Gijubhai Badheka’s Child-Centered Education: Learning through Freedom and Play

Most people who grew up in India remember school as a place of strict timetables, heavy textbooks, and end-of-year examinations that determined your worth as a student. Long before the world began debating alternatives to this model, a lawyer from Gujarat quietly walked away from his courtroom career and into a classroom – not to teach in the conventional sense, but to completely reimagine what teaching could look like. Gijubhai Badheka (1885-1939) believed that children do not need to be filled with knowledge; they need to be trusted to find it themselves. His ideas were radical for his era – and remain deeply relevant today.

From lawyer to educator: the personal moment that changed everything 🔗

Gijubhai’s path to education was not planned. Born on 15 November 1885 in Vallabhipur, Gujarat, he trained as a lawyer and practiced as a High Court pleader. The turning point came when his son was born. As he held his newborn, his own school days – marked by corporal punishment, rote learning, and fear – flashed before him. He began asking a single question: wasn’t there a better way?

That question led him to Maria Montessori’s work. He closely observed child education classes in Gujarat and discovered the Montessori method, which placed the child’s natural development at the center of learning. But Gijubhai did not simply import the method. Drawing from the educational philosophies of Montessori, Fröbel, Dalton, and others, he developed his own blend of music, dance, storytelling, and outdoor play suited to the Indian environment, with freedom and love as its twin guiding principles.

In 1916, he gave up his legal practice entirely. In 1920, he founded the Bal Mandir – one of India’s first pre-primary schools – at the Dakshinamurti institution in Bhavnagar. The Bal Mandir movement aimed to create a nurturing, stimulating environment focused on holistic development, creativity, and a stress-free learning atmosphere. Mahatma Gandhi admired his work deeply and affectionately called him Moochali Maa – “mother with whiskers” – a name that stayed with him for life.

The core of his philosophy: education belongs to the child 🔗

Gijubhai’s most fundamental conviction was simple: education is for the child, not the child for education. He opposed the colonial system of education, which concentrated too much on rules and regulations, leaving no room for teachers or parents to bring creative changes in students. In his view, the conventional system had it backwards – it forced children to fit a rigid structure rather than building a structure around the child’s natural needs and interests.

He emphasized self-discipline, encouraging children to learn independently in a natural environment rather than through coercion or punishment. He was not against discipline itself – he believed deeply in it – but he distinguished sharply between imposed discipline, which breeds resentment, and natural discipline, which grows from within when a child is genuinely engaged. A child absorbed in meaningful play does not need to be told to sit still.

According to his humanistic approach, a child should first feel good about themselves. When a child has a positive self-concept, it improves their abilities and motivates them to understand and work on their own weaknesses. This was not motivational language – it was his understanding of how learning actually works. He called the goal of education self-actualization: the fullest realization of a child’s potential, driven by intrinsic rather than external rewards.

Learning through play, stories, and songs 🔗

Play as the engine of learning 🔗

For Gijubhai, play was not a break from learning – it was the method of learning. Through games, he argued, children gain real education. Great qualities are developed on the playground. He designed classroom activities where children engaged in structured play – building, moving, creating – rather than sitting in rows copying from a board.

A telling example comes from his approach to geography. He developed interest in geography among students by showing them maps and having them play a game called “let us travel,” where each student imagined they were on a journey, planned their routes, and noted places of interest. The subject came alive because children were active participants, not passive listeners.

He also believed strongly in spontaneous expression through drama. He had children enact plays based on stories they already knew by heart, without rehearsal, so that their emotions and expressions came out naturally. For him, the spontaneous performance was always superior to the rehearsed one.

Storytelling as a teaching tool 🔗

Gijubhai placed storytelling at the heart of his classroom practice. Through storytelling, he put concepts in front of children in ways they loved to engage with, promoting attentive listening and stimulating the imagination for concepts requiring careful thinking. Stories were not entertainment slotted into the day – they were the primary vehicle through which language, moral understanding, and social awareness developed.

Storytelling also helped build a genuine rapport between teacher and students – children came to see the teacher as a friend rather than an authority figure to be feared. This shift in relationship was, for Gijubhai, as important as any content being taught. A child who trusts their teacher learns with openness rather than anxiety.

His use of songs followed the same logic. He experimented daily with poems and songs, identifying which ones children genuinely responded to, and found that many students memorized half a dozen songs naturally – without being forced to. Music stimulated emotions, aided memory, and gave children a channel for expression that formal instruction never could.

Rejecting examinations and rankings 🔗

Gijubhai firmly opposed using exams and rankings to determine a person’s potential. He believed that assigning grades would only foster insensitive competition, hostility, and bitterness among children. His classroom had no ranking system. Instead, children were encouraged to help one another learn. Assessment, in his view, should reflect a child’s overall development – not their performance in a three-hour paper on a single day.

He rejected what he called “the old servile system” and devised teaching methods that concentrated on language and the arts, encouraging children to explore and learn for their own development rather than to qualify for the next level. He was particularly insistent that pace must vary per child: it is, he argued, entirely unethical to assume all children learn the same things at the same time.

