Self-supporting Education

THE suggestion has often been made that in order to make education compulsory or even available to every boy or girl wishing to receive education, our schools and colleges should become almost, if not wholly, self-supporting, not through donations or State aid or fees exacted from students, but through remunerative work done by the students themselves. This can only be done by making industrial training compulsory. Apart from the necessity which is daily being more and more recognized of students having an industrial training side by side with literary training, there is in this country the additional necessity of pursuing industrial training in order to make education directly self-supporting. This can only be done when our students begin to recognize the dignity of labor and when the convention is established of regarding ignorance of manual occupation a mark of disgrace. In America, which is the richest country in the world and where, therefore perhaps, there is the least need for making education self-supporting, it is the most usual thing for students to pay their way wholly or partially.

Free Scholarships

If America has to model her schools and colleges so as to enable students to earn their scholastic expenses, how much more necessary it must be for our schools and colleges ? Is it not far better that we find work for poor students than that we pauperise them by providing free-studentships ? It is impossible to exaggerate the harm we do to India's youth by filling their minds with the false notion that it is ungentlemanly to labor with one's hands and feet for one's livelihood or schooling. The harm done is both moral and material, indeed much more moral than material. A free scholarship lies and should lie like a load upon a conscientious lad's mind throughout his whole life. No one likes to be reminded in after life that he had to depend upon charity for his education. Contrarily, where is the person who will not recall with pride those days, if he had the good fortune to have had them, when he worked in carpentry-shop or the like for the sake of educating himself mind, body and soul ?

— Young India : Aug. 2, 1928