Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

The article invites readers to question and reflect on the purpose of modern education and narratives of good life, success and happiness. Modern, capitalistic, industrialized, urbanized and colonial (and colonizing) ways of living and being have created numerous global challenges. In light of these challenges, we need to re-examine our educational systems. I explore the potential of nai taleem as a philosophy of learning, living, and being: one that decolonizes education, our monoculture mindsets, and our notions of a good life. In an increasingly globalized, albeit disconnected, world I call for nai taleem as a means for building meaningful connection with oneself, with the community, and with the larger (natural) world. I share four case studies of interventions where I applied nai taleem based philosophies to a mainstream government-run school, a higher education initiative, a translocal learning network, and to my own daughter’s education. Finally, I share a reflective oath for educators as a commitment to exploring unlearning and nai taleem .


Resurrecting Nai Taleem 1
If nai taleem gets imprisoned into a system, it will be killed.If that should happen there will be no room for initiative, and people will spend their time contriving how this piece of knowledge can be correlated with that activity.We must steer clear of that kind of thing.
--Vinoba Bhave, Thoughts on Education, 1996Education, /2010, p. 69 , p. 69 As a core part of the Indian Freedom Movement, M.K. Gandhi made a call for an ancientnew paradigm of decolonized knowledge production and sharing.While Gandhi was a "product" of the British factory education system and benefitted from it in his early career, he came to understand the well-known saying in India, "the white man who brought the pencil, also brought the eraser."In other words, the factory education system consciously made us forget and devalue who we were and what resources we had.Nai taleem can be seen as an attempt to regenerate our cultural imaginations.My insights about nai taleem emerges out of two decades of interactions with Gandhian educationists and activists, close interactions with my so-called "illiterate" village grandmother, engaging with indigenous tribal communities in India, learning experiments with thousands of learners, and my own personal experiments with truth.In addition, I spent more than two decades in the United States trying to understand the American Dream and the global economy at its highest levels as an investment banker, graduate student at Harvard, and as an educationist with UNESCO and UNICEF.
To understand Gandhi's vision of nai taleem, and its relevance for the 21st century, it is first important (and maybe easier) to discuss what it is not.It is not a fixed system, method, or curriculum.Nor is it a vocational crafts training program or skill-building project.Nor is it only for poor rural people.Nor was it an effort to reform or fix factory-schooling.
Nai taleem is an indigenous philosophy of learning and living.Its philosophical roots are quite different from the modern education system (see table below).It is a call for decolonizing our minds as it seeks to open up our notions and definitions of progress, success, freedom, happiness, power, work, wealth and well-being for critical interrogation and re-imagination.It is also a praxis-driven playing field for creating a new politics, new economics, new spiritualities, and new non-violent societies for our times.In that sense, it is not static; rather, it is contextual and emergent.Therefore, it must be continuously re-calibrated and re-imagined in dialectic conversations with what is happening in the many worlds we inhabit.The late educationist Narayanbhai Desai, recalling his conversation with Gandhi, advocated that each of us of needs to create our own definitions and models of nai taleem in order to keep it relevant, fresh, and alive.Indeed, if we can create so many different kinds of toothpaste, then what is stopping us from creating diverse models and approaches of nai taleem based on different contexts and needs?Nai Taleem/Indigenous/Unschooling Paradigm Factory Schooling Paradigm Wisdom, seva (selfless service).and kindness is the goal Marks and financial package is the ultimate goal Knowledge as copyleft, meaning knowledge is all part of the commons to be shared by all Knowledge as copyright, meaning private ownership, and therefore exclusion, of knowledge When conducting a post-mortem on the nai taleem experiments of the last century (mainly adopted and spread by the government on a large scale in the Indian state of Gujarat), one can argue that the biggest failure of nai taleem schools has been their lack of understanding of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (swaraj literally means rule over the self, but I prefer a more nuanced poetic framing as harmony of our many selves -with our inner world, with our diverse communities, with the natural more-than-human world).The school leaders eventually fell into the trap of accepting a modern state-corporate-military-industrial-urban development framework and institutions as their central reference point (and became both intellectually and financially dependent on this set-up).We need to recognize that modernist armies, prisons, factories, and schools are all based on the same basic design of centralizing control, narrowing relational-autonomy, and prioritising monoculture of the mind.They run on and promote standardisation and "institutionalization,"' (i.e., the submission of human conscience, wisdom and love to the will and logic of institutions, rules, and authorities).This implies a continuing shrinking of the notion of Self to homo economicus, the survival of the fittest mode, or the model of the one-dimensional man.
