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 pers. Apropos of his studies in America, he recalled a trip to New York on the “S.S. Berengaria” when the dining-room steward refused to serve him be cause he was brown. That stuck in his soul. His specialty is basic education, which means teaching peasant children crafts, chiefly spinning and weaving and agriculture. He said the Congress ministries had fostered this plan when they were in office in the Provinces between 1937 and 1939. But the British discouraged it. He showed me quotations from official British reports on education in India which stated that British methods had failed. He contended that the sole purpose of the educational system in India was to train clerks and government officials to work for the British. The government therefore was not interested, he said, in the education of the lower classes. It merely wished to educate part of the middle class which might serve it. The result was middle-class nationalism. Recently the British government had taken over the buildings of some teachers’ training schools.

Nehru, who had listened and agreed with Aryanaikam, asserted that if the British had applied to education a small part of what they spent on arms in peace-time in India the Indian peasant would not be so illiterate. Aryanaikam said the British always pleaded lack of funds to establish an adequate number of schools. He showed me the