Peter N. Herndon
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I hope to achieve several goals in creating this teaching unit for my high school World History students. The first is to acquaint students with the cultural and racial differences and conditions in the British colonies of South Africa and India which resulted in a form of legal discrimination. Some of the fundamental human rights questions that should interest my students are the following: How have people historically responded to legal injustice? What recourses other than violent action do people have available to them? What role can effective leaders play in helping to organize effective responses to oppression? Can we judge which responses are most effective given their historical context? What attitude changes are necessary both on the part of the victims and the victimizers in order for the situation to change? I hope this unit on Gandhi will challenge my students to increase their ability to think across cultures and to consider possible applications of Gandhi’s ideas and techniques in twenty-first-century America.
The second goal is to acquaint students with Gandhi’s personal philosophy and goals. We certainly can reason that Gandhi often became frustrated and angry because of the humiliation and physical injuries he suffered as a targeted member of a persecuted group. How was this man able to turn this justifiable anger into a calm determination to win social, economic and political gains for his people? In an attempt to “get inside” Gandhi, students will spend some time learning what effects Gandhi’s various life experiences had on his “world view.” How did growing up in a prominent liberal Hindu middle class (his was the Vaisya caste for farmers and merchants) home affect him? How did being married at thirteen to a girl he had never met before affect his thinking about romantic love? How did his life in England as a law student influence his ideas on Christianity and the industrial revolution? What life experiences caused him to develop such a committed interest in ameliorating conditions of caste, class and poverty for his people?
In order to better understand Gandhi, the teacher will assign short selections from the Bhagavad-Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, and Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You , all of which had a profound effect on the young man. For example, Gandhi was quite moved by the Sermon on the Mount where he was delighted by the passage where Jesus said,
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‘But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man take away thy coat let him have thy cloak also.’ Matthew chapter 5, verses 39, 40
Difficult words to live by, but Gandhi, though a Hindu, would spend his life illustrating how these love-principles could work to effect change.
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A third goal for students is to expect them to distinguish between methods and goals: What were Gandhi’s overall goals and how did he proposed to achieve them? What would it take? Students should be able to compare the English policy of racial segregation in South Africa to the Hindu caste system in Gandhi’s native India where certain people were segregated as “Untouchables” through no fault of their own. Students can read some of the restrictive laws in each system and compare them. Is it possible to condemn one system without also condemning the other? Is discrimination based on race or caste ever morally justifiable? Students will be asked to compare Gandhi’s leadership, goals and methods to those of Martin Luther King in the American civil rights movement. As students examine some typical Jim Crow statutes of Mississippi or Alabama from the 1950’s they may become even more aware that racial-cultural discrimination often occurs when persons in economic and political power choose to misuse that power for their own gain at the expense of the unenfranchised. The obvious question arises, “how can those without power gain fair treatment from those in power?” Nelson Mandela, who used nonviolence as a strategy, also was an admirer of Gandhi; students might examine Mandela’s leadership and methods in the early days of the African National Congress if there is sufficient time and interest.
A fourth major goal of my unit is for students to realize how physical objects are often useful as symbols for social movements like Gandhi’s. In Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance there were five goals, (he called it his Constructive Program) like the fingers of a person’s hand. They were: ending Untouchability (racism), home spinning of cloth (rejecting commercialism), sobriety (anti-alcohol, anti-drugs), Hindu-Muslim friendship (religious toleration), and equality for women (ending discrimination in jobs, suffrage). The one I have chosen to emphasize in my unit, because it was a vital part of ending British rule, is Gandhi’s second goal, symbolized by the simple spinning wheel. They will learn how wool is shorn, carded, gathered and spun into yarn. Gandhi was often photographed while spinning, a demonstration of his commitment to boycotting British-made clothing. My project will entail the students’ making yarn on a real spinning wheel. They will see slides which illustrate different types of wheels, including one called the Charka or portable “Gandhi wheel” which Gandhi developed in the late 1920’s. He encouraged everyone in India to spin for an hour “first thing each morning for the beneficial meditative state thereby produced.” (Cummer, A Book of Spinning Wheels, page 18) Another student project is for them to make posters or collages and collect current news or magazine articles that illustrate Gandhi’s five social goals and apply them to today.
To conclude, I plan to create a teaching unit that will help students understand the historic changes that occurred in India over a forty-year period and the leadership qualities that Mohandas Gandhi possessed, among them a great vision, rooted in humility. Who was this skinny brown man who said of himself, “Men say I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is that I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.” And yet he was a man who also said this: “As soon as a man thinks of himself as a saint he ceases to be one.” There were many struggles: personal struggles, social struggles, political struggles, economic struggles. I believe that by implementing this teaching unit with my students, I will be able to raise questions in my students’ minds that challenge them to think about their unique role in the struggle to alleviate certain aspects of human suffering. I hope that students will understand that art and artifacts (in this case Gandhi’s spinning wheel) can serve as metaphors that remind us that there is a high price to be paid in order to achieve true success. How many in history have been willing to pay such a price as this man Gandhi?
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