of M K Gandhi, volume 5 1938-1940, Govt of India.

Gandhi with microscope photo from wikipedia.org.

Maganlal Gandhi: Mahatma Gandhi’s innovation partner

"He [Maganlal] was, in my opinion, a genius... He laid the foundation of the science of Khadi by writing his Vanat Shastra” said Mahatma Gandhi at the inaugural ceremony of Magan Museum of Khadi (pdf) at Wardha on Dec 30, 1938². Ever since I read this, I became curious about Maganlal Gandhi. Where did Maganlal learn the science of khadi? Was this science backed up by rigorous experiments? If so, where did Maganlal perform those experiments? I wanted to find out. Finally, I got a peek into the story when my friend Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan connected me to Prof. Shambu Prasad of XIMB Bhubaneswar. Shambu has done extensive research on science of Gandhi. I found answers to some of my questions in an excellent article written by Shambu “Gandhi and Maganlal: Khadi science and the Gandhian scientist”. Here is a short summary.

Maganlal Khushalchand Gandhi (1883-1928) was Gandhi’s nephew (a grandson of his uncle) and 19 years younger to him. Maganlal met Gandhi in 1902, two days before Gandhi was to leave for South Africa. Maganlal was then on the lookout for a job in his native Kathiawar. Gandhi asked Maganlal to come to South Africa offering it as a land of opportunities with ample scope for growth. Maganlal was immediately put into business and was running a family shop of the Gandhis. When Gandhi quit his practice and decided to set-up a farm and take to farming as an occupation, Maganlal was the first to join him unconditionally knowing it involves self-imposed poverty.

In a short time, Maganlal picked up several skills at Phoenix Farm - composing and running the machines in the press, farming, carpentry and tailoring, keeping accounts of the settlement and teaching the children Gujarati and Mathematics. It was Maganlal who suggested the name Sadagraha to Gandhiji when he solicited a better term for “passive resistance” in the local newspaper Indian Opinion. Gandhi later modified Sadagraha to Satyagraha.

Later in India, Maganlal set-up and ran the khadi laboratory at Sabarmati Ashram as he was the head of the Technical Department of the All India Khadi Board (later the All India Spinners Association). Maganlal traveled to Madras Presidency to learn the art. The technical department of the Ashram, tested several samples of yarn (over 300 every month) and gave feedback to the Provincial Congress Committees. These results were widely reported regularly in Young India and Navjivan. As a resource centre in the field of khadi the Ashram used to send its staff, spindles, specimens of yarn, and charts explaining the effect of the wheel to exhibitions all over the country. Gandhi relied on Maganlal to test the various machines and always wanted Maganlal’s opinion on technical developments whether it was Mirabehn’s discovery of the soft spindle, Shankarlal’s Gandiva spinning wheel or the Ramachandra lift pump.

In 1922, a ‘Khaddar Information Bureau’ was constituted to provide or collect information on khadi from the provinces, to inform congress committees and selected workers on reports from the centres. Maganlal edited its ‘Khadi Bulletin’. A syllabus was formulated in 1923 for the weaving school with a regular six-month course. A khaddar service scheme was also instituted under which 600 instructors were to be trained in home carding.

Maganlal passed away while at work in Bihar due to typhoid on April 23, 1928, at the peak of his life and that of the khadi movement. In a moving tribute, titled ‘My Best Comrade Gone’ Gandhi remarked that: ‘The world knows so little of how much my so-called greatness depends upon the incessant toil and drudgery of silent, devoted, able and pure workers, men as well as women. And among them all Maganlal was to me the greatest, the best and the purest.’

Source:

1. Gandhi and Maganlal: Khadi science and the Gandhian scientist” by Shambu Prasad, Presented at the Seminar ‘Gandhi and his Contemporaries’ held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, April 13-15, 1999

2. “Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Gandhi” by D. G. Tendulkar, volume 5, page 6.

3. Maganlal’s photo is from "Magan Nivas" at Sabarmati Ashram.

Gandhi’s failed self-help experiment at Shantiniketan: a lesson in culture-unfriendly intervention

Every organization has a unique culture and any act to bring about a sustainable change needs to be sensitive to the existing culture. Gandhi, in 1915, either didn’t understand this yet or he hadn’t fully internalized it. Gandhi had a four day visit to Shantiniketan in February 1915 a month after his arrival in India. During this visit he conducted a self-help experiment with all the students and teachers. Like his visit, the impact of the experiment was short-lived. What was the experiment? And why did it fail? Let’s explore it here.

In 1904, Gandhi had established an Ashram in South Africa in a town called Phoenix about 14 miles from Durban. In 1915, when Gandhi returned to India many of his Phoenix Farm associates followed him as well. It so happened that the Phoenix party arrived before Gandhi arrived and found a home in Shantiniketan. After visiting Gokhale in Pune and meeting relatives in Rajkot and Porbandar, Gandhi proceeded to Shantiniketan.

The phoenix family had been assigned a separate quarters at Shantiniketan. Maganlal Gandhi, Gandhi’s close associate in Phoenix Farm, was their head, and he had made it his business to see that all the rules of the Phoenix Ashram should be scrupulously observed. Among Gandhi’s friends Andrews and Pearson were also present.

