Rabindranath Tagore’s Journey as an Educator

This book looks at Rabindranath Tagore’s, experiments and journey as an educator and the influence of humanistic worldviews, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in his philosophy of education.

It juxtaposes the educational systems and institutions set up by the British colonial administration with Tagore’s pedagogical vision and schools in Santiniketan, West Bengal―Brahmacharya Asram (1901), Visva-Bharati University (1921) and Sriniketan Institute of Village Reconstruction (1922). An educational pioneer and a poet-teacher, Tagore combined nature and culture, tradition and modernity, East and West, in formulating his educational methodology. The essays in this volume analyse the relevance of his theories and practice in encouraging greater cultural exchange and the dissolution of the walls between classrooms and communities.

This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of education, Tagore studies, literature, cultural studies, sociology of education, South Asian studies and colonial and postcolonial studies.

Mohammad A. Quayum is an Honorary Professor at Flinders University, Australia and has taught at universities in Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore and the US. He has published extensively on American literature, Asian Anglophone literature and Bengali literature. His recent publications include Reading Malaysian Literature in English: Ethnicity, Gender, Diaspora, and Nationalism (2021), Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology (2021), Tagore Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism (2020), Beyond Boundaries: Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore (2014) and One Sky, Many Horizons: Studies in Malaysian Literature in English (2014).