Santiniketan and Visva Bharati

Tagore despised rote classroom schooling in The Parrots Training, a bird is caged and force fed textbook pagesto death. Tagore, visiting Santa Barbara in 1917, conceived a new type of university he sought to make Santiniketan the connecting thread between India and the world and a world center for the study of humanity somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography. The school, which he named Visva Bharati, had its foundation stone laid on 24 December 1918 and was inaugurated precisely three years later. Tagore employed a brahmacharya system gurus gave pupils personal guidanceemotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Teaching was often done under trees. He staffed the school, he contributed his Nobel Prize monies, and his duties as steward mentor at Santiniketan kept him busy mornings he taught classes, afternoons and evenings he wrote the students textbooks. He fundraised widely for the school in Europe and the United States between 1919 and 1921.