Soon after his arrival Gandhi mixed with the teachers and students and engaged them in a discussion on self-help. He suggested to the teachers that, if they and the boys dispensed with the services of paid cooks and cooked their food themselves, it would enable the teachers to control the kitchen from the point of view of the boys’ physical and moral health. Also it would give lessons on self-help to the students. Some nodded their head tentatively, some appeared more enthusiastic. Gandhi invited Rabindranath to give his opinion. He said he didn’t mind it provided the teachers were favorable. To the boys, he said, “The experiment contains the key to Swaraj”.

Thus started an experiment involving the entire community of 125 boys and their teachers. Boys were running the kitchen, handling the garbage, cleaning the latrine, sweeping the ground and as Gandhi’s biographer Louis Fischer puts it, “forsaking the muse for the monk”. Pearson was looking after the cooking part and Nagenbabu was looking after the sanitary cleaning. It was difficult for the students. Some began to show early fatigue. Cleaning of vessels was especially tedious. A group of students played sitar next to the kitchen so as to make the task feel less cumbersome.

Gandhi had to leave Shantiniketan abruptly to attend Gokhale’s funeral. And the experiment was stopped after some time. As Gandhi notes in his autobiography, “I am of the opinion that the famous institution lost nothing by having conducted the experiment for a brief interval, and some of the experiences gained could not but be of help to the teachers.”

Gandhi and Tagore were united by their love for India and mankind. However, they were very different personalities. In the words of Louis Fischer, “Gandhi was the wheat field and Tagore the rose garden, Gandhi was the working arm and Tagore the singing voice, Gandhi was frugal and Tagore was prodigal”. At Shantiniketan, Tagore’s pupils sang and danced, wove garlands, painted sunrise and made life sweet and beautiful. Gandhi’s experiment essentially turned the place upside down. It is no surprise, it was shortlived. I feel it is a great lesson to understand what culture-unfriendly intervention is like.

Related articles:

Mahatma Gandhi and the heart and soul of systematic innovation

4 types of innovation leaders (Gandhi, Jamsetji Tata, Vikram Sarabhai, George Fernandes)

Sources:

An autobiography, M. K. Gandhi (part V, chapter IV, Shantiniketan)

The life of Mahatma Gandhi, Louis Fischer, HarperCollins

Photo: mkgandhi.org (Gandhi in 1915)

4 types of innovation leaders

Innovation leaders influence innovations and inspire innovators – sometimes for many generations to come. What are the different types of innovation leaders? Let’s look at one such classification: Solvers, surfers, capacity builders and champions.

1. Solver: When Gandhi returned from Africa to India there were many problems he felt drawn to – Lack of vocational education, poverty, discrimination against women, caste system, political struggle. Eventually he focused on only one of them – political freedom. And he attacked the problem in a way that is still inspiring many generations more than half a century after he is gone. Solvers like Gandhi immerse themselves in a difficult problem and are always several steps ahead of their contemporaries in their approach. Other solvers that come to mind are: Muhammad Yunus (Grameen Bank), Baba Amte (Anandwan), James Watt (Steam engine), Thomas Edison (Light bulb), Andrew Wiles (Fermat’s Last Theorem), Steve Wozniak (Apple).

2. Surfer: When ring spindle, a new technology, was brought to the notice of Jamsetji Tata he immediately bought two frames and started experimenting at Empress Mill. Neither any mill in India nor the main supplier from England (Pratt) had thought of adopting the new technology. When Jamsetji encountered a report suggesting possible iron ore deposits in Chamba district, he immediately took a sample to Germany for testing. Surfers are always looking for waves, especially BIG waves. Many times they don’t know where the wave is going to lead them to. Some of my famous surfers include: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, David Grossman (IBM), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Masaru Ibuka (Sony).

3. Capacity builder: When Padmanabh Joshi wrote his PhD thesis – “Vikram Sarabhai: A study on innovative leadership and institution building” from Gujarat University in 1986, the term “innovation” itself wasn’t fashionable let alone “innovation leadership”. And yet he couldn’t have chosen a more apt title for the thesis. Vikram Sarabhai was instrumental in building innovation capacity in India through institutions such as – ATIRA: India’s first textile research cooperative, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), ORG: India’s first market research organization, IIM Ahmedabad. As if this wasn’t enough, Sarabhai architected India’s space program. The secret, according to him, was in establishing a firm foundation: “The early beginnings of any institution are crucial, and the “culture” (or lack of it) brought the first entrants plays a significant role in establishing norms, procedures and practices” he said. Capacity builders work on various elements of the innovation ecosystem. Another of my favorite innovation capacity builders is: A G Lafley (P&G).

4. Champion: George Fernandes took over as railway minister in December 1989. Next month in January, he called for a board meeting at Raj Bhavan, Lucknow. In his talk he mentioned that there were two projects which were uppermost in his mind and they were his dreams for a long time. One was a railway link between Chithoni and Bogha in Bihar crossing the mighty Gankat river and the other was the west coast railway connecting Bombay and Mangalore (later called Konkan railway). Dr. E. Sreedharan attended the meeting as an engineering member from railways. Fernandez told Sreedharan in the meeting, “I will depend on you for realizing these two projects”. Fernandes neither had the technical know-how nor had the resources. But he used his influence with Chief Ministers like Mulayam Singh and Lalu Prasad Yadav and senior ministers like Ramakrishna Hegde and Madhu Dandavate and removed the hurdles for each of the projects. Champions support others’ ideas and help them move forward faster. Other champions I can remember are: the role Einstein played for Satyendra Nath Bose or the role Patrick played for Grossman at IBM.

Sources:

Vikram Sarabhai: A life by Amrita Shah

Story of Konkan Railway of India by E. Sreedharan