Page 84 - Acharya Vinoba Bhave in 21st Century ISBN

21oha “krkCnh esa vkpk;Z fouksck Hkkos dh izklafxdrk

The second feature of Nai Talim according to Vinoba is that the distinction or conflict between
knowledge gaining and work disappears. Educational activities may appear as learning and may also

be viewed as labour. If knowledge gaining process is not added to the work then it becomes labour.
But if knowledge process is integral to work or labour one need not confuse it with child labour.

However, one should confuse the issue by saying working all through fives knowledge. Physical labour
for all hours of the day, or learning from books and the class room and thirdly having leisure time should

all be combined so that there is no boredom and monotony. The time has to be meaningfully divided to
learn from work, literary learning and learn in leisure.

Addressing the Nai Talim convention in Wardha in 1951 Vinoba introduced Nai Talim as
seed thought and argued that it was not a system. He lamented that the country could not take decision

to adopt Nai Talim as the way of education in the country. Nai Talim was ‘basic’ not in the sense of
it being elementary or primary. Vinoba said, “It means that this is the foundation, the base upon which

the whole of our education, from beginning to end, has to be built, whether you call it primary, or
middle, or higher. It will not do to have one kind of education for the villages and another kind for the

towns. It will not do to have one kind of education for the first four years of school life and afterwards
some other kind that is quite unrelated to it… we have a right to use the word “basic” only if we are

15
agreed that the whole education of the country should be built up on the foundation of Nai Talim” .
Vinoba then warns that there is an often a mistaken understanding that Nai Talim was a

system. He explained, “Nai Talim is not a system, it is a far reaching educational idea, it is a seed-
thought like the Brahma-vichar which was formerly so widespread in India and in which so many

different of thought – advait, dvait, vishisht-advait and so on – were rooted.” 16
Considering Nai Talim as a system has one more danger. Since learning has to be correlated

to craft people may engage solely in the task of finding the correlations between a craft and the learning
and fit things without imagination and to the extent of absurdity. Vinoba in this context noted that Nai

Talim was a philosophy of living; it was an attitude to life that one had to bring to all work. Human
being was not merely a body it was a soul that lived in a body and it was only when the body was

informed by a soul that it had the strength for action. In Vinoba’s opinion Nai Talim as see-thought
meant,

Education must take up the task of training boys from childhood in self-control, manliness, and
temperance. “Control of hands control of feet, control of speech,” said Buddha. By all means let us

strive for the dexterity of hand, but let us also strive for the power of control. The power to sue the
sense must be matched by power to control the senses. Skill without self-control can lead a man to

disaster; it cannot profit humanity, Strength by itself is vain, skill by itself is vain; they have value only
when they are used for human welfare. Not enough attention is being given to this aspect of education. 17

84