No More Learning

But when we go to borrow help from a foreign neighbourhood we are apt
to overlook the real source of help behind all that is external and
apparent. Had the deep-water fishes happened to produce a scientist
who chose the jumping of a monkey for his research work, I am sure he
would give most of the credit to the branches of the trees and very
little to the monkey itself. In a foreign University we see the
branching wildernesses of its buildings, furniture, regulations, and
syllabus, but the monkey, which is a difficult creature to catch and
more difficult to manufacture, we are likely to treat as a mere
accident of minor importance. It is convenient for us to overlook the
fact that among the Europeans the living spirit of the University is
widely spread in their society, their parliament, their literature,
and the numerous activities of their corporate life. In all these
functions they are in perpetual touch with the great personality of
the land which is creative and heroic in its constant acts of
self-expression and self-sacrifice. They have their thoughts published
in their books as well as through the medium of living men who think
those thoughts, and who criticise, compare and disseminate them. Some
at least of the drawbacks of their academic education are redeemed by
the living energy of the intellectual personality pervading their
social organism. It is like the stagnant reservoir of water which
finds its purification in the showers of rain to which it keeps itself
open. But, to our misfortune, we have in India all the furniture of
the European University except the human teacher. We have, instead,
mere purveyors of book-lore in whom the paper god of the bookshop has
been made vocal.

A most important truth, which we are apt to forget, is that a teacher
can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can
never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame.
The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living
traffic with his knowledge, but merely repeats his lessons to his
students, can only load their minds; he cannot quicken them. Truth not
only must inform but inspire. If the inspiration dies out, and the
information only accumulates, then truth loses its infinity. The
greater part of our learning in the schools has been wasted because,
for most of our teachers, their subjects are like dead specimens of
once living things, with which they have a learned acquaintance, but
no communication of life and love.

The educational institution, therefore, which I have in mind has
primarily for its object the constant pursuit of truth, from which the
imparting of truth naturally follows. It must not be a dead cage in
which living minds are fed with food artificially prepared. It should
be an open house, in which students and teachers are at one. They must
live their complete life together, dominated by a common aspiration
for truth and a need of sharing all the delights of culture. In former
days the great master-craftsmen had students in their workshops where
they co-operated in shaping things to perfection. That was the place
where knowledge could become living--that knowledge which not only has
its substance and law, but its atmosphere subtly informed by a
creative personality. For intellectual knowledge also has its aspect
of creative art, in which the man who explores truth expresses
something which is human in him--his enthusiasm, his courage, his
sacrifice, his honesty, and his skill. In merely academical teaching
we find subjects, but not the man who pursues the subjects; therefore
the vital part of education remains incomplete.

For our Universities we must claim, not labelled packages of truth and
authorised agents to distribute them, but truth in its living
association with her lovers and seekers and discoverers. Also we must
know that the concentration of the mind-forces scattered throughout
the country is the most important mission of a University, which, like
the nucleus of a living cell, should be the centre of the intellectual
life of the people.

The bringing about of an intellectual unity in India is, I am told,
difficult to the verge of impossibility owing to the fact that India
has so many different languages. Such a statement is as unreasonable
as to say that man, because he has a diversity of limbs, should find
it impossible to realise life's unity in himself, and that only an
earthworm composed of a tail and nothing else could truly know that it
had a body.

Let us admit that India is not like any one of the great countries of
Europe, which has its own separate language; but is rather like Europe
herself, branching out into different peoples with many different
languages. And yet Europe has a common civilisation, with an
intellectual unity which is not based upon uniformity of language. It
is true that in the earlier stages of her culture the whole of Europe
had Latin for her learned tongue. That was in her intellectual budding
time, when all her petals of self-expression were closed in one point.
But the perfection of her mental unfolding was not represented by the
singularity of her literary vehicle. When the great European countries
found their individual languages, then only the true federation of
cultures became possible in the West, and the very differences of the
channels made the commerce of ideas in Europe so richly copious and so
variedly active. We can well imagine what the loss to European
civilisation would be if France, Italy and Germany, and England
herself, had not through their separate agencies contributed to the
common coffer their individual earnings.

