Wardha Scheme

A hundred years ago, India had a school in every village. Then Great Britain took charge of India's educational system, began to teach Indians in English, to concentrate on training clerks and professionals for its commercial and civil service. Now, 50,000 Indians go to college each year, and one-fifth come out with B.A. degrees or as "failed B.A.'s."--* In India nowadays professions and Government service are overcrowded, and the village schools are vanishing. With only half as much money spent on primary education as on higher education, barely 7% of the population is in school and 90% of India's 350,000,000 are illiterate.

This was the problem which Mahatma Gandhi and the All-India Nationalist Congress last week prepared to tackle with a new plan, the Wardha Education Scheme (named after Gandhi's headquarters). Its goal: a school in every village. These schools (vidya mandirs: "temples of learning") will be opened in 166 villages of one province next month and the Central Advisory Board of Education is planning to establish them soon throughout India. Championing the plan is the board's bespectacled, English-educated president, Bal Gangadhar Kher, Premier of Bombay, father of five children and himself a one-time schoolteacher.

The vidya mandirs will be "work schools" instead of "book schools." The Mahatma proposes to teach India's children how to use their minds by teaching them how to use their hands. Chief subjects in the curriculum will be spinning, weaving, agriculture, sugar-making; chief instrument of education, the takli, a small spindle on which the student can spin yarn as he walks, talks, prays. As they learn these trades, India's school children will also learn history, geography, the three Rs. English will be taboo, for British de-Indianizing of the Indians, says Gandhi, is the nation's curse: "We are strangers in our own home. The vocabulary of our mother tongue is so pathetic that we finish our sentences by having recourse to English words."

India's impoverished rural children, who will go to school from ages 5 to 14, 288 days a year, will work for their education four hours each school day, making cloth, etc. for sale. Plan is to start each school by getting a patriot to give a piece of land yielding at least $80 a year. The rest of the cost is to be met by village festivals, Government grants. Teachers will live in the schoolhouses, be paid $8 a month, sign up for a minimum of 25 years' service. A problem: enlisting women teachers. India has virtually none. Reason: it is unsafe for a woman to live alone.

--*The "B. A. Failed" is awarded to candidates who fail in final examinations, is almost as highly prized as the B. A.

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