Rabindranath Tagore: A Comparative Analysis of Indian Philosophy of Education vs. Western Philosophy of Education

Rabindranath Tagore was a great activist and intellectual of 21th century. Tagore was a rare great personality, in present era too. It represents important social and cultural changes of the present and rejects claims of classical social thinkers. He establishes a highly pluralistic and diverse view about the education. In Tagore’s philosophy of education, the aesthetic development of the senses was as important as the intellectual— if not more so—and music, literature, art, dance and drama were given great prominence in the daily life of the school. This was particularly so after the first decade of the school. Drawing on his home life at Jorasanko, Rabindranath tried to create an atmosphere in which the arts would become instinctive. One of the first areas to be emphasized was music. Rabindranath writes that in his adolescence, a ‘cascade of musical emotion’ gushed forth day after day at Jorasanko. ‘We felt we would try to test everything,’ he writes, ‘and no achievement seemed impossible…We wrote, we sang, we acted, we poured ourselves out on every side.’ (Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences 1917:141)