Teachers' Day special: Time to rethink learning by rote
As India celebrates Teachers’ Day on September 5, a month ahead of World Teachers’ Day, marking the birth anniversary of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, President of India (1962-1967), much has changed the way education is perceived, packaged and practised.
On the one hand, the processes and policies around education have prevailed largely unchallenged over the past six decades, the commercial forces have amped up packaged products, bundling these as exam-driven coaching classes to donation-driven admission schemes where degrees are akin to transactional commodities. Branding, marketing, admission numbers and enrolments are at the core of colleges, even as Montessori metrics steadily wither and the gap between early childhood and tertiary learning widens.
In a recent interview, Elon Musk spoke about formal university education, essentially contending that such degree-oriented, structured progression from grade to grade was becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s times. Musk said that such a system of specialised learning had held back human ingenuity, creativity and inter-disciplinary intellectual growth in an inter-connected world over-subscribing to quantum clouds.
The rapid advances in technology and reduced costs of access has heralded an era of unprecedented awareness among more than 1.1 crore high school graduates in India every year. As this number continues to grow, so will the unimaginable consequences of multi-layered societal impact, as the youth explore possibilities, prospects and new meanings of what qualifies in their minds as “success”.
With the popularised easy-to-use ChatGPT, AI is influencing and permeating all realms of education, entertainment and engagement with AI bots assisting customer service and responses, exam evaluations, micro-targeting of pop-up messages, medical diagnostics, credit card companies’ work, etc. Other areas where these bots are helping include navigation patterns, seating positions in automobiles, eating out patterns to mood-induced music preferences, facial and voice recognition capabilities, creation of convincing “accurate videos” to name a few of the fringe. From self-driven cars to autonomous weapon systems, AI is a force of the evolving future of humanity.
Researchers no longer speak of just one AI, but of hundreds, each specialising in a complex task — and many of the applications are already ahead of the humans who have made them. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Heinlein define AI as a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data and use the learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation. AI is also used to describe machines that mimic cognitive decision-making, functions and generate informed analytics. From mechanical operations and automation in the industrialised countries to pattern recognition, ability to respond to voice commands, chat online, schedule secretarial functions, advise on basic diagnostics induced by symptoms, to simulations, AI is penetrating more realms of possibilities and lifestyle each day at an alarming speed and incredible stealth.
India plays a significant role in its back-end software generation and front-end leadership, with many of the top influential CEOs of multi-billion corporations drawing their lineage from here.
While many of these adoptions are being taken for granted, it is clear that the confluence of software and the tech platforms has made a tremendous difference to the internal and external efficiencies of educational institutions around the world. It has also incrementally transformed and reshaped their business model. There is consensus among technology professionals, influencers and educational planners that all pedagogic markers must be leveraged for critical thinking and betterment of humankind as agent provocateurs to penetrate the risk-averse education systems that are impervious, immune, and often resistant to change.
Despite all the challenges faced by the Indian education system, status quo is neither an option nor a rehearsal for the future. We only have to look at the aggregate and the macro-impact of transformation to prep for a massive inevitable change heading our way. Unpacking the integrated aggregate into quantifiable metrics is an exercise that has been neglected, largely out of the fear of realising the impending need of the hour to avoid risking irrelevance as institutions.
India has the power and potential to leverage its vast tech-trained talent pool by investing in its domestic educational transformation and shape the future of global renaissance in bettering humanity.
The writer is an India-born museum futurist and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
