By, Tabitha Lopes.
Upon my research into Rabindranath Tagore I found that he had more to say than, “Terry not over your toilet”. His beliefs sound foreign to the Western bred mind but are essential to consider if we want to make a serious attempt at fixing our education system. That is not to say that western or modern education is necessarily bad nor is it to pretend that all education is the same, it is simply to suggest that everything can be improved upon and education is no exception. Due to his influence, controversies, and success Rabindranath Tagore has been widely discussed, and prolifically studied. Three authors in particular, provide a glimpse into his views and history within the context of his educational philosophy: First, Mohammad Quayum gives an overview of Tagore’s educational mission, principles of his vision, and synopsis of his writings in the essay, “Education for Tomorrow: The Vision of Rabindranath Tagore”. Second, Dipannita Datta, speaks more to his global politics of, what she refers to as, “glocal unity” or a united world, in the essay, “Connecting Cultures: Rethinking Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideals of Education”. Third, and most impressively, John Pridmore writes about the harsh truths of Tagore’s legacy in order to fully do Tagore justice. By providing a fleshed out history of Tagore, Pridmore’s argument stands stronger, making his acknowledgement of Tagore’s wisdom even more precedent.
The foundation for this research was in a belief that there has to be a better way, “a more excellent way” to cultivate our minds, and that the success I’ve found in academics has come when my love and passions were aligned with my educational pursuits. It is not an overstatement to say that “love and passion” is only nurtured in a classroom after grades and benchmarks have been met. And when we live in a world where money is never done being made, and power is never done being gained it is not surprising that the uniform, corporate, utilitarian mindset has trickled down into the classrooms. My greatest conclusion after having read Tagore and the stated authors on his work, is that education lacks a moral purpose. The purpose provided to students is egocentric and competitive at its core, developing students to succeed in a corrupted world, and calling them a failure when they choose to opt out of it. After finding solace in Tagore’s humanistically moral views on education I believe in the need to shine light on this visionary who has since been eclipsed.
Who was Tagore?
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941); Born into a well cultured Bengali family, he was Asia’s first recipient of a Nobel prize and an impressive jack of all arts (Pridmore 356). Despite his genius and talent, his name is not well remembered in western culture. Pridmore asks the blatant question that Quayum and Datta shied away from, “why the eclipse of such a luminary?” (356). The least problematic of reasons for Tagore’s faded legacy is that there is a huge mistranslation of the “subtleties of his thoughts” (Pridmore 356). The more exposed reason is that Tagore was problematic through a modern day lens; “He married a child bride and married off his own daughter”, “He was an aristocrat, not a democrat”, and “he was taken in by both Stalin and Mussolini”(Pridmore 357), though Pridmore explains that last one as “Tagore thinking too well of people” (357). These are all valid reasons to criticize Tagore but I fear they diminish the validity of the things he got right.
Similar to Bill Gates, Rabindranath Tagore was a dropout, leaving school behind at the age of thirteen (Quayum 3). It is evident that Tagore’s hatred of western education came from the harsh influences of British Colonialism that he was subjected to during his schooling (Pridmore 357). Quayum provides a reading of Tagore’s essay, “The Teacher”:
In this crucial period [childhood], the child’s life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within the bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead… We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man’s most cruel and wasteful mistakes. (Quayum 3).
Subjected to the worst form of western education, this shaped Tagore’s life mission and it was “his crusade to emancipate children’s minds from the dead grip of a mechanical method and a narrow purpose”, that narrow purpose being money and power, being driven by greed instead of love (Quayum 3).
With the purpose of love and sympathy Tagore went forward to develop his three schools: Santiniketan (“abode of peace”), Visva-Bharati (“where india meets the world”), and Sriniketan (“abode of prosperity”) (Quayum 2). Tagore did not like to call them schools, he preferred to call them ashrams, which “were the ancient forest sanctuaries of India, where beneath the trees, the wise taught the young” (Pridmore 357). At his core Tagore was a spiritual being deeply connected to the environment and natural world. His ashrams were for educating knowledge, but more importantly they aimed to teach students how to learn from and have a personal relationship with the universe (Pridmore 361). As peaceful of a vision as that is, it was flawed in practice because of economic constraints and parents’ dissatisfaction with the lack of a practical education (Pridmore 364). Due to this Santiniketan now resembles the very thing Tagore despised, having to make endless concessions in order to obtain funding for the ashram which “saddened him deeply” (Pridmore 364).
What should education be about? Theoretically.
Tagore has a whole set of his own philosophy regarding how education should relate in our lives. It is starkly different from the education given to us in American culture which is partly why I feel that his movement has been stilted. Tagore is not simply saying that we should have plants in classrooms, or that children should have more recess time, to a certain point he is saying the whole system of education is flawed at its core because of its corrupt purpose. If education does not provide “illumination of heart” or “joy of existence” then it is not that the child has failed education but that the education has failed the child (Quayum 3). Furthermore, it is insufficient to determine the quality of a person based on grades or wealth. It is in this way that Tagore brings about a spirituality to education, where this way an individual can learn how to love learning and use it to nurture one’s life. Pridmore does a eloquent job of breaking down the philosophy behind Tagore’s educational spirituality:
First, children are liminal beings whose native territory is the borderland between the apparent and the real. Secondly, spiritual education is the process of bringing the child’s spirit into harmony with the spirit informing all that is. Thirdly, the growing child must be in intimate and abiding contact with the world of nature. Fourthly, if a school should be a poem it should be set to music. Fifthly, spiritual nurture must be global. Sixthly, spiritual pedagogy is not to be confused with the stuffing of parrots. (Pridmore, 358).
