ABSTRACT
In all these lectures, you must have noticed a quest for a more life-affirming meaningful education. And despite the sociological analysis of what we regard as ‘objective facts’, I have appealed to you repeatedly to strive for what does not exist, but what ought to exist. Unless we retain this restlessness and search, we will fall into the trap of a ‘fact-centric positivist sociology’ that retains the status quo, and negates all deeper aspirations for a better society. That is why, I wish to end this series with a lecture on Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) and Jidu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). These three thinkers (or do I call them visionaries?) were neither professional educationists, nor university sociologists; and their speeches or writings were not ‘academic’ (by ‘academic’ I mean a trained style of reference-oriented writing characterized by technical vocabulary, empiricism and theoretical abstraction; and deprived of aesthetic/experiential/spiritual flavour); yet, with their penetrating eyes they could see the malady of the existing educational practices, and suggest a refreshing departure with new experiments and pedagogic possibilities. They did inspire many teachers and educationists who were never contented with the prevailing order. Before I go deeper, I request you to fight two temptations. First, understand, contemplate, think and allow yourself to be perplexed before you call them ‘impractical idealists’. And second, before you negate them as ‘elitist’ (in the university circuit you and I often use this word to stop those we do not want to listen to; you may think that the poor need bread, clothes and some basic 141education; they have no time for all these ‘alternative’ education projects which are essentially the privilege of the rich), you need to be calm and dialogic; you need to see whether the principles you derive from them can be used very creatively in simple/ordinary sites of learning.
