Sikshanamandira came into being in 1958 as the third Teachers’ Training College of West Bengal. The first prospectus depicts in its own language, the aim of this college:-

“To trend teachers so as to make them fit instrument for imparting right type of education to the younger generation of education. The enterprise is a step towards the realisation of a big educational scheme of the Ramakrishna Mission Saradapitha. The Sikshanamandira has been made wholly residential to enable the trainees to leave a community live for imbibing a spirit of service and mutual co-operation, learn self help and pay individual attention to their studies”.Swami Vivekananda said: “My idea of education is personal contact with the teacher - gurugrihavasa.Without the personal life of a teacher there would be no education. Take your Universities. What have they done during the fifty years of their existence? They have not produced one original man. They are merely an examining body. The idea of the sacrifice for the common well is not yet developed in our nation. One should live from his very boyhood with one whose character is like a blazing fire and should have before him a living example of the highest teaching” (My India, The India Eternal , p.-56).

Now to meet this aim the Sikshanamandira was framed as a residential college for the teacher community to be nurtured with Swamiji’s ideas on education. It is needless to say that the responsibility goes out-right with the teachers to train the future generation of a race up.

Swami Vimuktananda (Upen Maharaj), a visionary monk of the Ramakrishna order, was the first one to start with the ideas of today’s Saradapitha. He actually started from the scratches, and toiled beyond our fancy to real his visions. Vimuktanandaji’s was the life in which the ideals of karamayoga, as propounded by Vivekananda, found its true medium of translation. A senior monk recapitulates: “Swami Vimuktanandaji once asked us, ‘which stage, do you think, of work helps us to pure our mind?’ We answered, ‘The infantile stage, of course’. In reply he told, ‘Yes, the infantile stage truly educates us, but there is a stage more important than it. Suppose we have resolved for a work and it is yet to start - that particular phase of oscillation provides us more dependency on God, more calmness of mind, and more negation of the idea of doer-ship. And again you must know this phase really helps us to attain the purity of mind which Swamiji declares the aim of Karmayoga”.

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