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Even today, Gandhi\u2019s Nai Taleem idea holds the potential to address the challenges of the 21st century. A meaningful career for today\u2019s youth is defined at pursuing passion for which it has skills, and which in turn are sought by the society. Industry searches for affordable but high-quality manpower with a flexible framework. Universities strive to offer degrees that impart knowledge applicable to the industry and relevant to the society. Lastly, government and community want youth to be positively channelled and engaged in creative pursuits. An education system based on the pedagogic basis of Gandhi\u2019s Nai Taleem addresses all these challenges together, demonstrating the connection between the world of education and the world of work. Gandhi acknowledged of how education and work cannot be tackled separately and how productive work can act as a pedagogic source of acquiring knowledge, evolving values and developing skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kishore Bharati\u2019s Nai Taleem programme was an experiment outside the school system, as against to its within the school system Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme. About a dozen school dropouts belonging to landless and marginal farmer families became students under this programme. They learned to acquire knowledge, build human values and develop multiple skills by growing groundnuts, managing animal husbandry, doing carpentry and selling their products in the local market. What Gandhi said in his historic address to the Wardha Conference (1937) was concretized as a pedagogy in this programme during 1972-78. The Nai Talim experiment was influenced and enriched by the addition of a significant minor irrigation programme based on the appropriate technology of Ring Wells as well as a cattle breeding-cum-animal husbandry programme. Soon, a set of agricultural innovations aimed at engaging with cultivation in sandy soil began to occupy the central stage. KB\u2019s attempt to set up a cottage industry- production of electrical chokes for tubelights and training programme for repair of electrical motors of pump sets- is yet another evidence of how the Nai Talim idea was being transformed into a multi-dimensional rural development programme. The rich experience of the 5-6 years long experiment unfolded a range of radical pedagogic possibilities that seem to transcend even Gandhi\u2019s own ideas, at least as far as practiced by his followers since early 1940s. It was again through the Nai Talim experiment that the KB group could discover the Freirian pedagogy of social transformation that awakened it to a new educational discourse in the post-emergency period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pedagogy of productive work, language and knowledge:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This case from a small village in the district of Hoshangabad nicely depicts the working of the Nai Talim. Anil Sadgopal in his lecture at Vidyapeeth in Gujarat presents, based on his six years\u2019 experience of carrying out the, a dream example of how Nai Talim works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n