There was a time with us when India had her common language of culture
in Sanskrit. But, for the complete commerce of her thought, she
required that all her vernaculars should attain their perfect powers,
through which her different peoples might manifest their
idiosyncrasies; and this could never be done through a foreign tongue.

In the United States, in Canada and other British Colonies, the
language of the people is English. It has a great literature which had
its birth and growth in the history of the British Islands. But when
this language, with all its products and acquisitions, matured by ages
on its own mother soil, is carried into foreign lands, which have
their own separate history and their own life-growth, it must
constantly hamper the indigenous growth of culture and destroy
individuality of judgement and the perfect freedom of self-expression.
The inherited wealth of the English language, with all its splendour,
becomes an impediment when taken into different surroundings, just as
when lungs are given to the whale in the sea. If such is the case even
with races whose grandmother-tongue naturally continues to be their
own mother-tongue, one can imagine what sterility it means for a
people which accepts, for its vehicle of culture, an altogether
foreign language. A language is not like an umbrella or an overcoat,
that can be borrowed by unconscious or deliberate mistake; it is like
the living skin itself. If the body of a draught-horse enters into the
skin of a race-horse, it will be safe to wager that such an anomaly
will never win a race, and will fail even to drag a cart. Have we not
watched some modern Japanese artists imitating European art? The
imitation may sometimes produce clever results; but such cleverness
has only the perfection of artificial flowers which never bear fruit.

All great countries have their vital centres for intellectual life,
where a high standard of learning is maintained, where the minds of
the people are naturally attracted, where they find their genial
atmosphere, in which to prove their worth and to contribute their
share to the country's culture. Thus they kindle, on the common altar
of the land, that great sacrificial fire which can radiate the sacred
light of wisdom abroad.

Athens was such a centre in Greece, Rome in Italy; and Paris is such
to-day in France. Benares has been and still continues to be the
centre of our Sanskrit culture. But Sanskrit learning does not exhaust
all the elements of culture that exist in modern India.

If we were to take for granted, what some people maintain, that
Western culture is the only source of light for our mind, then it
would be like depending for daybreak upon some star, which is the sun
of a far distant sphere. The star may give us light, but not the day;
it may give us direction in our voyage of exploration, but it can
never open the full view of truth before our eyes. In fact, we can
never use this cold starlight for stirring the sap in our branches,
and giving colour and bloom to our life. This is the reason why
European education has become for India mere school lessons and no
culture; a box of matches, good for the small uses of illumination,
but not the light of morning, in which the use and beauty, and all the
subtle mysteries of life are blended in one.

Let me say clearly that I have no distrust of any culture because of
its foreign character. On the contrary, I believe that the shock of
such extraneous forces is necessary for the vitality of our
intellectual nature. It is admitted that much of the spirit of
Christianity runs counter, not only to the classical culture of
Europe, but to the European temperament altogether. And yet this alien
movement of ideas, constantly running against the natural mental
current of Europe, has been a most important factor in strengthening
and enriching her civilisation, on account of the sharp antagonism of
its intellectual direction. In fact, the European vernaculars first
woke up to life and fruitful vigour when they felt the impact of this
foreign thought-power with all its oriental forms and affinities. The
same thing is happening in India. The European culture has come to us,
not only with its knowledge, but with its velocity.

Then, again, let us admit that modern Science is Europe's great gift
to humanity for all time to come. We, in India, must claim it from her
hands, and gratefully accept it in order to be saved from the curse of
futility by lagging behind. We shall fail to reap the harvest of the
present age if we delay.

What I object to is the artificial arrangement by which foreign
education tends to occupy all the space of our national mind, and thus
kills, or hampers, the great opportunity for the creation of a new
thought-power by a new combination of truths. It is this which makes
me urge that all the elements in our own culture have to be
strengthened, not to resist the Western culture, but truly to accept
and assimilate it; to use it for our sustenance, not as our burden; to
get mastery over this culture, and not to live on its outskirts as the
hewers of texts and drawers of book-learning.

