Rabindranath Tagore is a key figure in India’s history of psychology, indeed of India itself, even though he was never trained in the field. Born to an high caste Bengali family, Tagore rebelled against conventional thinking. He advocated for India’s independence, the empowerment of its poor and widowed, and the celebration of word and movement. In 1913, Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his elegant poetry. This was the first time the award was ever given to a non-Westerner. But its his progressive ideas about education that is the focus here. Those ideas were shaped by his own experiences but found an ally in those of Maria Montessori.

Tagore’s schools

In 1900, Tagore started his first school, at the age of 39. He was motivated by the stifling experiences of his own educational experience. At first, Tagore educated primarily middle class boys and girls from Calcutta. But later he expanded his aspirations to teaching boys of nearby villages who lived in poverty. (RT: PiE, 10, 13)

Tagore discussed what fueled his early choices. “Knowing something of the natural school which Nature supplies to all her creatures, I established my institution in a beautiful spot, far away from town, where the children had the greatest freedom possible” (A Tagore Reader, 215).

In the spirit of fostering a sense of community, part of the activities of Tagore’s students involved helping out neighbors around the school in various ways.

Still later, in 1918, Tagore opened a university called Visva-Bharati which still operates today. In 1924, he also founded a free rural school named Siksa-Satra. While Tagore wasn’t a formal psychologist, he wrote extensively on psychological and educational topics. And he put into practice his ideas, many of which echoed those of Maria Montessori, the Italian theorist and educator half a world away.

Rabindranath Tagore on education

As early as 1906, in the essay “The problem of education,” Tagore delivered a stinging critique of the educational practices of his day.

“What we now call a school in this country is really a factory, and the teachers are part of it … One advantage of a factory is that it can make goods exactly to order. Moreover, the goods are easy to label, because there is not much difference between what the different machines turn out. But there is a good deal of difference between one man and another, and even between what the same man is on different days.” (Oxford India, 112-113)

How then should a standardized approach be allowed to stand? Not by imitating the European model, Tagore argued. Such a model was not directly relevant to life in India.

It was Tagore’s belief that education should be modeled after ancient Indian educational practices of teaching. Namely that students and their teachers “should live together and in a natural surroundings.” (Oxford India, 118)

By 1924, Tagore’s advice to those teachers was to embrace certain truths about childhood. Tagore observed that: “Children’s minds are sensitive to the influences of the world. Their subconscious minds are active, always imbibing some lesson, and realizing the joy of knowing. This sensitive receptivity helps them, without any strain, to master language…” (A Tagore Reader, 214; Oxford India, 107-08)

Tagore believed that children were also able to master abstractions through their natural ability to both guess and to perceive the connection between words and reality.

As such, Tagore argued that “children should be surrounded with the things of nature which have their own educational value. Their minds should be allowed to stumble upon and be surprised at everything that happens in today’s life. The new tomorrow will stimulate their attention with new facts of life.” (Oxford India, 109)

Further, Tagore noted that the best education increases the child’s ability to engage in improvisation, as life rarely supplies ready-made dilemmas. Life, instead, supplies “constant occasions to explore one’s capacity through surprises of achievement.” (RT: PiE, 57)

Yet Tagore noted with dismay what was happening in traditional schools, at precisely the time when children’s minds  are so “alert, restless and eager.” He colorfully described the typical school as an “education factory, lifeless, colorless, dissociated from the context of the universe within bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead.” Tagore argued that this misplaced emphasis on discipline “kills the sensitiveness of the child mind” (A Tagore Reader, 215).

Purposefulness, which is a necessary ability for an adult, requires such discipline. But Tagore felt it was premature to inflict such an a priori goal-directedness on children.

By 1925, the sponge like nature of Tagore’s intellect incorporated elements of Maria Montessori, psychoanalysis, and even the Boy Scouts into his ideas on education. While there was support for his ideas outside of India, Tagore encountered many naysayers at home. He found obstacles to his vision in those educated in the old manner, parental expectations, and the upbringing of teachers. He also found the guiding documents of “official” schools an impediment, even those of his own. (RT: PiE, 59)

But despite criticism at home, Tagore had also begun to garner an international audience. The Nobel Prize helped.

Tagore on tour and on human nature

Rabindranath Tagore went on a speaking tour In the United States in 1916-17. His lectures were collected into the book, Personality that same year. Here his ideas on human nature broader than childhood learning were aired.

“We imagine that our mind is a mirror,” Tagore declared, “that it is more or less accurately reflecting what is happening outside us. On the contrary our mind itself is the principal element of creation. The world, while I am perceiving it, is being incessantly created for myself in time and space.” (A Tagore Reader, 265)

Elsewhere, Tagore expressed his belief that “under our highly complex modern conditions, mechanical forces are organized with such efficiency that the material produced grow far in advance of man’s selective and assimilative capacity to simplify them into harmony with his nature and needs.” (RT: PiE, 49)

Elmhirst as Tagore systematizer

L. K. Elmhirst was a teacher at one of Rabindranath Tagore’s school and also his personal secretary and friend. As such he was ideally positioned to , articulate some of Tagore’s concepts more systematically.

