How Rabindranath Tagore's Educational Ideas Shaped Modern Learning and Why They Matter Today

Educational Ideas

Rabindranath Tagore's role in the innovation of educational ideas has been eclipsed by his fame as a poet. He was a pioneer in the field of education. For the last forty years of his life, he was content to be a schoolmaster in humble rural surroundings, even when he had achieved fame such as no Indian had known before. He was one of the first in India to think out for himself and put into practice principles of education which have now become commonplace in educational theory, if not yet in practice.

Today, we all know that what the child imbibes at home and in school is far more important than what he studies at college, that teaching is more easily and naturally communicated through the child's mother tongue than through an alien medium, that learning through activity is more real than through the written word, that wholesome education consists of training all the senses along with the mind instead of cramming the brain with memorized knowledge, and that culture is something much more than academic knowledge. However, few of Rabindranath's countrymen took notice of him when he made his first experiments in education in 1901 with less than half a dozen pupils. A poet's whim, thought most of them. Even today, few of his countrymen understand the significance of these principles in their national life. The schoolmaster is still the most neglected member of our community, despite the fact that Rabindranath attached more merit to what he taught children in his school than to the Hibbert lectures he delivered before the distinguished audience at Oxford.

Mahatma Gandhi adopted the scheme of teaching through crafts many years after Rabindranath had worked it out at Santiniketan. In fact, the Mahatma imported his first teachers for his basic school from Santiniketan.

If Rabindranath had done nothing else, what he did at Santiniketan and Sriniketan would be sufficient to rank him as one of India's greatest nation-builders.

With the years, Rabindranath had won the world, and the world, in turn, had won him. He sought his home everywhere in the world and would bring the world to his home. And so the little school for children at Santiniketan became a world university, Visva-Bharati, a center for Indian culture, a seminary for Eastern Studies, and a meeting place of the East and West. The poet selected for its motto an ancient Sanskrit verse, Yatra visvam bhavatieka nidam, which means, "Where the whole world meets in a single nest."

"Visva-Bharati," he declared, "represents India where she has her wealth of mind which is for all. Visva-Bharati acknowledges India's obligation to offer to others the hospitality of her best culture and India's right to accept from others their best."

In 1940, a year before he died, he put a letter in Gandhi's hand, "Visva-Bharati is like a vessel that is carrying the cargo of my life's best treasure, and I hope it may claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation."

MUSIC

Music, like all other arts in India, had stereotyped patterns. There was and is the classical tradition, whether of the north or the south, which has behind it centuries of devoted discipline, and which has within its limits attained near perfection. It is music, pure and abstract, and like all abstract art, its appeal is limited to those who have taken pains to understand what may be called its mathematics. For them, it can be very beautiful, hauntingly so, in the hands of a master, but ordinarily its appeal is limited. Its counterpart for the popular taste was the traditional religious and folk music, now rivaled by film music. The position was not dissimilar in literature where, before the nineteenth century, there was either the great storehouse of Sanskrit classics or the popular religious lyric and ballad.

What Rabindranath was doing in literature, he also tried to do in music. While caring for both the traditions, classical and folk, he respected the inviolable sanctity of neither and freely took from each what suited his purpose. He was not even averse to borrowing from Western melodies, although he did very little of that and made his own whatever he took from other sources. If his creative contribution in music has not received the same recognition as his contribution in literature, it is because, in the first place, the classical tradition of music in India, unlike that of literature, is still very alive and vital, and there was no vacuum to be filled.

In fact, Rabindranath did not attempt the creation of new forms in abstract music. What he did was to bring it down from its heights and make it keep pace with the popular idiom of musical expression. In the second place, his own music is so inextricably blended with the poetry of words that it is almost impossible to separate the mood from the words and the words from the tune. Each expresses and reinforces the other. Hence his songs have not the same appeal outside the Bengali-speaking zone as they have in his native Bengal.

In Bengal, however, each change of season, each aspect of his country's rich landscape, every undulation of the human heart, in sorrow or in joy, has found its voice in some song of his. They are sung in religious gatherings no less than in concert halls. Patriots have mounted the gallows with his song on their lips; and young lovers unable to express the depth of their feelings sing his songs and feel the weight of their dumbness relieved.

Rabindranath had said, "Whatever fate may be in store in the judgment of the future for my poems, my stories, and my plays, I know for certain that the Bengali race must needs accept my songs, they must all sing my songs in every Bengali home, in the fields and by the rivers... I feel as if music wells up from within some unconscious depth of my mind, that is why it has a certain completeness."