I have tried to save children from the vicious methods which alienate their minds, and from other prejudices which are fostered through histories, geographies and lessons full of national prejudices. In the East there is a great deal of bitterness against other races, and in our own homes we are often brought up with feelings of hatred. I have tried to save the children from such feelings, with the help of friends from the West, who, with their understanding and their human sympathy and love, have done us a great service.
We are building our institution upon the ideal of the spiritual unity of all races. I want to use the help of all other races, and when I was in Europe I appealed to the great scholars of the West, and was fortunate enough to receive their help. They left their own schools to come to our institution, which is poor in material things, and they helped us develop it.
I have in my mind not merely a University, for that is only one aspect of our Visva-Bharati, but the idea of a great meeting place for individuals from all countries where men who believe in spiritual unity can come in touch with their neighbors. There are such idealists, and when I traveled in the West, even in remote places, many persons without any special reputation wanted to join this work.
It will be a great future, when base passions are no longer stimulated within us, when human races come closer to one another, and when through their meeting new truths are revealed.
There will be a sunrise of truth and love through insignificant people who have 25 suffered martyrdom for humanity, like the great personality who had only a handful of disciples from among the fisherfolk and who at the end of his career seemingly presented a picture of failure at a time when Rome was at the zenith of her glory. He was reviled by those in power, ignored by the crowd, and he was crucified; yet through that symbol he lives forever.
There are martyrs of today who are sent to prison and persecuted, who are not men of power, but who belong to a deathless future.
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
What purpose do Tagore's reflections on his own educational experiences serve in the lecture? Why does he talk about how much he hated school? What about the school's educational system made him feel that way?
What kind of school does Tagore call "the education factory"? What impact does this kind of education have on students?
According to Tagore, what "natural gift" do children have? How can teachers use this gift to create stimulating educational experiences? Why do so many teachers fail to do this?
Why does Tagore believe that it is more important to create an atmosphere for learning than to actually teach important material?
5. How does Tagore believe that students of different races should be taught to interact with each other? What can schools do to encourage this?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Martha Nussbaum (p. 61) cites Tagore as one of the major theorists of what she calls "education for democracy." In what ways do Tagore's views on education seem especially useful for democratic government?
Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi (p. 560) knew and admired each other, but often disagreed about the role of education in society—Tagore believed that only education could ultimately free India from British rule while Gandhi saw formal education as a tool of imperialism. How would you compare the underlying assumptions of these divergent beliefs?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Compare Rabindranath Tagore's view of education to that of Hsun Tzu in "Encouraging Learning" (p. 5). What assumptions about human nature lie beneath these views of education?
Using Tagore's essay and other sources in this chapter, compose an argument in which you try to persuade your teacher to hold class outside for the rest of the semester.
Describe your own experience with what Tagore calls "the education factory." What elements of your elementary or secondary education were factory-like? Which elements were not? Are there classrooms today that incorporate some of Tagore's principles?
virginia woolf
Shakespeare's Sister [1929]
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the most important English writers of the twentieth century. Her father, the eminent scholar and religious freethinker Sir Leslie Stephen, raised her in an intellectually stimulating environment and encouraged her academic pursuits. After her father's death in 1904, she began to associate with a group of London artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group, whose members included the novelist E. M. Forster, the painter Roger Fry, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the political theorist Leonard Woolf, who became her husband in 1912.
Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. She would go on to publish several other novels of lasting influence, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). In her fiction, Woolf often experimented with many features of Modernist literature: non-sequential plot, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and interior monologue that explored the inner landscapes of her characters.
During her lifetime, Woolf gained fame as one of the best nonfiction writers of the Modernist period. In the second half of the twentieth century, she would be considered by modern feminists as one of the founders of their movement. One of her most famous works is the book-length essay A Room of One's Own, which grew out of lectures she delivered at the women's colleges of Cambridge University. In this essay, she explores the long and impressive history of women as the subjects of literature and contrasts it to the small number of women who actually wrote literature. In Woolf's day, only a handful of women rose to the status of major writers, and most of these women had either published their works anonymously (such as Jane Austen) or used a male pseudonym (such as George Eliot). Woolf wanted to understand these phenomena.
Her conclusion, which provides the title of the essay, is that a woman can only become a writer if she has "money and a room of her own"—two things that most women throughout history have not had. No matter how much innate talent women of the past possessed, Woolf argues, they did not have the economic or cultural freedom to put that talent to good use. In the passage reprinted here, Woolf imagines what would have happened if a woman in Shakespeare's day had been born with all of the innate talent of Shakespeare. No such woman could ever have become Shakespeare's equal, she insists, because she would never have had access to all of the things that make great writing possible.
Woolf tells the story of Judith Shakespeare, a fictional female writer with all of William Shakespeare's talent but none of his opportunities. Among other things, "Shakespeare's Sister" demonstrates the rhetorical power of narrative. Though Woolf invents many of the details of Judith Shakespeare's life, her creation dramatizes the very real limitations that women have faced in nearly every period and culture of the world's history.
It was disappointing not to have brought back in the evening some important statement, some authentic fact. Women are poorer than men because—this or that. Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for the truth, and receiving on one's head an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water. It would be better to draw the curtains; to shut out distractions; to light the lamp; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the historian, who records not opinions but facts, to describe under what conditions women lived, not throughout the ages, but in England, say in the time of Elizabeth.
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.