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These great thinkers have set the main philosophy of education straight.
Bring all light into the world; light, bring light! Let light come upto everyone; the task will not be finished till everyone has reached the Lord. Bring light to the poor, and bring more light to the rich, for they require more than the poor; bring light to the ignorant and more light to the educated for the vanities of the eduction of our time are tremendous! Thus bring light to all and leave the rest unto the Lord. Education is not the amount of information that is put into your brain and run riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making, assimilation of ideas
(1)
The chief aim of the education should be to help the growing souls to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble cause.
Principles of true teaching (2)
Nothing can be taught: The teacher has to play the role of a helper
and guide not as an instructor or task-masterNot to Force the Soul: The mind has to be consulted in its own growth.. To
force the nature to abandon its own DHARMA is to do it permanent harm,
mutilate its growth and deface its perfection. It is a selfish tyranny over a
human soul and a wound to the nation.Teaching from near to far: To work from the near to the far, from that
which is to that which shall be. The education should start from the known to
unknown.Following Snippet is from the book titled “Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yoganand”. They are comparing the schools they founded then Shantiniketan by Rabindranath, from the land donated by his father and 8000 Pounds he received from the Noble Prize, and Yogoda by Yogi Paramhansa Yoganand.
Tagore and I were soon deep in comparative study of our schools, both founded along unorthodox lines. We discovered many identical features - outdoor instructions, simplicity, ample scope of the child's creative spirit. Rabindranath, however, laid considerable stress on study of *literature and poetry and self expression through music and song*, which I had already noted in the case of Bhola. The Santiniketan childern observed periods of silence but were given no special yoga training. The poet listened with flattering attention to my description of the energising Yogoda exercises and the yoga concentration techniques which are taught to all students at Ranchi.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowlede is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where worlds come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert
sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my coutry awake!"
-- Rabindranath Tagore
Shri Aurobindo’s thought on education with special reference to the role of a teacher. paper link ↩