For nai taleem to be relevant to the world today, we must be willing to question the sacred cow frameworks that have until now defined the modern factory education paradigm: 1).nationalism and the military state; 2). the scarcity economic paradigm of GDP, money, globalised corporate control, and unlimited economic growth; and 3).Western science and memes of technological utopianism and hyper-rationality as the only tools for knowing, understanding, and progressing in the world.These reference points comprise and justify a global system of extraction and war.They are rarely explored or questioned by educationists or policymakers.Thus, they end up implicitly defining the contours of the modern education system and our notions of what it means to be human.However, the global complex polycrises that are emerging around the pursuit of the American Dream open a powerful need and opportunity to explore swaraj and our notions of a good life once again.
Fundamentally, Swaraj is an invitation to recover our expanded Self with the ancient questions of "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?"It emerges from a deepfelt desire to transcend the pain and trauma of separation, alienation, competition, and fragmentation that was hurled on us by the colonialism and modernization/neo-colonism agenda, and to reclaim our profound interconnectedness and sense of relationality with all life.Nai taleem offers a strong possibility for exploring swaraj --for recovery of the Self from the boxes of modernity, standardized normality, and its inherent anthropocentrism.
As a part of reclaiming the expanded Self in swaraj, Vinobha Bhave (1996Bhave ( /2010) articulated: Self sufficiency then has three meanings.The first is that one should not depend on or exploit others for one's daily bread.The second is that one should have developed the power to acquire knowledge for oneself.The third is that one should be able to rule himself, to be aware of one's senses and thoughts.(p. 31) To this, I would add a fourth dimension of moving beyond domination, violence, and control over Nature and finding our right relationship with the rest of Nature.
In the West, many countries are now talking of children suffering from Nature-Deficit-Disorder from being indoors all day and being addicted to video games, mobile phones, and now, online classes.Contrary to what modern science has taught us, Nature is diverse, alive, intelligent, conscious, and always communicating with us.The rat-race pace and intensity of factory-schooling and industrial-urban life has made us forget how to slow down and listen.We are not separate from the rest of Nature, but an integral and entangled part of it.We need to re-internalize the age-old adage that what we do to Nature, we do to ourselves.While there are some novel efforts to reintegrate Nature in children's lives through models such as forest schools, we need to more fundamentally question how modern development has changed communities' understanding of Nature from "the rest of Nature as our sacred relatives" to "Nature as a resource to be exploited, commodified and sold." Nai taleem was initially articulated for people living in rural areas, but there was never a strong effort to develop a nai taleem vision for the urban middle class and elite 2 .The urgent need of the hour is to develop a discourse of nai taleem for urban and semi-urban people whose connection with the body, the land and animal world, the spiritual world, and one's soul, and the sense of community has been severely severed -leading to fragmented individuals living fragmented lives and thinking and acting in fragmented ways.So-called educated people living in urban areas generally have no idea where their food, clothes, water, computers, phones, oil, gas, etc., comes from or where their waste and even excrement goes.This sense of fragmentation can also be witnessed in many of the superficial ways in which we are trying to deal with global challenges such as climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals.Experts are trained to deal with symptoms rather than root-level systemic causes.

