Mahavira Jain Vidyalaya Rajat Jayanti Mahotsava

Author(s): Mahavir Jain Vidyalaya Mumbai
Publisher: Mahavir Jain Vidyalay

Page 182

SILVER JUBILEE
THE WARDHA SCHEME
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GREAT NATIONAL EFFORT REQUIRED.
The Wardha scheme is, to my mind, a monumental programme of nation-building. Its effect on the psychology of different classes would be all that is actually required. The masses will know how the classes are living and vice versa, and everybody will have to share the burden of the nation. The destruction of India's economic policy during British rule, on which Dutt, Dadabhoy, Subramani Aiyer, Gokhale and others have written, resulted in the destruction of handicrafts and the destruction of skill, and the reduction of the masses to unskilled work of which there was not plenty. The result was that large chunks of humanity willing to work, did not know what to work at. What has been thus accomplished in the wrong direction for a hundred and fifty years could not be put right in one generation, except by a great effortand effort, which will call forth much sacrifice from a good many people of all ranks and the willing co-operation of all. It is the call to this effort, which Gandhiji has given to this country through his scheme of vocational education. It is a scheme, which will, to my mind, solve simultaneously the problem both of handicrafts and of unemployment as well as of education. Those, who are impatient because their own pet programmes cannot be put into execution, and those who are impatient because of unnecessary apprehension as to what will happen to either pupils or teachers, must hold their hands and their judgment until they see the results, if the great idea put forward by Mahatmaji is executed properly. Critics gifted with a noble vision like Dr. Zilliacus and Dr. Tagore have blessed the scheme in words which might be pondered over by the narrow-minded critics. Dr. Zilliacus, Chairman of the New Education Fellowship Delegation, said that “The situation in Primary Education is such as to call for heroic measures. The Wardha scheme is, in my opinion, a heroic measure and should be judged as such. Certainly it is put forward by the only man in India who could conceivably rouse the response necessary to put heroic measures into effect." And Dr. Tagore said : “No man loves the children of the poor more than the Mahatma, and we may be sure that when the scheme is actually worked out by him, we shall discover in it only one more testimony to the genius of this practical sage whose deeds surpass his words."
How it is DONE. A reader of these lines would be entitled to ask for some simple explanation as to how self-sufficiency could be secured. The simplest illustra