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Many students know Rabindranath Tagore as a poet who won the Nobel Prize. Fewer know that, as Visva-Bharati notes, he spent the last forty years of his life as a schoolmaster, or that he started it because he had found his own schools so dismal. His experiment at Santiniketan is worth knowing about if you have ever felt that school and learning were two different things.
What was school like for Tagore?
Tagore was born in Calcutta on 7 May 1861 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In his memoir My Reminiscences, he describes being sent from one school to another. Of the Bengal Academy he wrote: "The rooms were cruelly dismal with their walls on guard like policemen." He added that "the fact that likes and dislikes form a large part of the child mind was completely ignored", and that playing truant became a habit.
Home lessons were different. On Sunday mornings a tutor named Sitanath Dutta came to show the boys experiments in physical science, and Tagore remembered them with delight. In one, Dutta heated water with sawdust in a glass vessel so the boys could watch the hot water rise and the cold water sink until it boiled. A child who found school dull was gripped by watching convection happen.
How did the Santiniketan school begin?
According to Visva-Bharati's own history, Tagore's father Debendranath had built a small retreat for meditation on a seven-acre plot at Santiniketan in 1863. Tagore's school, the Brahmacharyasrama, started formally on 22 December 1901 with no more than five students. From 1925 it was called Patha-Bhavana.
The university's account describes the school as a deliberate rejection of the system the British had introduced. Simplicity was a basic principle. Classes were held in the open air in the shade of trees. Teachers and students shared one common life, and the curriculum included music, painting and drama alongside the usual subjects.
What did Tagore believe about learning?
The university's page on Tagore's educational ideas lists principles he put into practice early: that a child learns more easily in the mother tongue than in a foreign language, that learning through activity is more real than learning only from the written word, and that education should train all the senses along with the mind instead of cramming the brain with memorised facts. It records that Gandhi later took the first teachers for his basic schools from Santiniketan.
The Patha-Bhavana page names the school's distinctive features: open-air classes, personal contact between teachers and pupils, and training in self-government through a student council, the Asrama Sammilani, which runs activities such as a weekly literary meeting and village visits.
The little school grew into a university, Visva-Bharati. Tagore chose as its motto a Sanskrit line, Yatra visvam bhavatyekanidam, which the university translates as "Where the whole world meets in a single nest." In 1922 he also opened an Institute of Rural Reconstruction at Sriniketan, to help villagers solve their own problems rather than having solutions imposed from outside.
What can a student take from Tagore's way of working?
You probably cannot move your class under a tree. You can borrow the ideas behind it.
Study some topics outside. Take a physics chapter on motion or optics outdoors and look for examples: shadows, ripples, a ball thrown in the air.
Explain ideas in your first language. If a concept will not stick in English, explain it to yourself in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil or whatever you think in, then return to the English terms. Our post on mother tongue and learning looks at the evidence.
Watch the thing happen. Tagore remembered the sawdust demonstration for decades. When you study convection, diffusion or refraction, find a way to see it, at home or on screen.
Keep an art or music practice. Santiniketan treated these as part of education, not a break from it.
Run something yourself. The Asrama Sammilani gave pupils responsibility. A study group you organise, with its own rules, gives you the same.
When a process is hard to picture from a diagram, the Fermi Simulation Lab has interactive simulations for ideas that are easier to see than to read. Tagore's emphasis on activity has much in common with John Dewey's learning by doing.
This week, pick one science idea from your syllabus and find a way to watch it happen before you read about it again.
