"Painting by Shubnum Gill"
Rabindranath Tagore's Life and Important thoughts on Education
7th May, 1861 – 7th August, 1941
India’s Poet Laureate, Bengali Poet & Writer, Nobel Prize Winner, International Humanist & Educator, Artist, Dramatist, Dance Choreographer, Music Composer, Song Writer, Singer, Educator, Philosopher, Spiritualist, Orator
Born in Bengal, India, Rabindranath Tagore was the youngest and fourteenth child of his parents, Devendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. He was born into a distinguished family. His brothers and sisters excelled as poets, musicians, playwrights and novelists; thus, the Tagore home was filled with musical, literary, and dramatic pursuits. The entire family was involved with diverse national activities.
Important changes were taking place in Bengal at the time that Rabindranath was born. Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar had been attempting to reform the position of women in society. Schools using English as the language of teaching were being established, alongside the traditional Sanskrit schools. Vidyasagar had established Bengali-medium schools at different places in Bengal with little or limited government support. He had also established a center to train teachers for these schools. Rabindranath attended this school and, as he says himself, owed his love of Bengali language and literature to it. He was also sent to a number of English-speaking schools, but he did not like their teaching style.
He gradually withdrew from formal schooling when he was around 14 years old. The remainder of his education was carried out at home through his own personal efforts and with the help of tutors in various subjects. He also had lessons from professionals in wrestling, music and drawing. The manner of his early schooling was to leave a deep impression on him.
At the age of 12, Rabindranath’s father took him to Santiniketan, a meditation center the father had established in 1863. During their brief stay there, Devandranath gave his son lessons in Sanskrit, astronomy, and the scriptures. After these lessons, Rabindranath was free to roam among the fields and forests. This routine continued when father and son journeyed and stayed in the Himalayan foothills. After lessons in Sanskrit, English literature and religion, the would-be poet explored the mountains and forests. Life in close proximity to nature was unknown to him in the urban surroundings of Calcutta.
The close and affectionate contact between teacher and pupil that he felt when his father taught him was also completely absent in most schools. It was this childhood experience of the willing pupil enthusiastically following lessons given by his father in the manner of a noble teacher among agreeable surroundings that guided Rabindranath in establishing a school in Santiniketan in 1901.
In 1878, when he was 17, he was sent to London by his father to qualify for the Indian Civil Service or as a lawyer. He took his matriculation examination and then joined University College, London. He came to like his lessons in English Literature, and became exposed to British social life and Western music, both of which he enjoyed. But he returned home suddenly after some 18 months without completing his education.
Back in India, he continued with his personal education and his creative writing and music. His Sandhya Sangeet (Evening Songs), a volume of Bengali verse, came out in 1882. It was at about this time that he had a kind of mystical experience that led him to appreciate the unity of all that exists and himself as an integral part of it. Between 1884 and 1890 various volumes of his poems appeared, together with a profuse output of prose articles, criticism, plays and novels.
Tagore married Mrinalini Devi when he was 23, and together, the couple had five children. Early loss characterized his personal family life: in 1902, he lost his wife, and two of his children died before reaching adulthood.
Perhaps his most famous work – certainly in terms of international celebration – was ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings’. Following the publication of the latter in English, Tagore won international acclaimed in the West. In 1913, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature – becoming the first Asian and non-European to win the award. Tagore was subsequently knighted by the British crown in 1915. However, he renounced the English knighthood in 1919 in protest against British misconduct and excesses in India.
In 1918, Tagore founded Visva Bharati University – an international center of Culture and Humanistic Studies.
Tagore considered the lack of education to be the main obstacle in the way of national progress and at the root of all its problems. He thought that the basic objectives of any worthwhile national education system were to promote, creativity, freedom, joy, and an awareness of a country’s cultural heritage.
Therefore he worked assiduously towards developing an appropriate system of national education. He felt that each nation was different and this fact should be reflected in its system of education.
Some of his salient thoughts on this topic were:
“In every nation, education [should be] intimately associated with the life of the people.”
“Let the students gather knowledge and materials from different regions of the country, from direct sources and from their own independent efforts.”
“We must try to understand how [our native] genius express[es] itself… Unless we try to put these together and discover the integrating factors behind these diverse streams of thought and make them a subject of study at our universities, we would only be borrowing knowledge from abroad. The natural habitat for knowledge is where it is produced. The main task of universities is to produce knowledge, its dissemination is its secondary function. We must invite those intellectuals and scholars to our universities who are engaged in research, invention or creative activity.”
At the close of his life, Tagore’s creative corpus consisted of 40 plays, 8 novels, 4 novellas, 2,230 songs, over 2,000 pieces of art, and untold choreographed dances and music compositions.
Information excerpted principally from:
PROSPECTUS: The quarterly review of education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXIV, no. ¾, 1994. UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 1999.