Bhave describes (1996/2010):
We can live rightly only when we earn our livelihood in bodily labour.If we do not do this, we are a burden for other people [and fossil fuels] to carry on their backs, and our lives cannot be free of violence.This is the idea that is the foundation of nai taleem.(p.74) Our current factory-schooling system, however, is producing a huge pool of consumerist parasites who are taught the formula that "school = marks = degree = mobility = good package = more stuff = happiness.In India, educated young people are ashamed to use their hands and do productive manual work, considering it drudgery.There is a deep crisis as many children of farmers and artisans no longer want to continue with their parents' work or live in the villages.Local economies have been devastated.We are slowly realizing that the formula designed to convert young people to "human resources" and make them slaves to the global economy is actually a recipe for massive frustration, depression, social violence, societal and ecological breakdown.
Reclaiming our understanding of bodily labor is essential for our mental and physical health and well-being.Because of the radical shifts due to factory education and cheap fossil fuels, so much effort is currently being made to promote young people (particularly obese ones) to exercise in gyms or to drug young people who have high energy and are labeled as ADHD and hyperactive.Bodily labour is also integral to new holistic learning models.This will require that we relook at mechanistic Descartean notions of mind and intelligence and notions of 2 My own encounters with the corporate world and global elite have led me to believe that nai taleem is more important for them than for rural peoples today.Nai taleem for rural peoples will have to also be re-imagined with a focus on revitalizing a new cultural confidence in the value of rural communities and a rural nature-centered lifestyle; how to resist the onslaught of the global economy and regenerate vibrant local economies should be part of this revitalization.
spirituality disconnected from the material world as well as entrenched Greek and American Dream parasitic notions of "leisure." Gandhi talked about the essence of nai taleem as integrating and nurturing the hands, heart and head for swaraj.Bhave (1996) poetically articulated the soul of nai taleem as yog (union of individual with the divine), sahyog (collaboration), and udyog (meaningful work).This resonates with the ideas of other eminent social thinkers like Narayanbhai Desai (former Vice Chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapeeth) who talked about preeti (love), mukti (responsible freedom), abhivyakti (creative expressions) and Satish Kumar (founder of Schumacher College in the United Kingdom) who advocates for regaining harmony with soil, soul, and society.In our work in Shikshantar, we have added unlearning, gift culture, and jugaad design thinking as some of the key dimensions of nai taleem for our times.
We not only have to reclaim the organic connections between the head and the heart, the hands and the home (local living context and ecosystem), but also recognise that today even control of the "head" is under siege as our minds and lives become increasingly controlled by the processes and structures of digitalization.There are currently more mobile phones in India than toilets.Under such scenarios, pedagogies of "unplugging" and "techno-fasting" will be increasingly important to reclaim our consciousness as whole beings as will more public conversations around the role of technology in our lives and society.Re-plugging into the pregnant power of "place-based community" is also a critical aspect for nai taleem.Divided, as modern "I-driven individuals," we have very limited power to influence larger systems; however, new and viable political, economic, and cultural movements will depend on a strong foundation of communities and collaboration across communities.In our experiments in Swaraj University, we have found that skills of engaging with and transforming conflict, rebuilding a sense of "commons" and a sharing economy, and co-creation through accessing our collective intelligence are important to focus on as part of preparing learners for community living.