The main river in Indian culture has flowed in four streams,--the
Vedic, the Puranic, the Buddhist, and the Jain. It has its source in
the heights of the Indian consciousness. But a river, belonging to a
country, is not fed by its own waters alone. The Tibetan Brahmaputra
is a tributary to the Indian Ganges. Contributions have similarly
found their way to India's original culture. The Muhammadan, for
example, has repeatedly come into India from outside, laden with his
own stores of knowledge and feeling and his wonderful religious
democracy, bringing freshet after freshet to swell the current. To our
music, our architecture, our pictorial art, our literature, the
Muhammadans have made their permanent and precious contribution. Those
who have studied the lives and writings of our medieval saints, and
all the great religious movements that sprang up in the time of the
Muhammadan rule, know how deep is our debt to this foreign current
that has so intimately mingled with our life.

So, in our centre of Indian learning, we must provide for the
co-ordinate study of all these different cultures,--the Vedic, the
Puranic, the Buddhist, the Jain, the Islamic, the Sikh and the
Zoroastrian. The Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan will also have to be
added; for, in the past, India did not remain isolated within her own
boundaries. Therefore, in order to learn what she was, in her relation
to the whole continent of Asia, these cultures too must be studied.
Side by side with them must finally be placed the Western culture. For
only then shall we be able to assimilate this last contribution to our
common stock. A river flowing within banks is truly our own, and it
can contain its due tributaries; but our relations with a flood can
only prove disastrous.

There are some who are exclusively modern, who believe that the past
is the bankrupt time, leaving no assets for us, but only a legacy of
debts. They refuse to believe that the army which is marching forward
can be fed from the rear. It is well to remind such persons that the
great ages of renaissance in history were those when man suddenly
discovered the seeds of thought in the granary of the past.

The unfortunate people who have lost the harvest of their past have
lost their present age. They have missed their seed for cultivation,
and go begging for their bare livelihood. We must not imagine that we
are one of these disinherited peoples of the world. The time has come
for us to break open the treasure-trove of our ancestors, and use it
for our commerce of life. Let us, with its help, make our future our
own, and not continue our existence as the eternal rag-pickers in
other people's dustbins.

So far I have dwelt only upon the intellectual aspect of Education.
For, even in the West, it is the intellectual training which receives
almost exclusive emphasis. The Western universities have not yet truly
recognised that fulness of expression is fulness of life. And a large
part of man can never find its expression in the mere language of
words. It must therefore seek for its other languages,--lines and
colours, sounds and movements. Through our mastery of these we not
only make our whole nature articulate, but also understand man in all
his attempts to reveal his innermost being in every age and clime. The
great use of Education is not merely to collect facts, but to know
man and to make oneself known to man. It is the duty of every human
being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of
intellect, but also that personality which is the language of Art. It
is a great world of reality for man,--vast and profound,--this growing
world of his own creative nature. This is the world of Art. To be
brought up in ignorance of it is to be deprived of the knowledge and
use of that great inheritance of humanity, which has been growing and
waiting for every one of us from the beginning of our history. It is
to remain deaf to the eternal voice of Man, that speaks to all men the
messages that are beyond speech. From the educational point of view we
know Europe where it is scientific, or at best literary. So our notion
of its modern culture is limited within the boundary lines of grammar
and the laboratory. We almost completely ignore the aesthetic life of
man, leaving it uncultivated, allowing weeds to grow there. Our
newspapers are prolific, our meeting-places are vociferous; and in
them we wear to shreds the things we have borrowed from our English
teachers. We make the air dismal and damp with the tears of our
grievances. But where are our arts, which, like the outbreak of
spring flowers, are the spontaneous overflow of our deeper nature and
spiritual magnificence?

