Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/163

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XI
SHANTI NIKETAN
139

affections. Fatik is one of those boys who have too much unregulated nervous energy and too keen a wit to be able to square their own comfort with that of their elders. Even his own mother, whom he loves dearly, does not know how to manage him; his quarrels with his brothers incur her wrath, and when an opportune uncle appears and takes him off to town—Calcutta—the change does not prove lucky. Fatik is not a welcome visitor to his aunt, and there the boy's tragedy soon ends.

The measure of Fatik's unhappiness at school gives us the practical reason for the needed reforms which must come if education is to be humane and such as to develop all that is best in the pupil. It is from the lips of one of his own pupils, who was educated for nine years at Shanti Niketan and is at present an undergraduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge, that we have chiefly gathered the following account of his remarkable experiment.

Like most schemes that bear fruit the school arose in a natural way from little beginnings. As we said, the Maharshi in his early youth had retired there for meditation, and it was there, under the great "chatim" tree, that he first