New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

Many of the themes I have been exploring in recent weeks impact deeply on how I feel about the education processes we have adopted, so uncritically, in the western world, and these will certainly have a significant influence on the way my own teaching continues to develop in the future.

It was my prayer guide at St Bueno’s who first pointed me to the spiritual poetry of the Hindu mystic, Rabindranath Tagore, and especially to one of the first collections of his poems to be published in Britain under the title ‘Gitanjali’. Her inclination that they would resonate with the way my own mind and heart had been developing was exactly right; but, for me, the first delight was simply to read the ‘Introduction’ to the 1912 edition, written by the Irish poet W B Yates. In it, Yeats contrasts his own experience of survival as a poet in the western world, with its obsessive attachment to literary criticism and writing of critical reviews, with what he perceives to be the incomparably free eastern experience of the young Tagore. “We have to do so much (criticism), especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four–fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others”, writes Yeats. But, in contrast, of Tagore he writes, “These lyrics – which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention – display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble.”

The Introduction, though brief, is well worth reading in full – and, of course, the poems are a total delight. As a taster, how about this little piece (No 43), which harks back to some of the ideas I was exploring around ‘memory’ a couple of days ago – but with such simplicity and such beauty.

“The day was when I did not keep myself in readiness for thee; and entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment of my life.

And today when by chance I light upon them and see thy signature, I find they have lain scattered in the dust mixed with memory of joys and sorrows of my trivial days forgotten.

Thou didst not turn in contempt from my childish play among dust, and the steps that I heard in my playroom are the same that are echoed from star to star.”

Which connects in multiple ways with one of the memories which flooded back into my own mind during the days of silence at St Bueno’s. When it first came, I wrote about it like this:

“I must have been six years old; I was is Miss Eade’s class, but she was ill and away, and Miss Walker, the fearsome head teacher, was looking after us for the day – I was very scared of her. She asked us some question about nature which demanded the naming of animals, and I shouted out excitedly ‘a bunny’. “Richard” she said, in that hard very stern voice “that is what little children call them, you are older now and you must call them rabbits!” Is that what our educational culture does for us; and it has taken fifty years to the year to become as a little child again?”

So, as you might guess, I have become very much renewed in my attachment to bunnies. In fact, I seem to be finding them everywhere. Running one morning on the hill above St Bueno’s (see picture), I turned a corner only to find myself face to face with one - so to speak. “Hello bunny!” I cried out defiantly; and the terror of Miss Walker was banished; I was free at last!

All of which, it seems to me, is archetypical of what we do to an enormous number of people with our western forms of education. Much of the worst damage, it seems, is frequently done around the age of six, very much a watershed - and I have other memories from that period of life I shall want to share on other occasions.

In conclusion, however, I want to state, as clearly as I am able, that I am not against critical thought. I am not in any way losing my love for, or my desire to teach and inspire others with much of the deliciously rich fruit to be picked from the European history of ideas – but not at any price! There is a proper holism about human thinking in every way parallel to the proper holism of all human being.

Returning to Tagore, I need the freedom of the learned and unlearned metaphor. I need the freedom of a highly trained mind and also of liberated emotion. But what I need more than anything else is bunnies – and not merely rabbits!