ABSTRACT
The Indian national movement responds to this late 19th-century education debate and reopens the question of self-formation and education. In this process the notion of formation gets a new meaning. In the fifth chapter, I make an attempt to unravel the conceptual logic of Gandhi and Tagore on education and in particular examine Tagore’s idea of Santiniketan and Gandhi’s Nayee Talim. I argue that it is Tagore and Gandhi who provide us with a diagnosis that the contemporary scholars entirely miss: the crisis is internal to the notion of education and learning. Tagore speaks of colonial education as having brought about the ‘indistinctness of the Indian mind’ and the resultant loss of concepts that inhibits reflection on experience while Gandhi holds that liberal education not only did not enable ethical learning but was destructive of it. I explore how Gandhi’s notion of education through insertion into a practice introduces the idea of ethical learning as distinct from a theoretical acquisition of principles. By analysing the categorial structures through which they articulate their idea of education, I show that differing conceptions of education, good life and personhood that emphasise ‘erasure of self’ and ethical know-how, are at work.
