by Panduka Karunanayake

Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine and former Director, Staff Development Centre,
University of Colombo

The 34th J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Lecture

14 February 2025

SLFI Auditorium, Colombo

(Continued from 17 Feb.)

Tagore and humanism

Tagore was born to a wealthy Bengali family in British colonial India in the year 1861. This was a time of great social transformation in India, involving political, social, religious and literary movements. In his youth he saw the organisational structure that I described in its formative days, and immediately realised how it is unsuited for anything except the British colonial plans. In particular, he appreciated the strengths of traditional Indian education such as the gurukula, ashrama and tapovana systems, the value of the aesthetic sense to human growth and the role of the environment in our lives. He placed a huge importance on emotions and social values, and decried a materialistic or hedonistic approach to life. Always explaining his ideas through brilliant similes, he said: “The timber merchant may think that flowers and foliage are only frivolous decorations for a tree, but he will know to his cost that if these are eliminated, the timber follows them.”

But he also saw the value of the science and technology that the British were bringing in. He wasn’t a simplistic indigene fighting to chase the British out. He wanted to combine the good of both the old and the new, both India and the world. The best description that we can give of the man is call him a great harmoniser of ideas and an incorrigible optimist.

According to Subhransu Maitra, who is a well-known Indian intellectual who translates Bengali works into English, Tagore’s experimental journey on education lasted approximately fifty years, from the 1890s to the 1940s, and evolved through three phases. In the first phase, roughly from the 1890s to the 1910s, he thought of education as ‘freedom to learn,’ in contradistinction to the kind of straightjacketed rote-learning that British colonial education had introduced to India. He also fought for education in the mother tongue instead of English. This was the time Tagore set up the Brahmacharyashrama, a school for boys in Santiniketan. In the second phase, from the 1910s to the 1930s, he thought of education as ‘freedom from ignorance and want’ and as a powerful tool to emancipate humanity from poverty, superstition and suffering. This was the time when he set up the Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, his version of a university, as well as Sriniketan, his effort at rural upliftment. And in the third phase, from the 1930s until his death in 1941, which was the time when Visva-Bharati was flourishing, he thought of education as an internationalist, humanist project or ‘freedom from bondage’, in contradistinction to nationalism. I will follow Tagore’s journey in this sequence, and at each stage try to highlight the lessons his educational philosophy gives us today.

But in toto, I feel that the common thread that runs through this journey is his commitment to humanistic education – a term that actually became popular only after his death, following the work of educational psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. So let me start by briefly explaining what humanistic education means.

Humanistic education is the application of the principles of humanism or humanistic philosophy to education. I am sure that many in this audience already know what humanism means, but bear with me when I try to explain it. I want to highlight the fact that humanism is not the same as some concepts with which it is often conflated – such as humanitarianism or humaneness or the humanities. In essence, humanism believes in the primacy of human agency, or the belief that humans are in charge of their own destinies; it is an Enlightenment idea that took agency away from divinity and placed it in the hands of the human being. (But of course, it is also very much part of some ancient philosophies.) But it identifies this agency as a responsibility both to oneself and one’s society, rather than as a libertarian licence. The ideal of humanism is human flourishing – not hedonism, nor any goal in the afterlife.

In humanism, human beings are considered independent, inherently good and capable of positive growth. One might look at these assumptions somewhat cynically – but it is hard to deny these qualities to a newborn child who has arrived on this world in all its innocence. As Tagore once famously said, “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”

As Ratna Navaratnam (1958) wrote in New Frontiers in East-West Philosophies of Education:

“Humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity…The child is put at the centre of the picture and the educator judges the truth of any theory and the success of any system, by the contribution it makes to the transformation of creative childhood into creative manhood.”

In humanistic education, several features can be identified:

* The student is given a free choice to decide what to study, how and for how long, within reason. As a result, the motivation to learn is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic goals such as exams, grades or certificates.

* The educational experience is left open, exploratory and self-driven. There is little or no emphasis on a curriculum, syllabus or what we today call ‘intended learning outcomes’.

* The setting for learning is safe. What the teacher does is provide the student with the resources to quench curiosity and play a supportive and facilitatory role, as a resource person and guide. There is no coercion, judgement, criticism or corporeal punishment.

* The learning environment focuses on both cognitive and emotional aspects of the learning experience; in other words, both ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ are considered valid and important to the learning process.