Through this great deficiency of our modern education, we are
condemned to carry to the end a dead load of dumb wisdom. Like
miserable outcasts, we are deprived of our place in the festival of
culture, and wait at the outer court, where the colours are not for
us, nor the forms of delight, nor the songs. Ours is the education of
a prison-house, with hard labour and with a drab dress cut to the
limits of minimum decency and necessity. We are made to forget that
the perfection of colour and form and expression belongs to the
perfection of vitality,--that the joy of life is only the other side
of the strength of life. The timber merchant may think that the
flowers and foliage are mere frivolous decorations of a tree; but if
these are suppressed, he will know to his cost that the timber too
will fail.

During the Moghal period, music and art in India found a great impetus
from the rulers, because their whole life--not merely their official
life--was lived in this land; and it is the wholeness of life from
which originates Art. But our English teachers are birds of passage;
they cackle to us, but do not sing,--their true heart is not in the
land of their exile.

Constriction of life, owing to this narrowness of culture, must no
longer be encouraged. In the centre of Indian culture which I am
proposing, music and art must have their prominent seats of honour,
and not be given merely a tolerant nod of recognition. The different
systems of music and different schools of art which lie scattered in
the different ages and provinces of India, and in the different strata
of society, and also those belonging to the other great countries of
Asia, which had communication with India, have to be brought there
together and studied.

I have already hinted that Education should not be dragged out of its
native element, the life-current of the people. Economic life covers
the whole width of the fundamental basis of society, because its
necessities are the simplest and the most universal. Educational
institutions, in order to obtain their fulness of truth, must have
close association with this economic life. The highest mission of
education is to help us to realise the inner principle of the unity of
all knowledge and all the activities of our social and spiritual
being. Society in its early stage was held together by its economic
co-operation, when all its members felt in unison a natural interest
in their right to live. Civilisation could never have been started at
all if such was not the case. And civilisation will fall to pieces if
it never again realises the spirit of mutual help and the common
sharing of benefits in the elemental necessaries of life. The idea of
such economic co-operation should be made the basis of our University.
It must not only instruct, but live; not only think, but produce.

Our ancient _tapovanas_, or forest schools, which were our natural
universities, were not shut off from the daily life of the people.
Masters and students gathered fruit and fuel, and took their cattle
out to graze, supporting themselves by the work of their own hands.
Spiritual education was a part of the spiritual life itself, which
comprehended all life. Our centre of culture should not only be the
centre of the intellectual life of India, but the centre of her
economic life also. It must co-operate with the villages round it,
cultivate land, breed cattle, spin cloths, press oil from oil-seeds;
it must produce all the necessaries, devising the best means, using
the best materials, and calling science to its aid. Its very existence
should depend upon the success of its industrial activities carried
out on the co-operative principle, which will unite the teachers and
students and villagers of the neighbourhood in a living and active
bond of necessity. This will give us also a practical industrial
training, whose motive force is not the greed of profit.

Before I conclude my paper, a delicate question remains to be
considered. What must be the religious ideal that is to rule our
centre of Indian culture? The one abiding ideal in the religious life
of India has been _Mukti_, the deliverance of man's soul from the grip
of self, its communion with the Infinite Soul through its union in
_ananda_ with the universe. This religion of spiritual harmony is not
a theological doctrine to be taught, as a subject in the class, for
half an hour each day. It is the spiritual truth and beauty of our
attitude towards our surroundings, our conscious relationship with the
Infinite, and the lasting power of the Eternal in the passing moments
of our life. Such a religious ideal can only be made possible by
making provision for students to live in intimate touch with nature,
daily to grow in an atmosphere of service offered to all creatures,
tending trees, feeding birds and animals, learning to feel the immense
mystery of the soil and water and air.

Along with this, there should be some common sharing of life with the
tillers of the soil and the humble workers in the neighbouring
villages; studying their crafts, inviting them to the feasts, joining
them in works of co-operation for communal welfare; and in our
intercourse we should be guided, not by moral maxims or the
condescension of social superiority, but by natural sympathy of life
for life, and by the sheer necessity of love's sacrifice for its own
sake. In such an atmosphere students would learn to understand that
humanity is a divine harp of many strings, waiting for its one grand
music. Those who realise this unity are made ready for the pilgrimage
through the night of suffering, and along the path of sacrifice, to
the great meeting of Man in the future, for which the call comes to us
across the darkness.

