Tagore’s philosophy of education exactly conforms to his general philosophy. He was dissatisfied with the existing system of education because it ignored our own customs, traditions, conventions manners, ideologies, morals and ideals. It had taken Indians away from their own culture and civilization.
So Tagore considered the then educational institutions as “educational factories lifeless, colourless, and disassociated from the context of the universe within the bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead.” He felt that traditional schools gave information and knowledge.
They stressed only on the intellectual side and ignored practical side altogether, the other aspects of human growth. Tagore on the other hand, emphasised the innumerable implications of education and said, “Education is a permanent part of the adventure of life. It is not like a painful hospital treatment, curing students’ instincts.” He emphasised the following aims of education:
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About the main objects of education he said,
“The best function of education is to enable us to realise that to live as a man is great, requiring profound philosophy for its ideal, poetry for its expression and hearism for its conduct.”
Tagore explains the highest aim of education in the following words:
The highest education is that does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools but it is severely repressed. From our very childhood, habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weared away from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days.
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Thus the greatest aim of education for which we come prepared, is neglected and we are made to lose our world to find a bagful of information instead. We rob the child of his earth to teach geography, of language to teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates. He was born in the human world, but is banished into the world of living gramophones to expiate for the original sin of being born in ignorance.