School Education for Today: Extending Tagore and Gandhi’s Idea of a Good Society (Swaraj) and Its Accompanying New Education (Nai Talim)

At the time of writing this paper in November 2022, the global average carbon dioxide was at 419 parts per million (Daily Co2, 2022). This level of global warming has clear links with extreme and unpredictable weather, sea level rise, and recession of glaciers. The climate crisis is accompanied by the breaching of other planetary boundaries: biodiversity loss, land-system change, biogeochemical cycles, atmospheric pollution, and freshwater use. All these amplify the existing poverty and vulnerability of marginalized groups (Bhardwaj et al., 2021; Bhatt, 2017, 2022; Bhatt et al., 2013, 2022, this volume-a, b; Hota et al., 2019, 2023; Kistruck et al., 2013a; Pandey et al., 2021; Parth et al., 2021; Pillai et al., 2021a, b; Qureshi et al., 2017, 2020, 2021a, b, c, d, 2022a, b; Riaz & Qureshi, 2017; Sutter et al., 2023; Zainuddin et al., 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of our distorted relationship as humans with nature and continues to pose a threat crippling health and economic conditions. The World Inequality Report, 2022, highlights the rising trend of extreme social and economic inequalities worldwide (cf. Qureshi et al., 2018b, 2023; Parthiban et al., 2020a, b). There is sharply rising populism, authoritarianism, and fascism around the world, as per the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Democracy Index. These ecological, socio-economic, political crises are interrelated and reinforce each other.

Siksha Satra, located in Sriniketan – a few kms from Tagore’s main campus in Shantiniketan, was led by L.K. Elmhirst. Elmhirst was a Britisher who did his PhD at Cornell, met Tagore in 1920 in New York, and came and joined him at Santinketan in 1922. The other leading person with Elmhirst was Santosh Majumdar. The school started on July 1, 1924, in Santosh Majumdar’s house.

Zakir Husain, a prominent educationist and Gandhian, was Vice Chancellor of two universities for about 26 years. He was the third President of India from 1967 to 1969. He headed the ten-member committee formed in 1937 to draw up a detailed Nai Talim syllabus, of which the convenor was E.W. Aryanayakam, who had previously worked in Tagore’s experimental rural school, Siksha Satra.

Second author, Sujit Sinha, co-founded a rural organization called Swarnirva in West Bengal, India. One of its flagship programs between 1997 and 2010 was a youth initiative called the “Kishor Kishori Bahini,” or KKB (meaning Male and Female youth force). Young kids and teens (aged 10–16 years) from eight village communities participated in Nai Talim activities outside of school hours in various themes. The first author, Pallavi Varma Patil, coordinated a school farm project called “The Ragi Project” in Bangalore, India, and networked with similar ecological education projects worldwide on account of this. Both authors taught a course on Nai Talim for Masters in Development and Masters in Education students at Azim Premji University, Bangalore (2013–2023), and have been curating and writing about relevant examples of Nai Talim worldwide.