“It is between the ages of six and twelve that the growing child is most absorbed in gathering impressions though sight, smell, hearing and taste, but more especially through touch and the uses of the hands. From the start, therefore, the child enters … as an apprentice in handicraft as well as housecraft.” (RT: PiE, 68)

Within Tagore’s approach, young children might be engaged in sewing, paper making, brick making and other simpler activities. As children grew older, boys and girls were encouraged to take on more challenging tasks, such as weaving, making pottery, repairing watches or type setting. The key was to have these tasks be ones that were actually performed in their actual community, not something suggested in a book written in England. Field trips to local work places such as the post office, police station, or tailor shop could further interest in things the child might aspire to someday do. In the process, senses of community collaboration and cooperation could be instilled. (RT: PiE, 70, 76).

Summing up, Elmhirst describes education at its best providing “freedom for growth, experiment, enterprise and adventure, all (of which) are dependent on Imagination, that greatest of gifts … How often do we stifle the child’s imagination for fear that he will never grow up to be a practical man!” (RT: PiE, 79, 81)

Tagore on movement and learning

Rabindranath Tagore felt it was essential that a child’s imagination and creativity not be stifled. He felt music and dance should be integrated into the educational experience. This was not just because such activities encouraged creativity, but also because they required the child to use their entire bodies and not just sit quietly in a chair.

In an article published in 1924, “The Art of Movement in Education, Tagore argued: “It is a function of the body, not merely to carry out vital actions so that we may live and move, but so that we may express, and not with the face alone, but with the legs, the arms and the hands. All our limbs have their own power to express… We often take a brisk walk when we are agitated, because though needs bodily expression if it is perform its work freely and fully. Children must dance. They must be restless…

“The result is that the whole body, which is designed for expression through movement, loses one of its most important missions in life, the urge to express.” (RT: PiE, pp. 102-104)

Tagore never thought of himself as a psychologist, of course. He was skeptical of so called sciences to reduce human experience into manageable but ultimately insufficient concepts and rules.

Tagore argued that “science, in its theorems and formulas is insufficient to capture the richness of sensory experience … Science deals with this element of sameness, the law of perspective and color combination, and not with the pictures—the pictures that are the creations of a personality and which appeal to the personality of those who see them.” (A Tagore Reader, 269)

Montessori and Rabindranath Tagore

As may already be clear, there is a great deal of Tagore’s thinking that mirrors that of Maria Montessori, the influential Italian physician and educator. While Tagore began developing his ideas independently, he was excited to discover her writings.

In 1929, the First International Montessori Congress was held in Denmark. With a clear focus on spreading her views on education globally, the Italian physician organized the Association Montessori Internationale. This action acknowledged the reality that adherents to the Montessori method and national organizations were already widespread. Her approach already had roots in locales as diverse as the United States, Argentina and India. (Association Montessori Internationale, pp. 37-38)

Tagore traveled to Denmark to be part of that historic gathering that also included the presence of a young Jean Piaget.

For her part, Montessori also had a profound interest in India. Feeling the need to escape fascist Italy and pressure to use her methods in service of the military, Maria Montessori and her son booked passage there. On January 6^th, 1940 , upon hearing of her safe arrival in India, Tagore sent Montessori a warm letter of greeting.

“It is a joy to hear from you and your good wishes which I warmly reciprocate. As you know, I am a great admirer of your work in education and along with my countrymen think it very fortunate indeed that India, at this hour, can get your guidance in creative self-expression.” (Association Montessori Internationale, 49)

Tagore on broader social issues

Tagore was a poet, a novelist, and an advocate for those who lacked power in the existing cultural climate of his day. These included those who belonged to different races and castes as well as the plight of widows who enjoyed few rights and opportunities at that time.

“There are of course natural differences in human races,” Tagore wrote, “which should be preserved and respected, and the task of our education should be to realize unity in spite of them, to discover truth through the wilderness of their contradictions.” (A Tagore Reader, 216)

For Tagore, his educational project was always linked to the development of a vital and self-reliant independent India.

But Tagore also felt the call for a unified world that was powerfully felt in many circles throughout the world. He spoke passionately to a group of teachers in China in the 1920s of his dream. “It will be a great future, when base passions are no longer stimulated within us, when human races come closer to one another, and when through their meeting new truths are revealed.” (A Tagore Reader, 216)

When he delivered this address, the horrors of World War II were still 15 years away.

Mark Carlson-Ghost,

References

Association Montessori Internationale (1970). Maria Montessori: A centenary anthology 1870-1970. Amsterdam: Association Montessori Internationale, 1970.

Tagore, R. (2009). The Oxford India Tagore: Selected writings on education and nationalism, ed. Uma Das Gupta. New Dehli: Oxford University Press.

Tagore, R. (1961). Rabindranath Tagore, pioneer in education. Essays and exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and L. K. Elmhirst. London: John Murray.

Tagore, R. (1966). A Tagore Reader, R. Tagore & A. C. Chakravarty, eds. Boston: Beacon Press. .