write about the views of rabindranath tagore on education on his school santi
Answers
According to him, nature is the best of all teachers. Nature will provide students with necessary situation to learn things. No pressure should be exerted upon the student to learn anything. It is nature which will ingraft the spirit of learning in the mind of a student to pursue the education he likes and shape his behaviour and character.
He is the one who said goodbye to the book-centered education for the first time which was almost unthinkable during the then pedantic bookish learning system. As he believed confining students only to text books does no good but perishes the natural instincts of a students as well as their creative skills. Students should be freed from the book-centered education system and should be given a broader avenue for learning.
He always emphasized in giving the freedom to learner. He said that the children should be given freedom so that they are able to grow and develop according to their own wishes. And most importantly what he used to think is that it is a mistake to judge children by the standards of grownups. Adults ignore the gifts of children and insist that children must learn through the same process as they do. Students should have their own freedom to learn as they please in various sectors of the realm of knowledge.
According to Tagore, teaching should be practical and real but not artificial and theoretical. As he once said, "Educational institution must not be a dead cage in which living minds are fed with food artificially prepared. It should be a open house, in which students and teachers are at one"
And like he said there, he always believed that there should be living contact between the teacher and the taught.
Above all, Tagore attached great importance to the fine arts in his educational curriculum. To him, dance, music, drama, painting etc. should form a part of educational process. Students should take active part in these finer aspects of human life for these are very essential to enrich one's soul.
Not surprisingly, he found his outside formal schooling to be inferior and boring and, after a brief exposure to several schools, he himself refused to attend school in his early life. That is why as an alternative to the existing forms of education, he started a small school of education- “Shantiniketan” which was later developed into a university known as Viswa Bharati, where he tried to develop an alternative model of education that is stemmed from his own learning experience!
It's an abode of peace where teachers and students live together in a spirit of perfect comradeship. The motto of the institution is "where the whole world forms its one single nest." It has open spaces and atmosphere of freedom surrounded by natural environment. It is open to all irrespective of country, race, religion, or politics. It is centered around simple living and high thinking and has spiritual and religious atmosphere. The establishment of Shantiniketan reflected the desired goal of Tagore in the educational sphere.
Economist and Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, Satyendra Nath Bose who is renowned for his fundamental work in quantum physics, Satyajit Ray, the great filmmaker and writer, Giuseppe Tucci who is considered as one of the founders of the field of Buddhist Studies - to name just a few, all the great minds are fabricated in there time and again fulfilling the long cherished aspirations of Rabindranath Tagore.