Inspired by Indian Gandhian and author, Narayanbhai Desai, and his encouragement to create our own versions of nai taleem, I have been involved in several educational experiments in urban areas to re-imagine nai taleem for the 21st century, all focusing on self-designed learning and intrinsic motivation.Four experiments that I would like to mention are Creativity Adda, Swaraj University, the Ecoversities Alliance, and Unschooling my daughter Kanku.In all of these examples, there is a strong attempt to challenge the dominant schooling monoculture of competition, compulsion, fragmented/compartmentalised knowledge, the narrow definition of I.Q., and centralised/standardized certification.We begin in each example by acknowledging the diversity of all beings and the multiple intelligences, learning styles, knowledge systems, contexts, and natural ecosystems that exist.For us, every child is "intelligent" and every community has deep creativity and wisdom.Self-designed learning tries to support learners to question the dominant global worldview imposed by factory-schooling about who we should learn from, how we should learn, where we should learn, when we should learn, and what we should learn and unlearn as we explore a fundamental shift from "mainstreaming" to "many streaming." Creativity Adda Commercial School is a democratic free "unschool" which runs every day from 2 -5pm in the heart of a government school in Dariya Ganj, Old Delhi.It is intended as a parallel system to undo the damage of factory schooling and invite children into larger web of experiential learning possibilities.The mission is to connect 6th -12th class students with their passions and practical skills and to stimulate their intrinsic motivation, cultural confidence, curiosity, self-discipline, and emotional development and creativity through a project-based learning approach.There is a strong focus on the arts and music, urban organic farming, slow food cooking, designing different upcycled products, social entrepreneurship, and leadership.One of the many real-world projects is the Dariya Dil Slow Food Community Café, which the children organize and run together.The Café, while helping children come together and develop key skills for swaraj, also offers and opens up space for a much broader community dialogue and web of trust.Indeed, food -how we grow it, what seeds we use, our relationship with the farmer, what we put into our mouths, and how do we replenish our local food systems -can be seen as a major theme for nai taleem in these times.We would like the young people to see that there are many ways to earn a livelihood and contribute to the well-being of their communities.We see the Adda experiment as a radical virus inserted into the mainstream education system.Swaraj University is a two-year higher education program, based in Udaipur, where youth between 17 and 27 years join as 'khojis' (seekers, explorers, and researchers) to work on their dreams.There is no prior degree required to join nor do we give any degrees to those who have completed the program; rather, we support young people in building their own experiential portfolios.The program is an initiation into understanding self, sustainable lifestyles, social justice, and regenerative social entrepreneurship.Emotionally and spiritually healing ourselves from the violence and trauma of schooling, nuclear family setup, and modernity is a central feature.The campus is based on an organic farm with a focus on living in community and reconnecting with Nature as essential learning conditions; at the same time, we also believe that the world is our campus.Each khoji designs his or her own unique learning program.We have adapted the traditional apprenticeship system and deep mutual relationship between guru and disciple.Khojis get to choose their guides and mentors, regardless of academic qualifications; we even have had illiterate tribal fisherman, village farmers, folk musicians, and street children as our faculty.Our guiding principle is that the guru cannot be imposed on the learner.The khojis are also invited on learning journeys to many modern places like dump sites, factory farms, mines, and tribal communities, etc., to understand the hidden costs of modern development and globalisation.During the program, there is strong support for the khojis to start up their own social enterprises which help regenerate their communities and ecosystems; we emphasize spiritual purpose, people, planet, and profit and make a distinction between "deadlihoods" and livelihoods when exploring a career.The khojis have started up a range of projects, including organic farming, eco-architecture, nature conservation and eco-trekking, designing products from waste, filmmaking, dance therapy, and pranic healing.We envision our khojis to be job creators for others, rather than job beggars.
