Jill Carr-Harris on why Gandhi matters today, part 2: transcript

Key points

• Gandhi practiced a form of free schooling with young children and only set out his educational theory in 1937, so he practiced before he spoke.
• He reflected deeply on what he believed before putting his ideas into a theory.
• He stood up for his beliefs even when everybody was against him, as with hand-spinning and hand-weaving of cloth.
• The spinning wheel grew out of boycotting Manchester cloth and became a symbol of non-cooperation in 1921.
• Gandhi believed children should learn to spin and support their own education, despite others calling this crazy.
• Her third point is his integrated thinking: to have peace, people need to act peacefully and integrate how they act.

Chapters

1. 0:00Gandhi's reflective approach to education
2. 1:04Standing firm: the spinning wheel and persistence
3. 2:40Integrated thinking and walking peace

Full transcript

0:00And there he had young children, and he practiced a form of free schooling, one would say, in education. And he did all of that practice, but it was only in 1937 that he articulated his educational theory. so he practiced before he spoke he deeply reflected on what he believed and when the opportunity arose he really put together the notion of his night talent education and he he was always very deeply reflective so I think that's one second thing uh that was extremely important in why i find gandhi significant for today for the contemporary time is that he had the ability to stand up for what he believed at at whether

1:04everybody was against him or not you know he had this um this belief for instance in the charka The hand-spinning and hand-weaving of cloth. Now, this came out of boycotting Manchester cloth and finding a symbol of India's non-cooperation. It came up in the non-cooperation movement in 1921 when he was back in India.

1:35uh but what is so significant is that many people said oh come on you're crazy uh this is just a spinning wheel and he he actually believed that all children should learn how to spin and that they should become self-supporting they should actually support their education and i think in spite of this is just an example there were many where he stood up in spite of everybody saying that's quite wrong he had it incredible persistence and I think that internal quality to believe in truth is what how he framed it was was something that is necessary if you want to make change in dealing with resistance you have to kind of stare it down you you have to learn how to handle deeply How to resist countervailing forces.

2:40And the third thing that I think is really significant as kind of a model of values for young people was how he integrated... ...and you always get to the same place of an integration of programs, which reflect his integrative thinking, was really, I think, interesting because what it shows me is that if we really want peace and no conflict in the world today, we need to walk peace.

3:35We need to be peaceful, but we need a way of integrating the way we act. This is a transcript.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Jill Carr-Harris' speech, part 2, Lidköping, Sweden.webm by Yann Forget (2017-04-23), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.