Tagore’s Educational Ideals

Abstract

Half a century ago, in a world of political violence, racial persecution and spiritual decline, Cambridge University was an ideal place for one whose total commitment to the study of literature and the arts was shared by teachers and students alike. In the late thirties, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, my passage to India, from Cambridge to Santiniketan, was thus less traumatic than might have been expected. Yet it was an intellectual adventure, an exploration of the unknown, which led from the gothic solemnity of King’s College Chapel to the desert-like expanse of West Bengal, which was dotted by palm trees and flat-roofed brick buildings under a blazing hot sky and a horizon receding into infinity. Both places cultivated the meditative calm of scholarship and learning. Both emphasised the acquisition of knowledge within a framework of traditional concepts and values. Their educational aim, in spite of differences in tradition, was not altogether dissimilar: the fostering of an intelligent understanding of the past combined with the need for intellectual and social adaptation to the present. Both seemed to me then, in my own vulnerable state, shelters for those, always in a minority, who took part willingly or unwillingly in the truly desperate battle against the forces of unreasoning malignity in a world grown monstrous and vile.