Education is often discussed in terms of institutions, curricula, methods of teaching, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Yet beneath these immediate concerns lies a deeper question: what kind of human being should education cultivate? This question cannot be answered independently of the civilisation within which education takes place. Different civilisations have embodied different conceptions of knowledge, formation, human flourishing and the good life, and these conceptions have shaped the ways in which succeeding generations are formed. This points to a more fundamental question: how does a civilisation form the next generation?
The question of how a civilisation forms the next generation requires us to look beyond education as a set of formal institutions. Here, it is useful to make a distinction between institutions and forms of life. Institutions are the organised structures through which collective activities are conducted. They presuppose forms of life which concerns the ways in which people actually live—their habits of judgment, ways of inhabiting the world, forms of conduct, relations with others, and understandings of what is worth pursuing. The two are intimately connected. Institutions arise from particular forms of life and give them concrete expression, while at the same time shaping, refining and sustaining the forms of life from which they emerge. Educational reform, therefore, cannot be separated from the larger question of how a civilisation carries its forms of life forward across generations. It requires asking what forms of knowledge, judgment, and human flourishing are worth handing on, how the next generation can be initiated into them rather than merely informed about them, and how inherited horizons can be refined while remaining open to encounter with other civilisations, without becoming parochial.
It is therefore not surprising that some of the greatest reflections on education have also been reflections on civilisation. The Western tradition is no exception. The idea of education in paideia in Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic tradition, the notion of Bildung in Humboldt, and the idea of liberal education in Newman can all be understood as having a civilisational dimension, even if not all use the term “civilisation.” What they share is the idea that education is not merely the acquisition of skills for a career. It is the formation and cultivation of a particular kind of human being. It involves the handing on and rearticulation of a mode of life, its ideals, and its way of inhabiting the world.
Today we are accustomed to think of the university as an institution without civilisational roots or dimensions. Yet even though the ideals embodied in the university have often been presented as universal, they were shaped by particular understandings of human life and human flourishing that emerged in the West and are deeply tied to its civilisational ideals. It is against this background that the question of education in colonial India acquires a distinct significance.
Gandhi and Tagore belong to this larger tradition of educational reflection. It must be remembered that their educational thought emerged in the context of colonial India, when the encounter with modern Western institutions, systems of knowledge, and forms of social organisation raised fundamental questions about India’s civilisational ethos, its continuity, and its future.
Intriguingly, both Gandhi and Tagore understood education not as an autonomous domain but as a response to a deeper civilisational crisis. They saw that colonial education had produced a disjunction between experience and understanding: we had inherited European frameworks which had increasingly distanced people from the lived worlds they inhabited while also weakening the traditions through which those experiences were interpreted, disciplined, and refined. The problem, therefore, was not simply one of curriculum or institutions, but of the relationship between education and civilisational life itself. Yet they diagnosed the nature of this disjunction differently. Gandhi saw the crisis as one of a civilisation that had come under the sway of modern Western civilisation which he regarded as inherently destructive. He feared Indians would become cognitively enslaved, would expel the British but retain their ideas and institutions. It was, as he put it in Hind Swaraj, wanting “English rule without the Englishman,” or desiring “the tiger’s nature, but not the tiger.” Indians had lost their capacity for swaraj, or self-rule. His critique therefore extended to the ideals, the differing notions of formation, and the institutions of modern Western civilisation itself. Gandhi’s response to the educational predicament was Nai Talim, an experiment in cultivating habits, dispositions, and forms of ethical life through which, he thought, self-rule could once again become possible.
Tagore located the immediate crisis not in the civilisational ideals of the West—though he too was critical of nationalism and other aspects of Western imperialism—but in the disruption of India’s own traditions of learning under colonial rule. He believed that India’s intellectual and cultural resources could be renewed by restoring them to a living relationship with contemporary life and by bringing them into creative dialogue with other civilisations. He asked how a civilisation that had become intellectually dependent could recover the conditions for independent thought and cultural creativity. Visva-Bharati was conceived as the institutional home for such an intellectual life. In short, both Tagore and Gandhi focused on swaraj, even if they disagreed on what constituted swaraj and how it was to be achieved.
Tagore’s probing explorations of these questions can be found in his 1918 articulation of the vision for a “Centre of Indian Culture,” the institution he would later name Visva-Bharati. The document is not merely a plan for establishing a university; it is a reflection on the university as a civilisational institution—a place where forms of knowledge, cultural traditions, and traditions of learning could be renewed through engagement with the world. More than a vision document for a new university, the essay is a sustained inquiry into the idea of the university itself. Beginning not with questions of curriculum or institutional design but with a diagnosis of India’s educational and civilisational predicament, Tagore asks what conditions make a genuinely living university possible. Revisiting the essay today is therefore not an exercise in historical recovery but an opportunity to reopen the inquiry that Tagore began and to rethink the university in light of our own contemporary educational challenges. We will explore the essay in greater detail in the next post.
Bibliography
Srinivasan, Shashikala. 2019. Liberal Education and its Discontents: The Crisis in the Indian University. New Delhi: Routledge India Publications, Global and South Asian Editions