The educational institution, therefore, which I have in mind has
primarily for its object the constant pursuit of truth, from which the
imparting of truth naturally follows. It must not be a dead cage in
which living minds are fed with food artificially prepared. It should
be an open house, in which students and teachers are at one. They must
live their complete life together, dominated by a common aspiration
for truth and a need of sharing all the delights of culture. In former
days the great master-craftsmen had students in their workshops where
they co-operated in shaping things to perfection. That was the place
where knowledge could become living—that knowledge which not only has
its substance and law, but its atmosphere subtly informed by a
creative personality. For intellectual knowledge also has its aspect
of creative art, in which the man who explores truth expresses
something which is human in him—his enthusiasm, his courage, his
sacrifice, his honesty, and his skill. In merely academical teaching
we find subjects, but not the man who pursues the subjects; therefore
the vital part of education remains incomplete.
For our Universities we must claim, not labelled packages of truth and
authorised agents to distribute them, but truth in its living
association with her lovers and seekers and discoverers. Also we must
know that the concentration of the mind-forces scattered throughout
the country is the most important mission of a University, which, like
the nucleus of a living cell, should be the centre of the intellectual
life of the people.
The bringing about of an intellectual unity in India is, I am told,
difficult to the verge of impossibility owing to the fact that India
has so many different languages. Such a statement is as unreasonable
as to say that man, because he has a diversity of limbs, should find
it impossible to realise life's unity in himself, and that only an
earthworm composed of a tail and nothing else could truly know that it
had a body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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