Featured Article Caught in the Cross Traffic: Rabindranath Tagore and the Trials of Child Education RANJAN GHOSH The article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on child education, focusing on Ta- gore’s notion of the child, method and nonmethod in education, a deep understand- ing of education in relation to the child’s surroundings, and the ways in which Tagore envisaged the relationship between the child and the teacher—the guru-shishya dynam- ics. These investigations are transcultural in nature in that they engage with several thinkers and different clusters of ideas from the Western tradition, namely, Tolstoy, Rousseau, William Godwin, Martin Buber, Froebel, and others. The article also demon- strates how some of Tagore’s ideas fall in line with certain contemporary discourses on child education. Introduction This article is part of a larger project to advance the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) as an educationist and a thinker beyond the narrow confines of hitherto well-encrusted models of understanding. 1 My larger project involves reconfiguring the domains of comparative educational philos- ophy through what I call “(in)fusionised transcultural now” (Ghosh 2012a, 2012b, forthcoming). (In)fusion, as I have argued elsewhere, is about ques- tioning the limits of critical understanding, about trying to understand how far and to what extent critical correspondences between contesting para- digms of thoughts and concepts can be explored and executed. It is based on a sound faith in inevitable epistemic entanglements and refuses to see I am grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for constructive expressions that helped to im- prove the article. The article, in fact, went through five reviewers, two of them being in house. It owes a lot both structurally and expressively to all of them. 1 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) is a distinguished poet, a Nobel laureate who excelled in every literary genre, and a thinker whose thoughts on politics, religion, and culture attracted great attention in colonial India. Even though he established a school in 1901 that avoided the governing principles of colonial or missionary education, a university in 1918 with an internationalist vision and reach, and a rural education institute in 1921, his poetry, novels, plays, and songs (even his paintings and copious letters) have gained prominence at the expense of a rich body of writing that explores the philosophy and principles of pedagogy and education. Received February 26, 2014; revised September 10, 2014, September 29, 2014, and November 23, 2014; accepted February 13, 2015; electronically published June 9, 2015 Comparative Education Review, vol. 59, no. 3. q 2015 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2015/5903-0002$10.00 Comparative Education Review 399