This paper analyzes the aspects of Gandhi's notions of education for a modern and free India and traces the evolution of such ideas over time. A nation's system of education plays a significant role in the ordering of society and in imparting a particular identity to it. In India, modern Western education had been introduced by the colonial government which, though liberal, nonetheless, could be utilized as an instrument of control and indoctrination over the colonized people. Demonstrating as it did the racial and cultural superiority of the British, the new colonial education also served to instill a sense of inferiority among the Indian `subjects' vis-à-vis their white masters.

Stringently criticizing British education policy in India in his address to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in 1931, Gandhi observed that India at the time was more illiterate than it had been 50 or a 100 years ago and that the British administrators, instead of nurturing indigenous education, had "scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished." Gandhi felt that the colonial state's intervention had created a form of education that was totally alien to the Indian reality. It could not touch the lives of the millions and tended to impose a borrowed identity on a minuscule elite. He therefore was primarily concerned with the need to formulate an alternate, meaningful, nonviolent, non-exploiting education system that would be truly reflective of the village-based, multi-cultural Indian society. In his seminal article on education in the Harijan of the July 31, 1937.

"By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man—body, mind and spirit. Literacy is not the end of education, nor even the beginning. It is only one of the means by which man and woman can be educated. Literacy is in itself no education. I would therefore begin the child's education by teaching it a useful handicraft and enabling it to produce from the moment it begins its training. Thus every school can be made self-supporting, the condition being that the State takes over the manufactures of these schools...I hold that the highest development of the mind and the soul is possible under such a system of education. Only every handicraft has to be taught not merely mechanically, as it is done today, but scientifically, i.e., the child should know the why and wherefore of every process".

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