own the suppressed classes. Hindus will certainly never deserve freedom, nor get it if they allow their noble religion to be disgraced by the retention of the taint of untouchability. And as I love Hinduism dearer than life itself, the taint has become for me an intolerable burden. Let us not deny God by denying to a fifth of our race the right of association on an equal footing,
NATIONAL EDUCATION[1]
So many strange things have been said about my views on national education, that it would perhaps not be out of pace to formulate them before the public.
In my opinion the existing system of education is defective, apart from its association with an utterly unjust Government, in three most important matters :
(1) It is based upon foreign culture to the almost entire exclusion of indigenous one.
(2) It ignores the culture of the heart and the hand, and confines itself simply to the head.
(3) Real education is impossible through a foreign medium.
Let us examine the three defects. Almost from the commencement, the text-books deal, not with things the boys and the girls have always to deal with in their homes; but things to which they are perfect strangers. It is not through the textbooks, that a lad learns what is right and what is wrong in the home life. He is never taught to have any pride in his surroundings. The higher he goes, the farther he is removed from his home, so that at the end of his education he becomes estranged from his surroundings. He feels no poetry about the home life, The village scenes are all a sealed book to
- ↑ From Young India.
