India’s education system must adapt better to the real world out there

In education, teachers form the frontline, and their role requires all three capacities. Software coders, who are at the frontline of the IT world, mostly require technical capacities and a few social-human capacities. The frontline politician’s role is also complex, as it requires social-human and operational capacities in ample measure, though the typical political leader does not need technical capacities to match a teacher’s.

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This inherent nature of each field has profound implications. People, both individually and in groups, are unpredictable and have varying behaviour. They are often inconsistent, and change, not only across long periods of time, but even in short intervals. 

All this has direct implications for operational requirements because operations are often about getting things done with people, including managing your own self. Even aside from this people-driven complexity, all operations are context- and environment-dependent.

So, while most technical matters can be codified into knowledge that can be taught and used, it is very hard to do that for any of the social-human and operational stuff. It is also equally impossible to do it for that part of technical knowledge which is about ‘know-how’ and not ‘know-what.’ For example, which vaccine is to be injected, why and when, vis-à-vis how it must be done.

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This underlying reality led to a near comical standoff in a recent meeting. In a group of 30 people, eight were MBAs from one of the five top business schools in India, each with over 25 years of career success. The non-MBAs were keen on developing an educational programme like the MBA for the social sector. The MBAs were united in opposition to that idea because “the educational value of the MBA is near zero.”

The gist of their life experience was that as an education, the MBA degree gave them very little of use later in life, other than some specific technical skills such as accounting. Almost every capacity they needed and found useful, they had only learnt later as they became practising managers; most of it being about people and operations. 

The MBAs were not undermining the MBA programme’s value, as the credential could open doors, allow access to wide and deep networks, and grant social and economic opportunities. But it did not help develop the capacities needed at work. Thus, as an educational programme, it was inadequate.

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This is not a fault or limitation of MBA programmes in particular. The problem afflicts most education that prepares people for work lives that require technical ‘know-how’ and social-human or operational capacities. Our standard classroom-based model of education cannot develop these adequately. Developing them requires actual experience, and learning from that, which works even better if someone helps the learner learn and the organizational or institutional backdrop has been set up to aid that learning.

This limitation is well recognized in education, which is why most such programmes have a range of educational mechanisms. For example, exposure to work sites, live projects and internships.

But all of this seems to have been quite ineffective, which has led to outcries for more practical training, greater skill-orientation and closer links with industry. To improve things, it will not suffice to have better internships or projects and closer partnerships. Unless we address the core problems of imagination in our education, we will not move ahead.

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Our imagination of education is now almost universally of something that happens in institutional settings. The life experience required for the development of capacities is near impossible or very shallow in such settings. Instead of the institutional model of education, it is the apprenticeship model that is most effective for this kind of learning.

The practical problem is that it is nearly impossible to create a system that has large-scale apprenticeships that fulfil relevant societal needs. For example, if we were to convert teacher education from the current college-based B.Ed or management education from an MBA to an apprentice-based system, it will likely need a one-on-one teacher-apprentice ratio, and its associated costs, versus 1: 15-30 in an institutional classroom setting, with its relatively limited costs because of a bounded environment.

But there are deeper problems than practical hurdles. Such as the issue of what is knowledge and the educational system hierarchizing abstract and theoretical knowledge as ‘truer’ and more valuable. 

This deep dogma is manifest in our institutional structures and curricular approach. It’s a double bind because this knowledge power hierarchy is significantly controlled by the educational institutions themselves. All of which together constrain the possibility of an educational imagination that gives know-how, social-human and operational matters the full importance they deserve. Can we deal with this? We will explore that in the next column.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.