In India, Rabindranath Tagore created a form of authentic education which he believed was more true to the needs children growing up in rural India than conventional, didactic schooling: 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 allows them, without any strain, to master
language, which is the most complex and difficult instrument of expression, full of indefinable ideas and abstract symbols. 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, lifeless, colourless, 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 on us from on high, like hail stones on flowers.
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-2/rabindranath-tagores-school-at-shantiniketan
Eine Art reformpädagogisches Project aus Bangalore (ca. 1900) gegründet von Rabindranath Tagore