Intercultural education in trying times : cases of Rabindranath Tagore and Janusz Korczak

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Janusz Korczak (1878(9)-1942), an Asian and a European, developed their educational approaches and initiated their educational experiments as colonized subjects, living under foreign occupation. In their works, created in such circumstances, they both stress the importance of freedom and independence (spiritual, cultural, intellectual, political etc.), equality, tolerance, forgiveness, compassion, and sympathy as the constituting principles of the proposed models of education which were universal in spirit. But most of all, both underlined the supremacy of mutual respect and sensitive, respectful communication over every kind of force, whether psychological or physical. The aim of the paper is to reflect on selected educational ideas of these two 20th century personalities of Asia and Europe to show that the educational methods of both Tagore and Korczak realised the constitutive principles of culture, with an attempt to suggest possible reasons for their impact in both Korea and Poland.