Unless we offer our children education that opens up the mind with questions rather than closes it with answers learnt by rote, we can’t nurture solutionaries who will deliver freedom from starvation to those amongst us who are hungry
A hundred years ago, learning by rote, standardised tests, and a homogenised criteria for judging performance were established in education and employment. Institutions taught and tested individuals in a standardised fashion as if everyone must be of the same mettle, interested in the same things, and develop in a similar way. Those methods of teaching and testing were, in fact, relevant to the times. It was the post-industrial era and factories required many workers but few thinkers. And so, those methods were built to serve the ‘system’ but not the individual.
But today, even though many economies are shifting in favour of the individual, and countries like India have the ambition to be a knowledge economy, this factory style approach to education still persists. A popular argument to continue this method of education is its outreach. In India, where one in four people still can not read or write, a standardised learning and testing approach can indeed reach out to a large number of people at cheap costs.
In this context, technology can be a great enabler for providing both — a more customised approach to education that focuses on the individual as well as education at a large scale. On one hand, knowledge is available on the Internet, to be gathered as per the interest of the user. On the other hand, technology can bring about scale by ushering in, say, high quality teaching into classrooms in remote areas via satellites. Moreover, technology breaks the barrier between teacher and student — now everyone can be a teacher by sharing whatever skills they have on online public platforms. Further, there are technology enabled testing methods that mould themselves and roll out according to a student’s aptitude. In this way, the teacher is no longer the source of knowledge or the judge for a student’s performance. This frees up time for the teacher to better grasp individual needs of students in a real or online classroom. A teacher becomes a facilitator for students to grasp knowledge, ask questions, and develop social and emotional skills. Students have vast amounts of information just a keyboard away, while teachers need to help students make choices.
But for all this, a precondition is to have a robust, extensive, and safe digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure is still lacking, especially in middle and low-income countries. In a country as inequitable as India, not everyone has Internet. Here technology can be a great leveller but it can also be divisive socially and developmentally, separating the developmental trajectory of the online connected from those who do not have access or can not afford the Internet. Further, despite the burst of edtech innovations, very few have scaled up to the magnitude required to educate one and all, especially in India.
I have been engaged with education in India for almost a decade, running an NGO that offers education to the economically disadvantaged, managing the portfolio of schools, vocational colleges, and universities of the Jindal Group, to now creating new universities via my own company. It has also been an honour for the past four years to be on the jury of the million dollar Global Teacher Prize. Established by the Varkey Foundation, the prize celebrates the teachers of the world and ultimately selects and rewards the ‘best teacher’. The prize winner becomes the teaching community’s ambassador for the year, facilitated by the Varkey Foundation. The genius of the prize’s efficacy lies in its simplicity — one prize for one teacher.
Vikas Pota, the outgoing CEO of the Varkey Foundation, is a brilliant yet self-effacing visionary who helped education entrepreneur Sunny Varkey set up the prize in Dubai. I had first met Vikas while working at the World Economic Forum several years ago. At that time, Vikas had recently taken on the mantle of chief executive of the Varkey Foundation and I was helping him script and deliver a talk at one of the WEF’s regional summits about his vision for the teaching profession. last month, as he stepped down from his role, he also announced that he will now establish for Sunny Varkey a venture that seeks to build further understanding about the role of technology in education.
In 2017-18, there were 3,888 teachers from India who applied for the teacher prize, but none made it to the top 10 finalists. Instead, the top 10 finalists for the prize were a mix — there were those from the US, Australia, Norway, who leveraged technology for all kinds of teaching purposes; and there were those from developing economies, such as Turkey, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, who deployed offline methods. Edtech is clearly not viable everywhere in the world.
The nominations for the teacher prize 2019 close next month. Every year, I would love to see an incremental number of teachers from India and other developing economies use technology. Because I would hope that a probable precursor to achieving this would likely be an improvement of the digital infrastructure in these regions.
Undoubtedly, it is difficult to emphasise the need for broadband and smartphones in a country where there are millions of empty stomachs to feed. The 163 million Indians who do not have safe drinking water would first quench their thirst rather than their curiosity about the world. Yet both are important. Because unless we offer the largest numbers possible of our children the kind of education that opens up the mind with questions rather than closes it with answers learnt by rote, the kind that asks to look for knowledge, think for themselves, and speak their opinion, and not just pander to those of others, we will not nurture solutionaries who will deliver freedom from starvation to those amongst us who are hungry.
Miniya is the author of Indian Instincts: Essays on Freedom and Equality in India, Penguin Random House (2018), and the CEO of Sustain labs Paris, the world’s first sustainability incubator. Email: miniya@labsparis.com
