In reading Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, I came across a startling passage: “From my 6th or 7th year up to my 16th year, I was at school, being taught all sorts of things except religion. I may say that I failed to get from the teachers what they could’ve given me without any effort on their part.”

Gandhi added later: “The term ‘religion’ I am using in the broadest sense, meaning thereby, self-realization or knowledge of self.”

To me, both are astonishing statements.

I thought about paraphrasing the first part: “All those years were a failure. They did not give me something that I wanted and needed. The teachers could have easily given me what I wanted, and it wouldn’t have been hard for them to do so.”

Some positive thoughts that this quote triggered for me about education are:

• Start with the child, the student, the person, and what they want — not what the teacher wants. The most important question worth asking in schools is: what is wanted and needed by the individual student?
• This is not an earth-shattering task, however. Gandhi said that what teachers could have given would be “without any effort on their part.” Imagine that! Imagine a school that is designed to have teachers give students what they want to know. 

I don’t quite know how to mesh that with the current 1,000-year-old idea that a teacher’s job is to “deliver a body of knowledge.”

The system we are immersed in is a system that has stringent rules and requirements that prevent teachers from doing this:

• We have “grades,” based on age. Anyone who is 6 years old should be together with other 6 year olds and “study” reading, writing and arithmetic whether they know it already or not. Anyone who is 7 should be with other 7 year olds — all not considering where they already are.
• We have “grades” based on tests, which are primarily based on memorization.
• Learning is based on specific subjects — predetermined categories of knowledge — rather than  the questions that are alive for and in the student.
• State and federal laws tell schools what to teach.
• School boards make rules, often based on the rules they went to school under, often based on what governments tell them.

Going back to Ghandi’s interesting “definition” of religion, it gives, I think, the fundamental purpose of education itself: Helping others come to a knowledge of self!

That is schooling based, not on learning “subjects,” but on learning by “the subject,” the student, him- or her-self: “Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? Why do we, I, exist, rather than not? Why do we act the way we do? Etc.”

These questions often have been dealt with under the purview of religion. The problem is that each religion has specific sets of answers to these questions, so the study of religion becomes the rote memorization of other people’s answers.

It is the same with virtually all the subjects we study, instead of a pursuit of the answers for ourselves.

Not that learning “subjects” is not important, but if school doesn’t help every student to ongoing self-realization, it is a failure.

Incidentally, the subtitle of Gandhi’s autobiography is “The Story of My Experiments with Truth.”

That corresponds to what I remember my English mentor, Father Rooney, saying: “True education is self-initiated and self-sustained.”

That’s what I — and Gandhi — think school should be about, and I invite you to explore that with me in future articles.