The Biggest Thing Education Never Teaches
Acharya Prashant: I'm glad to be here with you all once again. Education for the unknown, most wonderful and relevant topic. I'll try to look at the whole spectrum, starting from education and moving to the unknown.
You see, the first thing that I gather is that we want to say as if the system is somehow broken. The system isn't broken. In fact, the system has been magnificent. It has delivered superbly over well over a century. But we must investigate what it was designed to do, and hence what it has delivered.
It was designed to take in human beings and convert them into functional economic units. And the system has done that brilliantly. I'm talking about the education system. Sometimes we want to say that the system was well intended. The design was right. The execution hasn't been proper. That's not exactly that.
You see, the product, when it comes to, let's say, an IIT, was an engineer. And the engineer was made for a certain kind of factory. What was not realized was the relationship between the engineer, the product of education, that is, and the factory, because that was never in the design of the education system itself. The factory moved on.
Why did the factory move on?
Because that is the very nature of time. Things will change. The world will change. And when the factory moved on, which is happening now, the engineer found that he is not in a place to respond rightly respond. Why? Because the education system had not just trained him, but also trained him to take the training as his identity.
You see, the external environment to which the engineer proceeds from the campus is a flux, is very fluid. But that's a thing of philosophy, and that's something that the campus does not adequately prepare the student for. Instead, what the student gets from the campus is an identity. And identities, as we all know, are frozen things. Identities will not prepare you for change. In fact, when change happens, identities panic.
So we have posited and kind of pretended as if the world outside would either remain still or move at a predictable pace, that the change can somehow be governed and predicted and, therefore, be managed and controlled. But that's not how the world is. And the world, the self, and the relationship between these two is not something we cover in the campuses.
So now, when we see this collision, we feel it is between the capacity of the product from the campus and the demand of the industry. No. The collision is actually between the expectations from the product and the very nature of the product.
When we do not understand the nature of something, our expectations are misplaced. And that is what is happening. This product that is going out has very little self-knowledge, and that's the real unknown. That brings me to the second part of what I must say. We are talking of education for the unknown. When we say education for the unknown, what we seem to mean is that the unknown lies outside of us. That the unknown lies in industries that rise and fall within a single decade. That the unknown lies in the form of the AI tsunami that we are witnessing over the last five years.
No. The real unknown lies somewhere else. And neither society nor family, and surely not the education system, prepare the candidate in any way for it.
The real unknown lies in the self. The real unknown is in the user of the technology. The real unknown is the one who reacts to external change. That's the real unknown.
But we seem to act as if the human being, the center he operates from, is very well known, and all that remains unknown is the world and the shape the future will take. No, the real unknown is within, and unless the education system addresses that, we might find ourselves scrambling again and again, not really knowing how to respond. And often the responses are also very predictable. When something unpredictable is happening outside, how can you rightly respond to it with a predictable kind of reaction?
See, we are talking of adaptability. We are saying when change happens outside, the product from the campus and the campus must adapt to it. We seem to suggest that adaptability is some kind of a skill,soft skill, communication skill, adaptability skill. Is adaptability a skill, really?
We seem to suggest that adaptability is something like a layer on what you already are, so you can put it on. No.
Adaptability is what naturally remains when the ego identity is removed. That's adaptability.
You cannot teach adaptability. You can unteach rigidity, and that's what the campuses must be doing, unteaching rigidity. Instead, unconsciously, we train the students in identities that are related to their departments, to their certificates, to their CGPA, to their packages. And when that happens, flexibility and adaptability are gone. Adaptability is not something you can learn. Adaptability is when, free of the inner rigidity, you flow. You respond rightly to the flux. That is adaptability.
So, all the discourse about adaptability is in the direction of learning something extra. Probably we might come up with a course on adaptability, which is all very fine.But that course cannot be in the positiva. That course cannot be in the additive sense. That course has to be in the negativa, in the sense of unlearning.
