The Two Propositions

I VENTURE to ask the educationists of the country, who have no axes to grind, and who have an open mind, to study the two propositions that I have laid down, without allowing their pre-conceived and settled notions about the existing mode of education to interfere with the free flow of their reason. I would urge them not to allow my utter ignorance of education in its technical and orthodox sense, to prejudice them against what I have been saying and writing. Wisdom, it is said, often comes from the mouths of babes and suckling. It may be a poetic exaggeration, but there is no doubt that sometimes it does come through babes. Experts polish it and give it a scientific shape. I, therefore, ask for an examination of my propositions purely on merits. Let me restate them here, not as I have previously laid them down, but in the language that occurs to me as I am dictating these lines :

1. Primary education, extending over a period of 7 years or longer, and covering all the subjects up to the matriculation standard, except English, plus a vocation used as the vehicle for drawing out the minds of boys and girls in all departments of knowledge, should take the place of what passes today under the name of Primary, Middle and High School Education. 2. Such education, taken as a whole, can, and must be, self-supporting ; in fact, self-support is the acid test of its reality.

— Harijan : Sept. 18 & Oct. 2, 1937