V. EDUCATION OF
CHILDREN
When I landed at Durban in January 1897, I had three
children with me, my sister's son ten years old, and my
own sons nine and five years of age. Where was I to
educate them ?
I could have sent them to the schools for European
children, but only as a matter of favour and exception.
No other Indian children were allowed to attend them. For
these there were schools established by Christian
missions, but I was not prepared to send my children
there, as I did not like the education imparted in those
schools. For one thing, the medium of instruction would
be only English, or perhaps incorrect Tamil or Hindi;
this too could only have been arranged with difficulty. I
could not possibly put up with this and other
disadvantages. In the meantime I was making my own
attempt to teach them. But that was at best irregular,
and I could not get hold of a suitable Gujarati teacher.
I was at my wits' end. I advertised for an English
teacher who should teach the children under my direction.
Some regular instruction was to be given them by this
teacher, and for the rest they should be satisfied with
what little I could give them irregularly. So I engaged
an English governess on 7 pounds a month. This went on
for some time, but not to my satisfaction. The boys
acquired some knowledge of Gujarati through my
conversation and intercourse with them, which was
strictly in the mother-tounge. I was loath to send them
back to India, for I believed even then that young
children should not be separated from their parents. The
education that children naturally imbibe in a
well-ordered household is impossible to obtain in
hostels. I therefore kept my children with me. I did send
my nephew and elder son to be educated at residential
schools in India for a few months, but I soon had to
recall them. Later, the eldest son, long after he had
come of age, broke away from me, and went to India to
join a High School in Ahmedabad. I have an impression
that the nephew was satisfied with what I could give him.
Unfortunately he died in the prime of youth after a brief
illness. The other three of my sons have never been at a
public school, though they did get some regular schooling
in an improvised school which I started for the children
of Satyagrahi parents in South Africa.
These experiments were all inadequate. I could not
devote to the children all the time I had wanted to give
them. My inability to give them enough attention and
other unavoidable causes prevented me from providing them
with the literary education I had desired, and all my
sons have had complaints to make against me in this
matter. Whenever they come across an M.A. or a B.A., or
even a matriculate, they seem to feel the handicap of a
want of school education.
Nevertheless I am of opinion that, if I had insisted
on their being educated somehow at public schools, they
would have been deprived of the training that can be had
only at the school of experience, or from constant
contact with the parents. I should never have been free,
as I am today, from anxiety on their score, and the
artificial education that they could have had in England
or South Africa, torn from me, would never have taught
them the simplicity and the spirit of service that they
show in their lives today, while their artificial ways of
living might have been a serious handicap in my public
work. Therefore, though I have not been able to give them
a literary education either to their or to my
satisfaction, I am not quite sure, as I look back on my
past years, that I have not done my duty by them to the
best of my capacity. Nor do I regret not having sent them
to public schools. I have always felt that the
undesirable traits I see today in my eldest son are an
echo of my own undisciplined and unformulated early life.
I regard that time as a period of half-baked knowledge
and indulgence. It coincided with the most impressionable
years of my eldest son, and naturally he has refused to
regard it as my time of indulgence and inexperience. He
has on the contrary believed that that was the brightest
period of my life, and the changes, effected later, have
been due to delusion miscalled enlightenment. And well he
might. Why should he not think that my earlier years
represented a period of awakening, and the later years of
radical change, years of delusion and egotism ? Often
have I been confronted with various posers from friends :
What harm had there been, if I had given my boys an
academical education ? What right had I thus to clip
their wings ? Why should I have come in the way of their
taking degrees and choosing their own careers ?
I do not think that there is much point in these
questions. I have come in contact with numerous students.
I have tried myself or through others to impose my
educational 'fads' on other children too and have seen
the results thereof. There are within my knowledge a
number of young men today contemporaneous with my sons. I
do not think that man to man they are any better that my
sons, or that my sons have much to learn from them.
But the ultimate result of my experiments is in the
womb of the future. My object in discussing this subject
here is that a student of the history of civilization may
have some measure of the difference between disciplined
home education and school education, and also the effect
produced on children through changes introduced by
parents in their lives. The purpose of this chapter is
also to show the lengths to which a votary of truth is
driven by his experiments with truth, as also to show the
votary of liberty how many are the sacrifices demanded by
that stern goddess. Had I been without a sense of
self-respect and satisfied of myself with having for my
children the education that other children could not get,
I should have deprived them of the object-lesson in
liberty and self-respect that I gave them at the cost of
the literary training. And where a choice has to be made
between liberty and learning, who will not say that the
former has to be preferred a thousand times to the latter
?
The youths whom I called out in 1920 from those
citadels of slavery -- their schools and colleges -- and
whom I advised that it was far better to remain
unlettered and break stones for the sake of liberty than
to go in for a literary education in the chains of slaves
will probably be able now to trace my advice to its
source.
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