Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/59

Rh out the School, but English is taught as a second language.

The direct method of teaching English is adopted in the lower classes, and when the boys are beginning to understand, fairy stories or adventures are told them in simple English. When they are interested in a story it is surprising with what ease they are able to follow. I have myself found such stories as George Macdonald’s “The Princess and Curdie” and “The Princess and the Goblins” fascinate Bengali boys of thirteen or fourteen, and they have been eager to hear the next instalment, even though told them in a foreign language.

One of the things that strike visitors to the School is the look of happiness on the boys’ faces, and there is no doubt that there is none of the usual feeling of dislike for school life which one finds in institutions where the only object held before the boys is the passing of examinations. Examinations have been abolished in the lower classes, except once a year when tests of each boy’s progress are made by the teacher who has been teaching the boy himself.

At the end of each term arrangements are made for staging one of the poet’s plays. The teachers and boys take the different parts, and