Children's minds are sensitive to the influences of the world. Their subconscious minds are active, always imbibing some lesson, and realizing the joy of knowing. This sensitive receptivity helps them, without any strain, to master language, which is the most complex and difficult instrument of expression, full of indefinable ideas and abstract symbols. Through their natural ability to guess they learn the meaning of words which we cannot explain. It may be easy for a child to know what the word "water" means, but how difficult it must be for him to know what idea is associated with the simple word "yesterday." Yet how easily they overcome such innumerable difficulties because of the extraordinary sensitiveness of their subconscious mind. Because of this their introduction to the world of reality is easy and joyful.
In this critical period, the child's life is subjected to the education factory, life- 5 less, colorless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead. We are born with that God-given gift of taking delight in the world, but such delightful activity is fettered and imprisoned, muted by a force called discipline which kills the sensitiveness of the child mind which is always on the alert, restless and eager to receive first-hand knowledge from mother nature. We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hail stones on flowers.
In childhood we learn our lessons with the aid of both body and mind, with all the senses active and eager. When we are sent to school, the doors of natural information are closed to us; our eyes see the letters, our ears hear the abstract lessons, but our mind misses the perpetual stream of ideas from nature, because the teachers, in their wisdom, think these bring distraction, and have no purpose behind them.
When we accept any discipline for ourselves, we try to avoid everything except that which is necessary for our purpose; it is this purposefulness, which belongs to the adult mind, that we force upon school children. We say, "Never keep your mind alert, attend to what is before you, what has been given you." This tortures the child because it contradicts nature's purpose, and nature, the greatest of all teachers, is thwarted at every step by the human teacher who believes in machine-made lessons rather than life lessons, so that the growth of the child's mind is not only injured, but forcibly spoiled.
Children should be surrounded with the things of nature which have their own educational value. Their minds should be allowed to stumble upon and be surprised at everything that happens in today's life; the new tomorrow will stimulate their attention with new facts of life. What happens in a school is that every day, at the same hour, the same book is brought and poured out for him. His attention is never alerted by random surprises from nature.
Our adult mind is always full of things we have to arrange and deal with, and therefore the things that happen around us, such as the coming of morning, leave no mark upon us. We do not allow them to because our minds are already crowded; the stream of lessons perpetually flowing from the heart of nature does not touch us, we merely choose those which are useful, rejecting the rest as undesirable because we want the shortest path to success.
Children have no such distractions. With them every new fact or event comes to 10 a mind that is always open with an abundant hospitality, and through this exuberant, indiscriminate acceptance, they learn innumerable facts within an amazingly short time, compared with our own slowness. These are the most important lessons in life, and what is still more wonderful is that the greater part of them are abstract truths.
The child learns so easily because he has a natural gift, but adults, because they are tyrants, ignore natural gifts and say that children must learn through the same process that they learned by. We insist upon forced mental feeding and our lessons become a form of torture. This is one of man's most cruel and wasteful mistakes.
Because I underwent this process when I was young, and remembered the torture of it, I tried to establish a school where boys might be free in spite of the school. Knowing something of the natural school which Nature supplies to all her creatures, I established my institution in a beautiful spot, far away from town, where the children had the greatest freedom possible, especially in my not forcing upon them lessons for which their mind was unfitted. I do not wish to exaggerate, however, and I must admit that I have not been able to follow my own plan in every way. Forced as we are to live in a society which is itself tyrannical, and which cannot always be gainsaid, I was often obliged to concede to what I did not believe in, but what the others around me insisted on. Yet I always had it in my mind to create an atmosphere; I felt this was more important than classroom teaching.
The atmosphere was there; how could I create it? The birds sang to the awakening light of the morning, the evening came with its own silence, and the stars brought the peace of night.
We had the open beauty of the sky, and the seasons in all their magnificent color. Through this intimacy with nature we took the opportunity of instituting festivals. I wrote songs to celebrate the coming of spring and the rainy season which follows the long months of drought; we had dramatic performances with decorations appropriate to the seasons.
I invited artists from the city to live at the school, and left them free to produce 15 their own work. If the boys and girls felt inclined to watch, I allowed them to do so. The same was true with my own work; I was composing songs and poems, and would often invite the teachers to sing or read with them. This helped to create an atmosphere in which they could imbibe something intangible, but lifegiving. . . .
When races come together, as in the present age, it should not be merely the gathering of a crowd; there must be a bond of relation, or they will collide with each other.
Education must enable every child to understand and fulfill this purpose of the age, not defeat it by acquiring the habit of creating divisions and cherishing national prejudices. There are of course natural differences in human races which should be preserved and respected, and the task of our education should be to realize unity in spite of them, to discover truth through the wilderness of their contradictions.
We have tried to do this in Visva-Bharati. Our endeavor has been to include this ideal of unity in all the activities in our institution, some educational, some that comprise different kinds of artistic expression, some in the shape of service to our neighbors by helping the reconstruction of village life.
The children began to serve our neighbors, to help them in various ways and to be in constant touch with the life around them. They also had the freedom to grow, which is the greatest possible gift to a child. We aimed at another kind of freedom; a sympathy with all humanity, free from all racial and national prejudices.
The minds of children are usually shut inside prison houses, so that they become 20 incapable of understanding people who have different languages and customs. This causes us to grope after each other in darkness, to hurt each other in ignorance, to suffer from the worst form of blindness. Religious missionaries themselves have contributed to this evil; in the name of brotherhood and in the arrogance of sectarian pride they have created misunderstanding. They make this permanent in their textbooks, and poison the minds of children.