Life, in such a centre, should be simple and clean. We should never
believe that simplicity of life might make us unsuited to the
requirements of the society of our time. It is the simplicity of the
tuning-fork, which is needed all the more because of the intricacy of
strings in the instrument. In the morning of our career our nature
needs the pure and the perfect note of a spiritual ideal in order to
fit us for the complications of our later years.

In other words, this institution should be a perpetual creation by the
co-operative enthusiasm of teachers and students, growing with the
growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent,
rich with ever-renewing life, radiating life across space and time,
attracting and maintaining round it a planetary system of dependent
bodies. Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete
man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by social bonds,
but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection.


THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.




BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE


=GITANJALI. (Song Offerings. )= Translated by the Author. With an
Introduction by W. B. YEATS, and a Portrait by W. ROTHENSTEIN. Crown
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_ATHENAEUM. _--"Mr. Tagore's translations are of trance-like beauty. . . .
The expanding sentiment of some of the poems wins, even through the
alien medium of our English prose, a rhythm which in its strength and
melody might recall familiar passages in the Psalms or Solomon's
Song. "


=FRUIT-GATHERING. A Sequel to "Gitanjali. "= Crown 8vo. 5s. net.

_ATHENAEUM. _--"The eighty-six pieces that fill this volume are pure
jets of lyric feeling, aphorisms expressed in moving symbols, or fully
developed parables and allegories . . . several are as perfect in form
as they are beautiful and poignant in content. "


=GITANJALI AND FRUIT-GATHERING. =

With Illustrations in colour and half-tone by NANDALAL BOSE,
SURENDRANATH KAR, ABANINDRANATH TAGORE, and NOBINDRANATH TAGORE. Crown
8vo. 10s. net.


=THE GARDENER. Lyrics of Love and Life. = Translated by the Author. With
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_DAILY MAIL. _--"Flowers as fresh as sunrise. . . . One cannot tell what
they have lost in the translation, but as they stand they are of
extreme beauty. . . . They are simple, exalted, fragrant--episodes and
incidents of every day transposed to faery.
"


=THE CRESCENT MOON. Child-Poems. = Translated by the Author. With 8
Illustrations in Colour. Pott 4to. 5s. net.

_NATION. _--"A vision of childhood which is only paralleled in our
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=STRAY BIRDS. = Poems. With a Frontispiece by WILLY POGANY. Crown 8vo.
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_SCOTSMAN. _--"The richness of this volume in thought and in imagery,
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_ATHENAEUM. _--"The poems often touch extreme heights of passion and
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=THE FUGITIVE. = Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

_SUNDAY TIMES. _--"In 'The Fugitive' the lovers of Tagore will not be
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never, in our judgment, has surpassed this work. "


=CHITRA. A Play. = Translated by the Author. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.

_OBSERVER. _--"An allegory of love's meaning, clear as a pool in the
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groped in his love, 'that ultimate _you_, that bare simplicity of
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=THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER. = =A Play. = Translated by KSHITISH CHANDRA
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_PALL MALL GAZETTE. _--"Altogether, the play is a beautiful piece of
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=NATIONALISM. = Extra Crown 8vo. 6s. net.

=PERSONALITY. Lectures delivered in America. = Illustrated. Crown 8vo.
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=CREATIVE UNITY. Essays. = Extra Crown 8vo.

=MY REMINISCENCES. = Illustrated. Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.

=GLIMPSES OF BENGAL. Selected from the Letters of Rabindranath Tagore,
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=ONE HUNDRED POEMS OF KABIR. = Translated by RABINDRANATH TAGORE,
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. The page numbers
in the Table of Contents have been adjusted to match the actual page
numbers.





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