It is interesting to note that many of the khojis are also supporting other young and older people to reconnect with their passions.One of the khojis, Madhur, inspired his father to resign from his job at a pharmaceutical company and start working on his passion in natural healing.The two-year process can also be seen as an important rite of passage for bringing youth into the responsibilities and relationships of sacred adulthood, which involves much more than just making money or advancing one's personal career.Importantly, it involves developing a deeper responsibility -grounded in a higher sacred sense of seva and love -to oneself, the community, and the planet.Swaraj University is proud to be 100 per cent undeemed and unrecognized by the government.We run the university in the spirit of gift culture.There a no fees for learning and no students are put into financial debt.This decision has been critical for us to retain our autonomy and freedom to innovate.It is interesting to note that the Swaraj University model has also been able to inspire and open up new opportunities such as the Jail University which is in collaboration with the government and Udaipur Central Jail.The Jail University invites convicted jail inmates to heal themselves as they explore their areas of passion in a learning community.Swaraj University has also helped to build the Ecoversities Alliance.This is a network of over 400 alternative universities from more than 40 countries, many of which have emerged out of or been inspired by social, spiritual, and ecological movements such as buen vivir, degrowth, ubuntu, eco-feminism and the Zapatista movement.These ecoversities are exploring many different radical pedagogies as they seek to support learners to find their way back Home and reclaim a sense of belongingness and right relationship with Mother Earth.Ecoversities are a playful challenge to the hegemony of modern universities which have devalued many forms of knowing and labelled many communities as "uneducated," "backwards," and "illiterate.".One can find all kinds of ecoversities around the world such as the River-versities, Farmversities, Forest-versities, Water-versities, Favela-versities, Travellers-versities, and Artversities.The central focus of these universities is to serve local communities, not the demands of global corporations.They stress experiencing the world rather than just reading about it.They are also exploring themes which keep triggering trauma and fear, such as love, death, money, and navigating difficult terrains between tradition and modernity.These universities are also experimenting with innovative governance and participatory decision-making structures like sociocracy and cooperatives.We are supporting many communities to break the hierarchies of knowledge and fragmented epistemologies and dream and reimagine their own notions of university based on their local knowledges.Furthermore, these "universities" are not meant to be isolated islands that are unaccessible and off the map.Our experience is that once they start to get a bit established, they can then eventually engage with and influence other mainstream universities and institutions on different terms.
In recent years, thousands of urban educated families in India have made a conscious choice not to send their children to factory-schools.There are many motivations behind this, such as parents wanting to live a more natural and slower life, wanting to travel as a family with their children, a child's strong interest in sports or some other hobby requiring more time, schools labelling children as ADHD or slow, etc. COVID-19 also encouraged a lot of families (at least briefly) to rethink their approach to education as well as life priorities.My wife, Vidhi, and I have been unschooling our daughter, Kanku, for the past 21 years.There is no set syllabus, no tests or exams, and no textbooks in our approach; it is very emergent process based on her needs and interests and the local context we live in.Every day, we ask Kanku what she would like to do.She learns with people of all ages in an intergenerational setting at Shikshantar's community center and through working in many spaces around the city in our development of Udaipur as a Learning City.I am happy that she can communicate and connect with people across diverse socio-economic backgrounds and across various ages.Over the years, she has been volunteering and helping her friends in an animal shelter, vegetable market, pani-puri shop, beauty parlor, organic farm, community café, fashion design studio, art gallery, amongst many other places in Udaipur.Re-engaging the debate around child labour is an important issue for nai taleem going forward, as I believe children should have the right to do safe, meaningful work in their families and communities, bringing about immersion in the real world rather than learning only through books and written words.Bhave (1996Bhave ( /2010) ) beautifully describes how nai taleem and a notion of sacred work as seva must be re-integrated into our pedagogical visions and everyday lives: We believe that it is possible for us to learn all day long, work all day long and enjoy ourselves all day long.That is not three days but one; not 72 hours but 24.There is no joy apart from knowledge and work.The watchword of our education is Sat-Chit-Anand.Sat is work, without which life can not go on; chit is knowledge, without which life lacks freedom; and without anand, or joy, life loses its flavour.(p.63) Kanku's unschooling process has been a major contributor to Vidhi's and my growth as parents, change makers and human beings.She has helped to unschool us and open up many new pathways in our lives.In all of these various experiments, we have been trying to create learning spaces and processes based on seva, trust, collaboration, mutual care, and admitting and learning from our mistakes.We have also been trying to understand and reconnect to local traditional knowledge systems around food, water management, natural healing, etc., through local grandmothers.