* And finally, at least a significant portion of the learning time is spent in contact with nature and the environment, rather than inside a classroom.

With that background, let me now turn to the three phases in Tagore’s journey in education.

Phase 1: ‘Freedom to learn’

Tagore was urged to experiment with education because he saw the unsatisfactory nature of schools, which he described as “…educational factories, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls, staring like eyeballs of the dead…It provided information and knowledge for the intellectual growth and it neglected the aspects of human growth.”

Let me quote Tagore at length:

“The way we understand it, the word school means an education factory or mill of which the schoolmaster is a part. The bell goes off at half past ten and the mill begins to work. As the mill starts, the master also keeps spouting off. The mill closes at four o’clock. The master too, stops spouting and the students return home, their heads stuffed with factory-made lessons. Later, at the time of examinations, these lessons are evaluated and stamped.

“The advantage of factory production is that the products are exactly made to a standard and the products of different factories differ but little from one another. So, it is easy to grade them. But individuals differ a great deal from one another. Even an individual may not be the same from one day to the next.

“Even so, a man cannot get from machines what he gets from another man. A machine produces, it can’t give. It can supply oil, but it can’t light a lamp.”

Tagore’s journey was dedicated to find a suitable alternative to such factory-style education

You can see that he disliked uniformity and intellectual dominance in education, and he preferred freedom to do, experience, feel and learn. This is especially noteworthy today, because educational psychologists have since found the importance of the affective domain for learning: the so-called cognitive-emotional model of learning.

Importantly, the reason he liked a more active style of learning is not merely because it is better for assimilation or long-term memory – as we are accustomed to think today – but because it promoted the growth of individual talents and tastes and imparted a communitarian rather than an individualistic outlook to life.

He also preferred a more idyllic, rural setting to educate children, because he felt that cities and towns rob the students of their bonding with nature, which was necessary for the growing mind to grow freely, wholistically and strongly. This also included creating opportunities for social contact with the rural folk, and trying to help the villagers at least in small ways. So he was especially keen that school and society were welded together. That was his way of teaching two things: first, communication skills, and second, a sense of social service. It would be interesting to compare this to a similar local experiment: Dr C.W.W. Kannangara’s Handessa rural education scheme. (For an excellent account, see Gunasekara [2013].)

To Tagore, the school-society link was also necessary to impart moral virtues: “It is utterly futile to expect that the preaching of a few textbook precepts…at school will set right everything when countless varieties of dishonesty and perversity are destroying decency and taste every moment in today’s artificial life. This only results in different kinds of hypocrisy and insolent flippancy in the name of morality…”

All around us today, we can see how textbook-based teaching of virtues has led to hypocrisy among those who do wrong with impunity, flippancy among those who allow wrong to happen as if it is the norm, and cynicism among those who try to reconcile what they see with what they were taught in classrooms.

I am sure you will appreciate that some of Tagore’s humanistic ideas are being put into practice in pre-school and primary education even today, for instance following the teachings of Maria Montessori. In Sri Lanka, however, because of the bottleneck effect of exams, they are being throttled by the competitiveness and the rush to obtain certificates. This has enormous implications to our own education system. What Tagore taught us – by not judging learning through exams – is that if we had exams, much of what we expect students to learn would be ignored because they are not specifically assessed in the exams. The reason we want exams is because we want to compare student with student. But how can we compare student with student if each student is a unique person? What do we value greater: the comparison or the uniqueness? We must be careful when answering this question, because often it turns out that our answer is actually not that of the educationist but that of the industrialist, and not that of our society’s but that of the countries in the core of knowledge production.

Phase 2: ‘Freedom from ignorance and want’

This is perhaps the phase of his work that is hardest to pin down to a few fundamentals. But I will try.

To me, it appears that his first lesson is to tailor education to our own needs, rather than to import and transplant an educational system from elsewhere. (Tagore himself was, of course, warning about the dangers of blindly following the British system.) This is an excellent testament for what we today call contextual knowledge or conditional knowledge.

Looking around, I cannot help feel that this is such an important lesson for us too. I wish that as educationists we paid more attention to this. We cannot do so if we merely ask our teachers to do what international experts advise. We must study our own society, our own past practices and experiments, how they have succeeded or failed and why, what would work for us now and so on. Tagore said:

“Only when we are able to channel the current of education in our country through the numerous experiments of numerous teachers, it will become a natural thing of the country. Only then will we come across real teachers here and there, now and then. Only then a tradition, a succession of teachers will naturally follow. We cannot invent a particular educational system by labelling it as ‘national’. We can call ‘national’ only education of that kind which is being conducted in a variety of ways through a variety of endeavours by a variety of our countrymen…When a particular education system seeks to fasten a static ideal on to the country, we cannot call it ‘national’. It is communal and therefore, fatal to the country.”

