Santiniketan

Dear Anastasia,

This weekend our group traveled to a place called Santiniketan, a school, university, and living philosophy founded by India's revered poet Rabiindranath Tagore. It is impossible to write about Santiniketan without writing about Tagore's philosophy a little first. As you are a poet, you understand that poetry is a way of seeing the whole world, not just art, but learning, family, nature; everything.
Tagore envisioned a place "where the world makes its home in a single nest", where learning happens at the student's pace and in a natural environment. He believed that a school that included Indians, British, Bengalis, Punjabis, would knit the world together, so too did he feel the importance of including all religions, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddihism and others.
The feeling one gets when setting foot on campus at Santinketan is peace, deep and whole. This might be a campus that encourages free speech and inquiry, but it is pursued with the utmost respect for all. Students mainly study outdoors, under trees, in smaller groups than most of the classes I've seen in India. They seemed absorbed in their studies, paying little attention to the group of American teachers snapping pictures and making comments.
I have to admit, most of us where entranced by the outdoor classrooms, the serenity of teacher and student as learning seemed to take place with ease and comfort. Our guides at the school explained that students call their teacher 'sister' and 'brother' as Tagore also believed that learning is an exchange between equal partners. Students may still practice rising when the teacher "enters" the classroom, but the formality is much more subtle. Unlike other schools in India, students at Santiniketan are encouraged to seek their teachers out, discussing their ideas, asking questions, and learning constantly.
Students live on campus in dormitories and examples of student art pieces pepper the campus in unexpected places. The air at Santiniketan makes one want to sit under a tree and learn and it is not hard to see why this university has produced some of India's most famous thinkers.
Down the road, four kilometers from Santiniketan there is another school called Sriniketan, developed in conjunction with Tagore's rural reconstruction project. Tagore wanted to maintain and preserve village life in India, at the same time, giving villagers access to an education that would improve their lives and promote prosperity. If Santiniketan was a school for wealthy students who wanted to study humanities and arts, Sriniketan was the school for peasants who needed access to more practical skills like agriculture and craft work. Herein resides Tagore's contradiction. He makes a case for blending the world together at Santiniketan, but acknowledges that the peasant has no part of that world and belongs at Sriniketan.
It is elitist no doubt, but Tagore was part of a wealthy landowning family, known for their philosophy, art and poetry. His school was merely a continuation of the world he grew up in, a place where people knew their place. Tagore was pragmatic enough to realize that wealthy Brahmin parents would not send their children to study with peasants, so the creation of two schools is really not surprising.
My visit to Santiniketan reaffirmed my belief that education can happen in a variety of circumstances, using a variety of methods. The students studying at Santiniketan do not merely sit under trees and contemplate their navel. They become scientists, mathematicians, national leaders, and teachers. Yet they study the arts and humanities. We put so much emphasis on STEM subjects both in India and the US, it is easy to forget that humanities play a role in our understanding of those subjects as well.
Learning is universal, but teaching, it seems, beyond the student and the teacher is not.