Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/160

 own boyish experience, and had sought a cure for so deterrent and mortifying a discipline in the case and for the sake of others. To some it may seem that the trouble which we recognise in our own schools is due in part to the obstinate great ailment of youth itself. To him it seemed possible to find a more natural way of education, by going back to instinct and going on to a new understanding of the imaginative and the humane needs of the growing boy. In India the folk live in the open, as we cannot in this country, and it is easier there to bring the solace of nature and her doings out of doors to bear upon her children.

In trying to get a notion of Rabindranath's method, we ought to know something of the Indian schools as they were; as indeed, it is to be feared, they still are in many parts of Bengal. Some of the accounts remind us not a little of the old Irish hedge-school. In one village, described in, the master was a good mathematician and logician and a hard disciplinarian. His rod was a long thin bamboo cane: "You could hardly pass the door during school hours without hearing the of the bamboo switch." A more