In conclusion, I believe more than ever that there is an urgent need for nai taleem as we face many levels of social and ecological crises in the world.The god of money has taken centre stage.The global economy is trying to commodify everything, supporting the unparalleled growth of huge corporations (larger and more powerful than many nation-states), land/ water/ fossil fuel grabbing and the creation of special economic zones (SEZs), privatization, and urbanization.Even yoga and spirituality have become commodities.One hundred years ago, Gandhiji advocated swadeshi and satyagraha.Building on that, we need to reconnect nai taleem to localization, resisting the global economy and regenerating our local economies, local ecologies, and local cultures.While globalization and technological innovation promises global connection, it lacks the foundations of being connected to one's whole self.We are thus left in a bizarre and pathetic situation where we can have 5000+ friends on Facebook and still feel alone, empty and afraid.Therefore, a nai taleem based approach could allow for true, meaningful, and embodied understandings of interconnectedness and interdependence within oneself, within communities, and within the planet.This will call for more imaginative forms of social, political and economic action as the Market has become more seductive and the State apparatus has become more insensitive and intolerant using more surveillance and more violence towards those who resist.We need a new politics of Beyond Hope that goes beyond looking towards big institutions, experts, technological utopianism or good politicians to solve our problems and seeks to more fundamentally change the rules of the game.We need to be able to work with the cracks, the margins, the shadows, the wounds to evolve new models.It is in this larger milieu that nai taleem must find its way.Unlearning and reconditioning will be a key first step as the way we have been trained to think about the crises we are facing is part of the crisis.I leave you with a reflective invitation and a commitment to nai taleem.

Nai Taleem Educator's Unlearning Oath 3
(Offered in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath) Unlearning is one of the most important processes we have to invoke and support in education if we are to find ways out of the global mess that industrial-military systems have created.Unlearning opens an alchemical portal to reclaiming swaraj in our lives and shape-shifting into our expansive, inter-connected Self.For me, living with my so-called illiterate village grandmother and in her larger Grandmother's University, was critical to my unlearning journey and to finding my way home.I invite all educators around the world to bring unlearning into their pedagogical vision for a more convivial world.I invoke Saraswati, Athena, Isis, Odin, and all the forces of wisdom, creativity and deep understanding, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath.I vow to support my students to unlearn the monoculture of the mind and TINA (there is no alternative); I vow to support my students to unlearn the myth of technological arrogance and technological utopianism; I vow to support my students to unlearn the fear of money, limitless GNP/GDP, the idea of life as a commodity, and dependency on the global financial system for meeting our basic human needs; I vow to support my students to unlearn standardized notions of "normal" and the mainstream definitions of who is "educated," who is "developed," who is "wealthy," who is "successful," who is "powerful," who is "beautiful", what is "happiness," and what is "real progress"; I vow to support my students to unlearn the inner voice of constant comparison, artificial scarcity, and competition, and the idea that more and more consumption and stuff leads to more happiness and respect; I vow to support my students to unlearn the paralysing dependency on big experts, global institutions, governments, corporations, large-scale technologies, continuous fossil fuel extraction, and the West to solve all our problems; I vow to support my students to unlearn the conditioned disdain and shame of the "local" as undeveloped, unhygienic, dirty, smelly, lazy, inefficient, unorganised, inferior, superstitious, backwards, unproductive, violent, etc.; I vow to support my students to unlearn the many institutional labels (such as "failure") and associated trauma the System places on them and on Others; I vow to support my students to unlearn the idea that valuable learning only happens in schools or online and that marks and degrees are an indicator of intelligence or self-worth; I vow to support my students to unlearn the individualist, isolated Self and the idea that we are separate from the soil, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the deserts, the forests, the animals, the seeds, the bacteria.We need to remember that what we do to them we do to our selve;.I vow to live as a seeker and stay on the path of unlearning and up-learning in my life.I will keep carrying out my own experiments with truth.I will not be ashamed to tell my students, "I don't know."I recognize that this unlearning journey does not only happen at the level of the rationalfragmented-anthropocentric intellect, text, or classroom, but must involve our hands, our hearts, our cells, our intuitions, our relationships, our sensual rituals, our ancestors, and our lands.It is an invitation to travel in the promiscuous informal, the messy margins, the unknown shadows, the puzzling paradoxes, and the uncomfortable whispers and beyond political correctness and Left-Right polarisations.
May I walk this arduous path with courage, imagination, and deep compassion in service to my students, my vocation, and the well-being of all life on the planet.I invite you to keep adding to this.