Tagore wrote a short story called “The Parrot’s Training” where he equated the modern education of children to the training of a parrot from within a cage (Pridmore 356). His practice was to free students from their cages and detest against conformity. The need to cultivate a strong individual who evokes “the spirit of sympathy, service, and self-sacrifice” was Tagore’s vision (Quayum 3).
This is where Dipannita Datta enters the conversation. Tagore was subjected to the harshness of western education due to the colonial power Britain had over India. Datta writes, “the colonial education system manipulated subservience through bureaucracy”, and with this greed driven purpose, education became about uniformity in an attempt to better serve the powers that are going against the natural world (Datta 413). Being surrounded by nationalist mindsets and a divisive world, Tagore’s main purpose of education was to unite everyone into, what Datta calls, a “glocal” unity. Acknowledging the local within the global, and the global within the local, “perfection of unity is not in uniformity, but in harmony” (Datta 418).
Tagore wanted to free the parrot from the cage and said, “that education has its only meaning and object in freedom- freedom from ignorance about the laws of the universe, and freedom from passion and prejudice in our communication with the human world” (Datta 416). In this way education should be about freeing the individual, not by teaching them what to say, but rather through “independence, awareness of oneself as an equal citizen of the world- is to speak in one’s own voice” (Datta 415). To speak against another just because of their skin color, nationality, or religion, is to disconnect yourself from that part of the universe. A former student of Tagore writes about his experience at Santiniketan, “The school’s celebration of variety was also in sharp contrast with the cultural conservatism and separatism that has tended to grip India from time to time” (Pridmore 363). To give Tagore credit, he followed this belief of variety and balance to the point where he didn’t fully disavow the good that can come from a western education; “I always felt the need of the Western genius for imparting on my educational ideal that strength of reality which knows how to clear the path towards a definite end of practical good” (Pridmore 363). As Pridmore states, “we misunderstood Tagore badly if we suppose that he thought that the practical and the spiritual were opposed”, Tagore just had a different vision of how to balance and unite the two (Pridmore 358).
Where can the East and West realistically meet?
Western education has fallen short with the spiritual and the natural. Pridmore makes a poignant remark by saying, “Tagore’s understanding of education was his belief that we find our meaning and fulfilment relationally; in our relationship with one another, to be sure, but fundamentally in our kinship with all that is…Thus all education should be education into a relationship” (Pridmore 360-361). Right now, we are in a toxic relationship with our education, using her as a trophy wife who gets displayed on a wall or flaunted on Linked-In. We need to restore love, excitement, and purpose into our relationship with education because when we have genuine interest and motivation in our education is when we will fully absorb the knowledge into wisdom and begin to create, not just recite as the parrot does.
The best way to make the world a better place is to first create yourself as a good character of the universe. Sympathy and altruism without ulterior motivations, for both the universe and all its creations. Datta writes about this in the context of hospitality:
He also said: ‘India… is waiting to unite within itself Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist, and Christians, not by force, not by apathy of resignation, but in the harmony of active cooperation’. Tagore understood that claims to purity of cultures are untenable. He therefore perceived hospitality to cultures’ diversity and/or culture-transmission which would bring the harmony of active cooperation, as a crucial component of education and that was invariably intertwined with his realisation of spiritual-interculturality (Datta 418).
Only through service of others, instead of competition with others, can we find unity. The purpose of education should be tailored to service. Service to both the natural world and to what we know deep in our hearts to be good. We don’t necessarily have to change what we are doing in western schooling, just what we are doing it for. As Pridmore states, “It is as important to encourage children to love trees because they are lovable as it is to teach them the scientific reason why trees are necessary for our survival”, we are leaving behind the natural world at our mental and societal peril (Pridmore 362).
I think the most realistic way to honor Tagore’s legacy is to break down the current expectations we have of what makes a successful student. Stop building molds for good students to liken to and for bad students to break. Encourage talent, passion, and drive for service of others over drive for money and fame. Maybe that’s idealist and counterintuitive to steer away from money in the world we live in, but it is to steer into peace and harmony with yourself and with the universe, which no amount of money can buy you.
WORKS CITED
Datta, Dipannita. “Connecting Cultures: Rethinking Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideals of Education”, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Social Identities, Vol. 24, No. 3, 412-423. 25 Sep. 2017.
Pridmore, John. “The Poet’s School and the Parrot’s Cage: The Educational Spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore”, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, Vol. 14, No. 4, 355-367. Nov. 2009.
Quayum, Mohammad. “Education for Tomorrow: The Vision of Rabindranath Tagore”, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Asian Studies Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, 1-16. 2016.
Sprockets and Springes 