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Imagine a teacher who, on the first day, puts the textbooks away and tells a story so good that the class refuses a holiday to hear the end. That is how Divaswapna, Gijubhai Badheka's short book about an imaginary teacher, begins. Nearly a century after it was written, it still has something to say to students who find exams more frightening than useful.
Who was Gijubhai Badheka?
Gijubhai lived from 1885 to 1939. In Gijubhai in My Life, a memoir by his granddaughter Mamata Pandya, she records that he went to East Africa in 1907 to work for a solicitor, a Mr Stevens, whose standard advice was "Use your brain!" Back in India he studied law and practised it. For the first 30 years of his life, she writes, he had not thought about children's education. His interest was triggered by the birth of his son Narendra in 1913.
In 1920 he set up the Bal Mandir, a school for young children, at the Dakshinamurti institution in Bhavnagar. He died in 1939 at the age of 54. Pandya writes that he wrote more than 200 books, 20 of them addressed to teachers and parents, and many stories for children.
What is Divaswapna about?
The English edition of Divaswapna, published with a preface by the educationist Krishna Kumar, says the book first appeared in Gujarati in 1932. Kumar describes it as the imaginary story of a teacher who rejects the orthodox culture of schooling. Its theory comes from Montessori, he writes, but its preparation and practice are thoroughly local.
The narrator, a thinker who has never taught, asks the Education Officer for a Class 4 for one year. The officer agrees but warns him that the class will be judged by the examinations at the end of the year. The narrator accepts.
On the first day he tells a story. When he offers the children a choice between a holiday and the rest of the story, every one of them picks the story. He uses stories to lay the ground for history. For grammar, which he thinks dull for children that age, he devises a card game. Within two months, the narrator says, the children could pick out nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs in a sentence. The Education Officer, visiting, at first thinks the boys are just playing cards.
What did Gijubhai think exams were for?
Late in the book, the narrator gives the Education Officer his ideas for reform. Hold monthly tests instead of two big ones a year, so pupils get used to them. And, in the words of the English translation, "the examination must be regarded not as a test of achievement but as a means to diagnose the pupil's weak points and to alert the weak students."
This is close to what researchers now call formative assessment: using tests to guide the next step of learning rather than only to grade it. Our post on Black and Wiliam's work on formative assessment covers the evidence.
What did he tell parents?
Pandya quotes a short piece by Gijubhai that reads like a checklist. If you want to do one thing for children, do not hit them. If two, do not scold or insult them. If more, do not bribe them, do not preach, do not keep finding fault, and let the child do things for itself. His parenting writing was collected in books such as It Is Not Easy Being Parents, published in Gujarati in 1935.
What can a student take from Gijubhai's way of working?
Gijubhai's narrator kept trying things, watching what worked, and adjusting. You can run the same experiment on your own study.
Use mock tests to find gaps, not to judge yourself. After each mock, list the three weakest topics and spend your next week on those.
Test yourself often and in small doses. Short weekly quizzes make the final exam feel familiar, as the narrator wanted.
Turn dull material into a game. Make cards for reagents and products, or units and quantities, and sort them against a timer.
Learn through stories. For a history of science topic or a biology process, tell it to yourself as a sequence of events with causes.
Ask "Use your brain" before asking for the answer. Spend five minutes on a problem on your own before you look anything up.
If you want a check on your understanding that works the way Gijubhai's diagnostic tests did, Fermi's AI tutor checks understanding as it goes, so weak points show up while you are still learning. For where his ideas came from, see our posts on the evidence behind Montessori education and on Friedrich Froebel and the first kindergarten.
After your next mock test, write down your three weakest topics before you look at your rank.
