Page:SELECTED ESSAYS of Dr. S. S. KALBAG.pdf/9

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[Translated from Hindi, Hindustani Talimi Sangh, 1957, pp. vii-viii] This historic vision of educational transformation received only lip service from the rulers of independent India. The colonial system of education was founded on dichotomy between work and knowledge. It has had an hegemonic impact on the thinking of the ruling class in post-independence India, since it reinforced the Brahminical tradition of separating manual work from learning and vice versa. This is what Gandhiji had challenged though his Basic Education programme. By 1960s, essentially all the institutions that came up soon after the Wardha Conference to promote the Gandhian conception of curriculum, gradually lost their direction and dynamism and were ultimately absorbed by the mainstream system. Herein lies the significance of the emergence of Dr. Kalbag's work during the past two decades as it explored the Gandhian idea afresh. Without claiming as much, Dr. Kalbag quietly but steadily reinterpreted the Gandhian pedagogy of linking work with knowledge in contemporary economic, technological and socio-cultural framework and demonstrated how it could become a powerful means of curricular transformation. The papers presented here consistently underline Dr. Kalbag's deep concern for scientific philosophy and the method of science. Look at his observation, “..... every measurement is an approximation; no measurement is absolute." No question of philosophical value was outside the scope of learning through work, as far as Dr. Kalbag was concerned. The discussion on text books in one of the papers leads him to raise the issue of "the usual distinction between distance and displacement" wherein distance is routinely "taught as a scaler and displacement as a vector." He builds up a logical case for maintaining that "distance is always a vector” when you look at distance in a three-dimensional space. The critical point is not whether he was right in such views but that such theoretical issues were integral to Rural Development Through Education System 4