India's schools are dumbing down our children

The innovation-driven economy and education system moving in different directions

It may not be an exaggeration to assert that the combined effect of current developments in knowledge automation, advanced robotics, driverless cars, drones, cloud technology, next generation genomics, clean energy, 3D printing (including its possible liquid option), nanotechnology, brain-computer interface (BCI) and many others have brought the human society to the doorstep of a new revolution, when fantasy and reality are increasingly becoming indistinguishable. But at the same time, there is a converging view among many leading researchers that to meet the challenges of this fast emerging innovation-driven economy, the prevalent one-size-fit-all factory model of school education – originated a couple of centuries ago to serve the needs of industrialisation – is woefully inadequate.

The incident of mass cheating in Bihar school board exams – widely reported in the global media some time ago – only confirms yet again how miserably our education system is out of sync with today’s requirements. Considering the gravity of the situation the incident indeed should have been treated as a national wake up call.

Labour and creativity

Transition from mass production to mass customisation is the most distinguishing feature of the global economy today when every product is being increasingly treated as a service. In the new economy, labour is expected to apply divergent thinking to find creative solutions for unknown problems of a highly uncertain tomorrow. By managing routine operations remaining within a narrowly defined area of expertise, an employee will no longer be able to add much value to a business. Say, for example, an automobile engineer trained to work with suppliers and assembly specialists for designing and manufacturing components is, possibly, ill suited for a future garage-sized plant capable of replacing a city-sized car factory.

Evidently most large organisations are yet to wake up to this new reality. For many firms achieving six-sigma still remains the coveted goal. There is little room for “creative deviation” from predetermined processes in these firms. Creativity at best is “sigmatised”, if not stigmatised. Consequently, there is hardly any demand on the education system to provide creative workforce. The system is busy in producing the proverbial cog in the machine.

Linear thinking, which dominates the management discipline till date, is not capable of managing extremely high levels of uncertainty created by the onslaught of ever-increasing disruptive innovations. A country’s competitive advantage will be increasingly determined by its ability to nurture creative mindsets and out-of-the-box thinking, essential for managing high uncertainties. But for this to happen, the creative mindsets need to be nurtured from an early age.

Creativity is generally high in early childhood, but is gone – at least most of it – by the time the school education is over. In view of the requirement of the current age, the education system has to be fundamentally reformed to cultivate the creative mind throughout the education process. As Sir Ken Robinson mentioned in his talk, creativity was now as important as literacy.

Since high uncertainty and creative experiments go hand in hand with high failure, learning to fail is also critical for future-proofing the career of the population. Stew Friedman from Wharton advised that people should now imagine being scientists in the experiment of their lives and try adventures.

Silicon Valley has understood this a while ago where failure, as a rule, is something entrepreneurs like to flaunt.

Standardised test to ensure failure in life

It is important to acknowledge that under high rate of knowledge obsolescence, ability to find the right answer to a question has less value compared to the ability to provide a host of alternative solutions based on non-obvious connections and intuitions. Standardised tests are not critically important for performance evaluation in an innovation-era.

As the Bihar incident demonstrates, the friends, relatives and “professional helpers” of the candidates are ready to take enormous physical risk to provide “right” answers to the candidates appearing for the exams. The system obviously has created a dangerous illusion that the road to a bright future depends upon one’s ability to get a degree by providing right answers to the test questions. Like in the popular TV programme it seems it is quite okay to take outside help, if required, for procuring those answers.

In an economy where knowledge is growing exponentially, by just providing right answers using logico-mathematical reasoning employees will not be able to help their firms much to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Moreover, rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence will anyhow allow firms to replace such employees with machines. The industries will more and more require human labour with creative problem solving skills and entrepreneurial ability that can experiment with vague ideas. If the education system cannot prepare such labour then initiatives like Make in India will remain only as a wishful thinking.

The present education system, unfortunately, continues to prepare our workforce for hopeless competition with the machines where the latter can win hands down. The time has come to experiment with a wide variety of disruptive models in education for bringing a paradigm shift in the system. While developing the skills required for outsourcing most of the linear thinking – from simple to complex operations – to machines, the education system must focus on developing skills to bring creativity and fun to the workplace.

The machines probably will always remain hopelessly ineffective to compete with humans on this.