Yeats, the celebrated Irish poet said in his introduction to the book Gitanjali or Song Offering(1912) “......these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years.” The book received Nobel Prize in 1913. Ezra Pound said of the same work, “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.” 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, “generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth”. 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.