Gender, Craft and Education


Gender and craftwork in rural society: The role of education 

Author: Nidhi Gaur 
ISBN: 978-1-032-84327-6 
First published: 2025 
Publisher: Routledge 
Pages: 181

The review up at Teacher Plus here. 
Warmly thanking Teacher Plus and Routeledge.

Is craft-centred education the way to go?


This book is an outcome of the author, Nidhi Gaur’s, study of Anand Niketan in Wardha, Maharashtra. This is a school where “Work is not associated with particular people; rather, it is perceived simply as work that needs to be done.” The first chapter, Introduction, deftly conveys what the book is all about; it states, “So far, craft-centred education has not been studied from the perspective of gender, so this study revisits an older idea with a new perspective.” The book has been neatly structured over nine chapters spread across 181 pages. The final chapter, Implications and conclusion, succinctly sums up the learning – “The examination of the pedagogy of crafts has shown the potential of craft-centred education in the holistic development of the self of the students.”

The author “examines the interrelation of gender and the pedagogy of crafts” in depth. She looks at the history and trajectory of crafts and gender juxtaposed with education. She is immersed in the topic and gleans out knowledge from the books she referred to and the children (at Anand Niketan) she interacted with. These she deftly puts forth in the book. She also pauses to clarify terms and concepts (such as modernity and modernization) where the text warrants. She talks about “rural” India, but is aware of the irony that today “the village is referred to as a thing of the past, far away from the ‘active’ space”. The oeuvre of references is rich as well; she brings in John Galsworthy’s classic short story, Quality, for example, to highlight a point on craftsmanship. She underscores that “craft-centred education has the potential to create a culture of patience, reflective action, expression, coexistence and peace” in a manner befitting the topic.

The book challenges the existing paradigm of school education. In telling us what a craft-centred education can achieve, it points to what we are missing in our conventional schools today. When, for example, the author says of Anand Niketan, “The school was also found to be emerging as a space where students could express and experiment with their gendered roles to understand other people’s responses and behaviours towards their experimentation,” we go back to the schools we have been associated with as students or teachers and wonder how we had explored gender and what could have been done differently. When a child tells her, “We are taught to study while we learn craft by doing it with our hands,” or when she observes that, “The practice of crafts is based on the methods of science,” we pause and absorb. This is where the book scores; it nudges us to think. The book also has lessons for today – it informs us that there were critiques on a craft-centred education policy, a little less than a century ago; in other words, education policy matters used to be read and discussed! It reminds us that to move forward as a society, we need to get education into the public consciousness and discourses.

The editing could have been tighter. Some things are repeated (e.g.: Devi Prasad’s introduction and work) and there are errors too (e.g.: it is Zakir Hussain on one page (44) and Zakir Husain on the next (45)). Cliches like “her ngo” too could have been avoided. Could it also have looked at Gandhi with a more nuanced and balanced lens?

The book, however, like all good books, left me with questions:Why talk about this school at all when it has neither flourished nor its model replicated?
  • Why discuss craft-centred education with an English reading-writing audience; an audience whose aesthetics are not exactly thriving?
  • What motivates the teachers in this school? How were their roles envisaged in the initial design?
  • Teacher capacity has been a bottleneck in conventional schools; how different is it here?
  • Are there other schools, today, that adhere to a craft-centred curriculum? Is a craft-centred curriculum relevant only to the rural areas?
  • How is craft education being imparted in our schools today? Has it become restricted to the privileged (read fancy) schools?
  • Finally, what if we replace crafts with sports? How would it impact the attributes the author ascribes to craft-based education – gender equity, working with hands, quality, balance, initiative, interdependence?

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