Abstract

With the advent of colonial education, the school-going ‘child’ as a conceptual category became substantially complicated. Moreover, the seemingly progressive structure of nineteenth-century English Utilitarian thought was responsible for the association of primitivism with both the child and the colonized natives. The Utilitarian thought, along with the Sanskrit nitishastras, influenced the earliest Bengali textbooks of the nineteenth century, including that of Tarkalankar’s Sishusiksha and Vidyasagar’s Barnaparichay. In closely reading these influential primers, this paper attempts to show that the moral pedagogy was a cryptic disciplinary measure to shape the child’s character, often employing the newly introduced tool of ‘clock-time’. As a critique of this, Rabindranath Tagore reinvents the ‘child’ by emphasizing the imaginative to open up a space for the literary. This paper will further attempt to argue that there is a significant shift from pedagogy to play when it comes to Tagore. The loaded idea of ‘ethical play’ forms the fundamental premise of Tagore’s philosophy of education. The ‘child’ has a complicated presence in Tagore’s oeuvre. He significantly deviates from the earlier tradition to inform his philosophy of education with a spontaneous sense of becoming (‘howa’) to develop an aesthetics of resistance. The paper will argue that ‘ethical play’, the philosophy of educating the child is nothing separated from his larger philosophical assumptions about the world and the Man.