In a kind of ideological comparison with ancient sites of learning much eulogized in the Upanishads and in the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, Santiniketan was sometimes referred to as an ‘ashram’. Schooling in India’s old ashrams, we have been told, put particular emphasis on fostering curiosity rather than competitive excellence, and this was the focus in Santiniketan too. Any kind of concentration on examination performance and grades was, as I have mentioned, strongly discouraged. This prompted me to read many of Tagore’s essays on education – not just his poems and stories, as I had done
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