Nature is the best classroom: Rabindranath Tagore

By: Barnali Bose, Editor-ICN Group

KOLKATA: A great Indian who believed that true education is the result of man’s tryst with his environment was none other than Rabindranath Thakur( anglicised Tagore) also endearingly called Robi thakur or Gurudev.

Tagore was born on May 7( 25th Baishakh ),1861, in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta (now Kolkata) that housed an affluent family profoundly involved in the socio-religious and cultural innovations of the !9th century Renaissance.

To quote him,“I was brought up in an atmosphere of aspiration, aspiration for expansion of the human spirit. We in our home sought freedom of power in our language,freedom of imagination in our literature,freedom of soul in our religious creeds and freedom of mind in our social environment.”

That he was a distracted student in class is well known. His mind was a  wanderer thirsting to explore the diverse facets of the universe and the rigid confines of the classroom was impossible for young Robi to bear.

After having shifted him from one elite school to another,  his parents realised that it was futile to enforce schooling upon him. The best of tutors were thus engaged to teach him at home. Later he was sent to london to acquire a degree in law but returned without having completed the same.

The conventional educational system seemed to stifle his young energetic spirit as he believed in practicality.That true education is not synonymous with university degrees is proved by the fact that the only degrees Rabindranath Thakur had ever got were honorary ones.

One day  Robi Thakur, then eight, observed  raindrops falling on the leaves and composed his first two-line verse, “ Jol pore,pata nore( raindrops fall, leaves move ) ”.

It was the cultural richness of his  family that enabled young Rabindranath to imbibe subconsciously at his own pace, the knowledge and experience that no formal education could ever have enriched him with.

In the eighty years of  his life, he had written over twenty-five volumes of poetry, fifteen plays, ninety short stories, eleven novels, thirteen volumes of essays, initiated and edited various journals, prepared Bengali textbooks, kept up a correspondence involving thousands of letters, composed and sung over two thousand songs; and after the age of seventy – created more than two thousand pictures and sketches.

He composed the national Anthem of India,’Jana Gana Mana’ as well as that of Bangladesh namely‘ Amar Shonar Bangla’ and was the inspiration behind that of Sri Lanka.

He was not only the first Indian but also the first Asian to be honoured with the Nobel prize for Literature for his anthology of poems Gitanjali, in 1913,translated by him from Bengali at a time when he wanted to revive  the emotions he had experienced while composing them.

Unfortunately,the Nobel Prize was stolen in 2004. Later, two replicas of the Nobel medallion of Rabindranath Tagore were handed over to the Visva-Bharati University by Sweden’s Nobel Foundation.

Tagore’s  compassionate nature contributed to his philosophy of life that manifested into his educational ideology.

As a young boy he was shocked at the sight of a hunted blood-smeared rabbit  and flashes of the gory scene haunted him for many years to come.The pathos he saw on his father’s face when his mother passed away left a lasting imprint in his young impressionable mind.

That he wished to erase the margin between the ruler and the ruled is reflected in the incident when he  removed the ancestral zamindari high throne and sat with the commoners.The Jallianwala Bagh massacre shocked him and he gave up his knighthood to protest against the mass shooting .

He found a soulmate in Kadambari devi, his elder brother’s wife with whom he shared more than love for poetry. Societal restraints imposed upon Rabindranath a marital relationship with Mrinalini Devi after which Kadambari Devi is believed to have ended her life. Rabindranath was devastated.

The inner restlessness in him found manifestation in Shantiniketan, the Abode of peace that later evolved into Visva Bharati University, a fusion of the best of the East and the West.He said, “Don’t limit your child to your own learning for he is born at another time.”

Tagore advocated an education system deep-rooted in Indian culture yet reaching out to inhale and absorb the progressiveness of the West.That his school is a co-educational one indicates his progressive attitude towards education.

He envisaged a wide spectrum of education that was not restricted to cramming of facts and acquiring of university degrees. He believed that development of one’s aesthetic self was as important as that of one’s intellectual self.

This  fundamental aim of education can be seen in another great philosopher Rousseau’s idea of how “Man is born free, but lives in chains.” Rabindranath Thakur echoed this idea of freedom as the pathway to true education.

Tagore stated, “The regular type of school is a manufactory and is a mere method of discipline specially for grinding out uniform results.The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.” Indeed his philosophy of education is life-encompassing. In fact,it is life itself.

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