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Excerpted from:
V. Bhatia
(ed.) 1994. Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in
Education.
New Delhi: Sahitya Chayan.
ONCE UPON
A TIME
THERE
WAS
a bird. It was ignorant. It sang all
right,
but never recited scriptures. It
hopped
pretty frequently,
but lacked manners.
Said the Raja to himself: ‘Ignorance is costly in
the long run. For fools
consume as much
food as their betters,
and
yet give nothing in
return.’
He called
his nephews to his presence and
told them that the bird must have a sound
schooling.
The pundits were summoned,
and at once went
to the root of the matter. They decided that
the ignorance of birds was
due to their natural habit of
living in poor nests.
Therefore, according to
the
pundits, the first thing necessary for this
bird’s education
was a suitable cage.
The pundits had their rewards and
went
home happy.
A golden cage was
built with gorgeous decorations. Crowds came to see it from
all parts of the world.
‘Culture, captured and
caged!’ exclaimed some,
in a rapture of ecstasy, and
burst into tears. Others remarked:
‘Even
if
culture be missed, the
cage will remain, to the end, a substantial
fact. How
fortunate for the bird!’
The goldsmith
filled his bag with money and lost no tune in sailing homewards.
The pundit sat
down to educate the bird.
With proper deliberation
he took his pinch of snug: as
he said: ‘Textbooks
can never be too
many for our purpose!’
The nephews brought together an enormous crowd of scribes. They copied
from
books, and copied from
copies, till the manuscripts were piled
up to an unreachable height. Men
murmured
in amazement. ‘Oh,
the tower of culture,
egregiously high! The end of
it lost in the clouds!’
The scribes, with light hearts,
hurried home, their pockets heavily laden.
The nephews were furiously busy keeping the cage in proper trim. As their constant
scrubbing and polishing went
on, the people said with
satisfaction: ‘This is progress
indeed!’
Men were employed in large numbers and
supervisors were still
more numerous. These, with their cousins of all different
degrees
of distance, built a palace for themselves
and lived there happily ever after.
Whatever may be its other deficiencies, the
world is never in
want of fault-finders; and
they
went about saying that
every creature remotely connected with the cage flourished
beyond words,
excepting
only
the bird.
When this remark reached the Raja’s ears,
he summoned his nephews
before him and
said: ‘My dear nephews, what is this that we hear?’
The nephews
said
in answer: ‘Sire, let
the testimony of the goldsmiths and the pundits, the scribes and
the supervisors
be taken, if the truth
is to be known. Food is scarce with
the fault-finders, and
that is why their tongues
have gained
in sharpness.’
The explanation
was so luminously satisfactory that the
Raja decorated each one of his nephews with his own rare jewels.
The Raja at
length, being desirous of
seeing with his own eyes
how his Education Department
busied itself with the little
bird, made his
appearance one day at the great Hall
of Learning.
From the gate rose the sounds
of conch-shells
and
gongs, horns, bugles and trumpets, cymbals, drums
and kettledrums, tomtoms, tambourines,
flutes, fifes, barrel-organs
and bagpipes.
The pundits began chanting mantras with their topmost voices, while the
goldsmiths, scribes,
supervisors, and
their numberless
cousins of all different
degrees
of distance, loudly raised a round of
cheers.
The nephews smiled
and
said: ‘Sire, what
do you
think of it all?’
The Raja said: ‘It does
seem so fearfully like a sound principle of Education!’
Mightily pleased,
the Raja was about
to remount
his elephant, when the fault-finder,
from behind some bush, cried out: ‘Maharaja, have you seen the
bird?’
‘ Indeed, I have not!’ exclaimed
the Raja. ‘I completely forgot
about the bird.’
Turning back,
he asked the pundits about
the method they followed in instructing the bird. It
was
shown to him. He was immensely impressed.
The method was so
stupendous that the bird looked
ridiculously unimportant in comparison. The Raja was
satisfied that there was
no flaw in the
arrangements. As for any complaint
from the bird itself, that
simply could not be expected. Its
throat was so completely choked
with the leaves from the
books that it could neither whistle nor whisper. It sent a thrill through one’s body to watch the
process.
This
time, while remounting his elephant, the
Raja ordered
his State ear-puller to give a thorough good pull at
both the ears of the fault-finder.
The bird
thus crawled on, duly and
properly, to the safest
verge of inanity. In fact, its progress was satisfactory in
the extreme. Nevertheless,
Nature occasionally triumphed over training,
and when the morning light
peeped into
the bird’s cage it
sometimes fluttered its wings in a reprehensible manner.
And, though it is hard to believe,
it pitifully pecked at its bars
with its feeble beak.
‘ What impertinence!’ growled the
kotwal.
The blacksmith,
with his forge and hammer,
took his place in the Raja’s
Department
of Education. Oh, what resounding blows!
The iron chain
was soon completed,
and the bird’s wings were clipped.
The Raja’s
brothers-in-law looked
black, and shook their heads, saying: ‘These birds
not only lack good
sense, but also gratitude!’
With text-book in one hand and baton
in the other, the pundits gave the poor bird what
may
fitly be called lessons!
The kotwal
was honoured with a
title for his watchfulness, and
the blacksmith for his
skill in forging chains.
The bird died.
Nobody had
the least notion how long ago this had
happened. The fault-finder was the first man
to spread the rumour.
The Raja called his nephews
and asked them,
‘My dear nephews, what is this that we hear?’
The nephews said: ‘Sire, the bird’s
education has been
completed.’
‘ Does it hop?’ the Raja enquired.
‘ Never!’ said the
nephews.
‘ Does it fly?’
‘ No.’
‘ Bring me the bird,’ said the Raja.
The bird was brought
to him, guarded
by
the kotwal and the
sepoys and
the sowars. The
Raja poked its body with his
finger.
Only
its inner stuffing of book-leaves rustled.
Outside the window,
the murmur of the spring breeze amongst the
newly budded asoka
leaves made the April
morning wistful.
With public education currently under attack from many different
sides, it is important that we as educators, become advocates for our
profession. We need to arm ourselves with the facts, with why we should
be proud of what we do, and how well we do it. 
