Saturday, February 2, 2013

Rabindranath in Dartington Hall, London

In Villeneuve Rabindranath met different greatmen of France, Germany etc and became much pleased. He visited Jurich, Vienna, and Paris and then came to England. From London he went straight to Tottenos village in Devonshire. In 1925, Elmhirst purchased a house named Dartington Hall and established a school there.He introduced the same method of teaching as in Shantiniketan and Sriniketan. Elmhirst got huge property bny marrying his American friend. Now, he was doing some work for public benifit with that money.
Dartington Hall School
The Dartington Hall Trust, near Totnes, Devon, England, is a charity specialising in the arts, social justice and sustainability.
The Trust currently runs 16 charitable programmes, including The Dartington International Summer School and Schumacher College. In addition to developing and promoting arts and educational programmes, the Trust hosts other groups and acts as a venue for retreats.
Dartington Hall School, founded in 1926, offered a progressive coeducational boarding life. When it started there was a minimum of formal classroom activity and the children learnt by involvement in estate activities. With time more academic rigour was imposed, but it remained progressive and had mixed success educating the children, sometimes the more wayward ones, of the fee-paying intelligentsia. A noted alumnus was Lord Young, a founder of Which? and the Open University. Lucian Freud attended the school for two years, and his brother Clement Freud was also a pupil at Dartington. Oliver PostgateMartin Bernal, Ivan Moffat, Matthew Huxley and Richard Leacock are also noted alumni.
At its peak the school had some 300 pupils. However, with the advent of state-based progressive education, the death of its founders, and the appointment of a new headmaster who was at odds with the school's philosophies and subsequently generated a significant amount of negative publicity, the school suffered a dramatic drop in recruitment. Despite the efforts of those who cared about the school, it finally shut its doors in 1987. After the school's closure a number of staff and students set up Sands School which still carries some of the principles that Dartington once had.
The editor and writer Miriam Gross wrote an interesting account of the school, and of her time there, in the May 2011 edition of Standpoint magazine.
Rasbindranath came to Dartington Hall to visit newly founded school by Enderson. he married a rich American lady and got huge property which he utilised for charitable work. He stayed at Carbis Bay