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 is not a novel insight. Most practitioners recognize that classroom learning prioritizes conceptual and abstract learning at the expense of hands-on know-how. This is an educational dogma reflected in institutional structures and the curricular approach. To counter it, most such programmes have mechanisms like exposure to work sites, live projects and internships.

But all of this seems ineffective, so cries have arisen for education that’s more practical and skill-oriented, with closer industry links. Improvements on these alone may not help. We must address three difficulties—problems of imagination, resources and what I call ‘leakages.’

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The problem of imagination is that we have institutionalized all learning. Institutional settings cannot provide the active life experience needed to develop these capacities. The apprenticeship model is most effective for this kind of learning. An even deeper issue is what constitutes useful knowledge. Our educational system privileges abstract and theoretical knowledge as more valuable. This sets up a power hierarchy of knowledge, significantly controlled by institutions. Thus our institutional imaginations are trapped in a ‘chakravyuh’ with no clear way out of it.

This raises the resource problem. The scale of resources needed to convert teacher education from today’s B.Ed system or management education from the MBA system to an apprentice-based one is prohibitive. It would take a one-on-one teacher-apprentice ratio, and that too in a work-scape with its associated costs, instead of the standard one-to-many ratio that keeps costs low.

The third factor, leakage, is well known to economists. In a context where exit barriers are low and people can easily leave one job for a ‘better’ one, organizations do not have an incentive to invest heavily in education, especially in apprentice models. An organization that invests may end up helping a competitor. So we have a Catch-22: only institutionalized settings like business schools can take on educational costs, but they cannot really teach what matters most. How could this be resolved? Much depends on it.

The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.