To me, such a uniform education system is worse than communal – at best it would facilitate pedantry, at worst it could even facilitate totalitarianism and fascism.

Importantly, Tagore was keen to point out that when times change, the same energy needs to be spent on amending our systems and practices. In one speech he used a beautiful simile: he likened time to a river, and said that people who don’t change with changing times are like the people who would not change the position of the ferry even after the river has changed its position. He asked, How can they cross the river from the old ferry? This would be great advice for a country that still runs its educational system dictated to by policies that are over eighty years old.

The next crucial lesson is his trust in science and technology – but only appropriate technology – as well as his disdain for outdated traditions, superstitions and rituals. In this sense, he was remarkably modern. He said:

“When in the East we were busy calling upon the ghostbuster in case of disease, the astrologer to placate hostile planets in case of trouble, worshiping the goddess Sitala to ward off smallpox and similar epidemics, and practising home-grown black magic to get rid of enemies, in the West a woman asked Voltaire: ‘I have heard one can kill whole flocks of sheep by chanting a mantra?’ Voltaire replied: ‘It can certainly be done, but an adequate supply of arsenic along with it is also required.’ It cannot be absolutely ruled out that a modicum of faith in magic and the supernatural still persists in isolated pockets in Europe, but a trust in the efficacy of arsenic in this connection is almost universal there. That is why they can kill us whenever they want to and we are liable to die even when we do not want to.”

Tagore was wise enough to note that the British colonial government was actually quite keen to deny Indians this gift of science and technology. He pointed out that the colonial colleges and universities actually functioned with many constraints and limitations imposed by the colonial government. One of the main hopes that Tagore had in establishing Visva-Bharati was overcoming this. He knew that foreigners, both western and eastern, yearn to come to India to learn about her strong and vibrant achievements in the humanities. He welcomed them. In return, he also created space for Indians to come there and learn what the West had to teach – which, of course, was mainly science. This was the confluence of East and West that Tagore envisaged for Visva-Bharati. And I think that one
of the reasons why Visva-Bharati failed later on was that after Independence, India had an alternative, perhaps better way to forge ahead with science, when Jawaharlal Nehru set up the Indian Institutes of Technology. But I wonder whether Tagore’s plan in combining the strength in our humanities with the strength in science and technology of other lands within our educational system could still serve us here.

Tagore also created Sriniketan and its Institute of Rural Reconstruction, a rural upliftment
programme using what would later come to be called ‘appropriate technology’. This was not a
blind exercise in importing European machines and gadgets like washing machines or floor polishers. Instead, it was an attempt to solve the problems faced by the rural folk by the use of scientific knowledge and appropriate technological tools. It included components such as rural education, village sanitation, roving dispensaries, anti-malaria and child welfare schemes, cooperative societies, scientific
agriculture, experimental farming, dairy farming, weaving, tannery, smithy, carpentry and other
projects. It was designed to promote selfconfidence and self-help and eliminate ignorance and superstition among the villagers. As Tagore described his educational mission:

“Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of intellectual life of India, but the centre of her economic life as well. It must cultivate land, breed cattle, to feed itself and its students; it
must produce all necessaries, devising the best means and using the best materials, calling science to its aid. Its very success would depend on the success of its industrial ventures carried out on the co-operative principle; which will unite the teachers and students in a living and active bond of necessity. This will also give us a practical, industrial training, whose motive is not profit.”

When the time came for Tagore to send his son Rathindranath for higher education, he sent him not to Oxford but to learn agricultural science at Illinois: “Indians should learn to become better farmers in Illinois than better ‘gentlemen’ in Oxford”. Similarly, he sent the children of his relatives and friends, including his son-in-law, to learn other skills, such as scientific dairykeeping, the cooperative movement and rural medical systems.

We can see that Tagore’s educational philosophy was not merely bookish but also practical, not merely ideological but also pragmatic, not merely effective but also of quality, and not merely focused on the individual but also on uplifting the community. We can see that it was not pedantic but contextual, not blind but appropriate, and not profit-oriented but promoting human flourishing.

(To be concluded)