Divaswapna: his educational manifesto 🔗

Gijubhai’s most celebrated work is Divaswapna (meaning “Daydreams”), first published in Gujarati in 1932. The book is structured as the story of a fictional teacher named Laxmiram who enters a conventional school and systematically introduces child-centered methods – storytelling, games, songs, class libraries, spontaneous drama, and hygiene routines – against strong resistance from colleagues, parents, and education authorities.

Laxmiram strongly rejected the summative education system, in which children’s entire performance was judged by a single year-end examination, ignoring everything they demonstrated throughout the year. By the end of the academic year, however, the results of his approach were undeniable – students improved not only academically but in their behavior and self-confidence. In a break from tradition, the prize money that was typically distributed among top students was redirected to start a school library, to be continued every year.

Divaswapna remains a landmark in Indian educational literature. It stands as testimony to alternate paradigms in educational theory and practice, demonstrating through narrative what pedagogy textbooks could never quite convey. Its lessons feel as immediate today as they did in 1932.

Building institutions, training teachers 🔗

Gijubhai understood that ideas alone change nothing – structures are needed. In 1925, he founded the Adhyapak Mandir (teacher training center) at Dakshinamurti, believing that teachers in the colonial education system had never been oriented to creative or child-centered methods. He also launched the Shikshan Patrika, a Gujarati monthly journal in 1925 that published critical articles on the existing education system and created wide awareness about holistic education among parents across Gujarat.

That same year, he co-founded the Nutan Bal Shikshan Sangh with educator Tarabai Modak. Together they developed affordable educational aids and spread their model of child-centered learning across Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. His influence on young educators was direct and personal: he would give morning talks wrapped in a quilt, with young trainees gathered around him in what became known as the Godada Adhyapan Mandir – the “training school in quilts.”

He also firmly held that teachers alone are not responsible for educating children – it must be a participatory process involving parents, educationists, guardians, and the wider community. This systemic view was decades ahead of its time.

In just two active decades, Gijubhai authored close to 200 publications – storybooks, educational pamphlets, plays, poems, and journal articles – all aimed at children, parents, and educators. He once told a colleague who urged him to rest: “I would wish that in a lifetime of fifty years, I could do a hundred years of work.” He passed away in 1939 at the age of 53.

His philosophy in today’s classrooms 🔗

Gijubhai’s ideas are not historical curiosities. India’s National Education Policy 2020 emphasizes foundational literacy, critical thinking, and holistic development – precisely the vision Gijubhai articulated nearly a century ago. NEP-2020 stresses that over 85% of a child’s brain development occurs before the age of six, reinforcing the critical importance of quality early childhood care and education – which was the exact space Gijubhai dedicated his life to improving.

The policy’s emphasis on mother-tongue-based instruction, play-based pedagogy, and reduced dependence on rote learning all echo what he practiced in Bhavnagar a century ago. Gijubhai released more than 200 books in Gujarati to support learning in the mother tongue and to encourage child-centered education – a priority that NEP-2020 has now formalized at the national level.

As researchers have noted, Gijubhai’s emphasis on play-based learning, child autonomy, storytelling, and natural settings demonstrates how Indian educational wisdom and modern insights into child psychology can coexist. He is often called the “Montessori of India” – but the description sells him short. He did not copy Montessori; he filtered her ideas through Indian culture, children’s literature, folk traditions, and his own deep empathy for children, producing something original and lasting.

The school he founded in Bhavnagar still exists. Teachers there continue to follow his methods. That, more than any award or official recognition, is the measure of his legacy.

What do you think? If Gijubhai Badheka’s ideas about play, storytelling, and freedom from formal examinations were fully implemented in today’s schools, what would need to change first – the curriculum, the assessment system, or how we train teachers? And looking at your own experience as a student or educator, which of his principles do you feel is most urgently missing from classrooms today?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gijubhai_Badheka
2. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/socp13/chapter/gijubhai-badheka/
3. https://www.scribd.com/document/796734588/GIJUBHAI-BADHEKA
4. https://www.gyanvihar.org/journals/uploads/2024/09/meenakshi-paper.pdf
5. https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/epgpdata/uploads/epgp_content/S000033SO/P000300/M013099/ET/145259084710ET.pdf
6. https://researchpaedia.in/issuepdf/16350597907ShradhaBookReview.pdf
7. http://lamhangsing.blogspot.com/2012/09/divaswapna-review.html
8. https://www.creativeflight.in/2024/11/an-investigation-reviewing-educational.html
9. https://www.gijubhaibadheka.in/divaswapna.php
10. https://gijubhaibadheka.in/biography.php
11. https://tssreview.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/33-Ashok-Kumar-Dr.-Rajendra-Kumar-Ram-.pdf
12. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393051254_Gijubhai_Badheka_as_a_Bridge_between_Indian_Knowledge_Systems_and_Child_Psychology