The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
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The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) (Ashgate World Philosophies Series) by Kalyan Sen Gupta (z-lib.org)
The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore
is on the sheer pursuit of knowledge with no end beyond it. In his satirical narrative ‘Tota Kahini’ (the tale of a parrot), he brings to light how our ‘knowledge-industry’ is inimical to the potential for meaningful living. In this story a minister decides that the king’s beautiful songbird should be properly educated. The beak of the bird is accordingly ‘stuffed with thousands of pages from thousands of books’. Eventually the bird can no longer sing, the only sound it makes being ‘the dry pages of books mak[ing] a rumbling noise within its stomach’: but at least the ‘education of the bird has been complete’. 45 ‘Tota Kahini’, needless to say, is a satire on the uselessness of mere learning. Tagore wants to make us aware of the evil of a traditional education system which encourages acquisition of inert ideas without contributing anything to significant living, an education which creates a gap between theory and practice. As he observes: It will be wrong to blame the students. Their academic world is on the one side, while their lived world is on another side. There is only the bridge of grammar or dictionary lying in the middle. Hence it does not come to me as a surprise when I see that the same erudite scholar highly proficient in philosophy and science also entertains at the same time many superstitions that dwarf his life, as well as poison his relation with others. For there is really an insuperable distance between his learning and life: the two do not meet. 46 In this way Rabindranath uncovers the barrenness of a system of education devoted to dry scholarship that remains external to one’s life, an education ‘showered on a spot which remains far away from our life’. 47 Education should not consist of the accumulation of dry ideas; rather it should be directed to the development of our awareness of how to cope with life, how to enrich it. There must be no gap between ideas and their application to life. What does Rabindranath intend when he insists that learning should be reflected in life, that it should equip us to live meaningfully, and to place us effectively in our lived situations? Certainly he does not want education to be seen merely as a means to a livelihood. According to him, learning becomes joyless and purely mechanical if it is looked upon only as an instrument for getting jobs and for material or financial gain. It is not the religion of man to remain imprisoned within the walls of necessities. No doubt we are to some extent bound by the chains of necessities; but we are also free at the same time. Our bodies occupy only a limited space, but for that reason we cannot build our house just in proportion to the space that our body can occupy. We must have enough room for our free movement; otherwise it will tell upon our health and happiness. The same is true of education. If the aim of education is only to make us fit for doing clerical or other jobs, it cannot contribute to the growth of mind. 48 Society, Marriage and Education 31 This does not, however, mean that learning has nothing to do with subsistence, only that education aims at something more than pragmatic ends. It should enable us to understand the situations in which we are placed and to adopt proper attitudes towards them. In fact education serves no real purpose in our life if it is severed from the familiar milieu in which we are rooted. It is then reduced to a completely uninteresting and mechanical process. It does not stimulate our ideas, nor does it nourish our emotions and imaginations. In the words of Tagore: When we find that our learning is not in tune with the way we live, that it does not depict … the social milieu we are rooted in, that it does not reflect our relation with our parents, friends, brothers and sisters … it becomes obvious to us how impotent it is to fulfil all the needs of our life. 49 Such remarks establish that Rabindranath wants to bring education nearer to the situations we are in, to the experiences we have in our lived situations which involve our various relations with the people around us – our personal relations with our families, with our beloved ones, and our relations with our socio-political surroundings. The aim of education should be to develop and nourish our beliefs, emotions and imaginations, enabling us to assess, evaluate, and take up appropriate attitudes towards our experience in the milieu in which we live. It is this conviction that accounts for Tagore’s disapproval of a system of education which accentuates theoretical learning. It provides a plethora of information about objects and events, but this information is too inadequate to give us an understanding of how we experience things in our life. Biology, say, may give us information about hormones and glands, but it cannot capture ‘my experience of sexual pleasure, the place it has in my marriage, the reaction I should have when age reduces it’. 50 To put it in a different way, there is no limit to the knowledge which our sophisticated learning may initiate us into; there are many things about birth, death, the brain or whatever that we can be enlightened about through academic learning. But even an encyclopaedic knowledge of these things will be unable to tell us anything about how we encounter them, or organize our experiences of them, what our responses to them are or should be. It cannot measure the throb of our intimate experiences of life, cannot determine the way we should look at them, the weight or value we should give to them. It is in relation to this experienced world of ours that education should endeavour to enable us to cope, by shaping our beliefs, responses and reactions. The aim of education should be to concentrate on our familiar lived world in order to equip us well for a beautiful life in harmony with our fellow beings. The foregoing indicates something of the aim of education as Rabindranath envisages it. We now turn to his insights into the issue of how it can be 32 Download 467.3 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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