Education for the People

Yeats, the celebrated Irish poet said in his introduction to the book Gitanjali or Song Offering(1912) "e;......these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years."e; The book received Nobel Prize in 1913. Ezra Pound said of the same work, "e;We have found our new Greece, suddenly......I am not saying this hastily, nor in an emotional flurry, nor from a love of brandishing statement."e; This Bengali poet of India was founder of a University called Visva-Bharati, an institution founded on an Indian philosophy of education. Albert Einstein said of Gandhi, "e;generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth"e;. For Gandhi, too, the path of India's deliverence was through education. Their thoughts have been brought into a living interaction with the thoughts of Grundtvig, the innovator of Scandinavian Folk High School and Paulo Freire, the Rousseau of the twentieth century. This book provides a strong North-South, trans-contextual, anti-colonial dimension to adult education......should be of interest to those engaged in post-colonial studies and comparative education.