Caught in the Cross Traffic: Rabindranath Tagore and the Trials of Child Education

The article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on child education, focusing on Tagore’s notion of the child, method and nonmethod in education, a deep understanding of education in relation to the child’s surroundings, and the ways in which Tagore envisaged the relationship between the child and the teacher—the guru-shishya dynamics. These investigations are transcultural in nature in that they engage with several thinkers and different clusters of ideas from the Western tradition, namely, Tolstoy, Rousseau, William Godwin, Martin Buber, Froebel, and others. The article also demonstrates how some of Tagore’s ideas fall in line with certain contemporary discourses on child education.