3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature ® The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies Vol 29(1), March 2023 http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2023-2901-15 213 Rabindranath Tagore’s Journey as an Educator: Critical Perspectives on His Poetics and Praxis Mohammad A. Quayum (Ed.) Rabindranath Tagore’s Journey as an Educator: Critical Perspectives on His Poetics and Praxis London, New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis), 2022, xiv + 300 pp. ISBN: 978-0-367-69500-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74428-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-15776-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003157762 Reviewed by: RIFAT MAHBUB National Institute for Health and Care Research, United Kingdom rifat.mahbub@nihr.ac.uk rifatmahbub24@gmail.com As I sat to write this review, my mind played a trick, and I logged on to my ChatGPT account. I wrote, “tell me something about Rabindranath Tagore,” and within 10 seconds, it came up with certain basic information, identifying Tagore as a poet, philosopher, polymath and a great reformer of education. I did so to reflect on the unprecedented challenges and opportunities education as a cultural, social, political and economic system is experiencing in the post-post-modern globalised societies worldwide. And why, if there is a reason, should we return to Tagore, who, one may argue, was an “accidental” educationalist, having been unsuccessful in earning any formal degrees from colonial India or imperial Britain, but who ended up establishing and administering not only a number of community schools but also three full-fledged academic institutions: Santiniketan (1901), Visva-Bharati (1921) and Sriniketan (1922). This question is at the heart of the book Rabindranath Tagore’s Journey as an Educator: Critical Perspectives on His Poetics and Praxis, edited by eminent scholar and a Tagorean erudite, Professor Mohammad A. Quayum, and the answers, drawn from multiple intellectual, cultural and geographical perspectives and collated in this book, will convincereaders that there probably was no other time in human history than now when Tagore’s philosophy of education would help piece together some key jigsaws of the time and space we inhabit. The “journey” metaphor runs through the collection divided into two parts, “Tagore versus Selected Modern Educationists” (Part I) and “Tagore’s Educational Ideas and Experiments: Diverse Perspectives” (Part II). The fourteen chapters comprising these two parts (4 in Part I and 10 in Part II) individually and collectively take textual, temporal, spatial and intercultural journeys into the “poetics” and “praxis” of Tagore to grapple with questions about contemporary education, environment and the world. The editor’s “Introduction” comprehensively and succinctly lays the colonial context in which Tagore, a poet and philosopher, turned into a critique of the regimented and profit-oriented education system of his time and developed a “reverse” (p. 4) model in which, to quote from the introduction, “students would enjoy freedom, teachers would be caring and benevolent, the curriculum and pedagogy would underscore the creativity and imagination of students and the overall objective of education would focus not just on obtaining a good living but