The poet’s school and the parrot’s cage: the educational spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate, was a man of myriad gifts, but he sought to articulate a single global vision. He believed that for our flourishing we must strive towards ‘the other and the beyond’. In so doing we discover that, as we seek, we are ourselves being sought. Tagore believed that we find our meaning and fulfilment relationally; in our relationships one with another, to be sure, but fundamentally in our kinship with all that is. We must be liberated, Tagore believed, from the bounds of our separateness and so discover a wholeness larger than our individual well‐being. That wholeness is ultimately realised in our union with the eternal Divine Spirit. In the establishment of his ‘poet’s school’ at Shantiniketan Tagore sought to make his ideals come true. This paper will focus on Tagore’s understanding of childhood and on the pattern of education by which, he believed, the spirit of the child may be nurtured. It will also enter a plea that we return to someone whose neglect in the West has been much to its loss.

Keywords:

• Rabindranath Tagore
• spirituality
• spiritual education

Notes

1. Twenty years later, Tagore opened his university, which he named Visva Bharati, in Surul. The early 1920s also saw the establishment in Surul of ‘The Institute of Rural Reconstruction’. Tagore later named the Institute ‘Sriniketan’ (‘The Abode of Grace’). This foundation was the work of Tagore’s disciple, Leonard Elmhirst. (Elmhirst, inspired by Tagorean ideals, subsequently founded Dartington Hall, now, alas, no longer.) From what was learned at Sriniketan, a further school emerged, a weekly boarding school for village children, to which Tagore gave the name ‘Siksha‐Satra’. The stated purpose at Siksha‐Satra was to provide a pattern of education which would meet the needs of any child in a rural society. According to Elmhirst, the school would seek to nurture ‘the overflowing abundance of child life’ by providing ‘the utmost liberty within surroundings that are filled with creative possibilities’. Siksha‐Satra was to be a place where children would discover ‘the joy of play that is work … and of work that is play’ (Tagore and Elmhirst 1961, 68). Tagore’s educational institutions were taken over by Indian government in 1951 – with lamentable consequences.

2. In correspondence, Jerome Berryman has suggested to me that Tagore would have welcomed the educational approach of ‘Godly Play’ (Berryman 2009).

3. There are some in our own day who believe as did Tagore that we must be attentive to nature if we are to flourish. John White sees the place for the ‘spiritual’ to be in the recognition of ‘the wonder of it all’ (1994a, 1994b). Human flourishing, he holds, needs to be understood against some kind of cosmic framework. We enjoy the sensation of the wind and the sun on our bodies. We sense an attachment to nature as our dwelling place. We delight in the beauty of the natural world, such delight yielding at times to the sense of the sublime. We still wonder at the very existence of it all. Awareness of a cosmic framework to our existence calls for an ethical response, for a respect for the natural world, for the desire to safeguard it from abuse and depredation, to preserve the wilderness, to save endangered species. It is White’s ‘ungrounded intuition’ that such values are ‘ineliminable features of our well‐being’ and that we have good reason to bring up children to adhere to them. Tagore would have agreed.

4. In the West we are coy about introducing the language of love into educational discourse. One philosopher who is not reluctant to do so is Paddy Walsh, who writes, ‘Only from the perspective of love of the world can the values of the ethical life, of the rich or the full life, and of possessions be balanced and integrated’ (Walsh 1993, 115).