How a British educational inspector made learning Gujarati easy and fun

Ahmedabad: In 1876, former British educational inspector, T C Hope, decided that "children suffered enough learning Gujarati letters and words under the weight of boring, repetitive drills". His book, ‘Gujarati Peheli Chopdi' or ‘Gujarati First Book', was a total ‘U' turn against the "old way" of teaching children through rote learning that left most of them frustrated and weary.The very first words a child learned in Hope's system were ‘Ma' (mother) and ‘Ba' (grandmother). "By starting with people they love, the lessons feel personal rather than clinical," Hope wrote in his manual for teachers teaching Gujarati. Before Hope's intervention, children spent a lot of time memorizing the alphabet (moolakshar), syllables (barakhadi), and complex conjunct characters (jodakshar) before they ever got to read a real sentence. "It was all rote learning, and frankly, it was exhausting," says Rizwan Kadri, a city-based historian and member of the Prime Minister's Museum and Library, New Delhi.Hope's new method flipped the script. He believed learning should be full of ‘ras' (interest and fun). Instead of breaking words down into dry grammatical components, he insisted that children should learn reading, writing, and the meaning of words all at once, Kadri said.Teachers were told not to explain vowel signs like ‘kana' or ‘matra' at the start. Instead, they pointed to the word ‘ma' and had the child recognize the whole sound and its meaning immediately. City-based historian Kadri said, "Teachers were asked to show children whatever was mentioned in the lesson and explain its material and make."