And when you are no more tightly bound to what you know, when you have not made it the center of your life, when you have not let it become your identity, then you find that it's not very difficult to respond to what is happening. Because what is threatened often is not a physical fact but a mental identity, and a lot of panic is around that only, the mental thing, not the physical instability.
The students that emerge from the campus, and the very design of the campus, are intellectual enough. It has the wherewithal to deal with external change. But you cannot deal with external change if you remain frozen in some concept of who you think you are. Then it becomes very difficult. Then you cannot flow.
Look at AI. Is AI actually a threat that we must respond to? Is AI actually a changed environment that we must adapt to? No, not really. AI is not really a disruption, from where I look at it. It is rather a revelation.
You see, is it not revealing if what I have been taught over four years can be taken over by a machine, by a system that cannot even experience itself, by a system that has zero self-knowledge? AI is just revealing to us what we have anyway been doing for far too long.
So, that's the question to be asked. If a system that consists of programmed responses, of pattern matching, of logical deduction, can substitute a conscious product of an intelligent system, then is the product conscious enough and the system intelligent enough? That is the question I invite that we must deliberate on.
If we remain fixed to the center we operate from, and our institutions operate from, then the very foundation of the discourse will remain shaky. So we will say a lot, but a lot of that will remain mostly reactive. It will not take us to a new dimension.
Then we come to the matter of the industry-academia interface. And yes, the gap is real. I do not deny that. What the industry requires, it's a fast-paced environment, and what the institutions in academia provide, yes, there is definitely a gap. The gap is real, but probably misdiagnosed. You see, when it comes to bridging that gap, we often say that let there be more apprenticeships, internships, joint curricula, joint research, and such things. Basically, we want academia to listen to the industry.
The little problem with that is that industry is the most reactive institution that there can be. The industry exists to react to the market, and the market is society, and society is determined through a lot of factors, including some in which the causal chain can't even be neatly established. There is just so much randomness, and the industry reacts to that.
So the industry is reacting to society. Society is composed of human beings. Please look at the chain. There is the human being, and the human being does not know where his impulses, drives, likes, and dislikes are coming from. Right? Aggregation of such human beings is society. The industry exists to cater to society, which it calls its market. So: individual, society, which is the market, the industry, and then academia is saying, "Let the industry tell us how we should develop our students, how we should train them," and such things.
Academia is supposed to be the most formative institution. Industry is the most reactive institution. If academia is to follow industry, there would always be a lag between the academic product and the direction of the wider world. There will always be a gap, a phase lag, whichever way we want to put it.
What to do then? Why wait for the industry to tell what is going on? Because the industry itself is not autonomous or sovereign. The industry is taking its cue from society, which, in turn, is taking its cue from the individual. And if it all boils down to the individual, why can't academia connect the individual to the individual, which is to himself or herself? That is the way to not just stay on the curve but actually always stay ahead of the curve. Otherwise, we would always be reacting.
Now something has happened in society, and the industry is reacting to it. Then that gets communicated to academia, and that takes four months, or six months, or one year to come up with a solution. And by that time, the world has moved on. So that won't help.
I understand there is a gap, but following the line of the industry is probably not the way to bridge that gap. Because we have institutions in the West which are very closely and organically connected to industry, but the debate we are having here is very much present and relevant there as well.
How can matching pace with the industry help when the industry itself does not know which way it's going to take the next step? So the institutions must realize that what they are doing, they are fantastic at it, but they are doing only half of what they must be doing.
It's like having a question paper of 100 marks, two problems of 50 marks each. Our institutional setup, including the IITs, is very good at attempting one of those two problems. Fifty out of fifty, maybe. Wonderful. I'm glad to be an IITian and proud. But the other question, the other 50 marks, are not being addressed at all. Not at all. That's where we are probably getting a big zero, and that brings in a lot of nervousness. That brings in anxiety and sometimes panic also. We are not diagnosing the problem correctly.
When we find that we stand at 50 by 100, we start exerting ourselves even more on the problem that we already know how to solve. When it comes to the 50 marks, we are already doing well in it. We are already excellent there. Pushing ourselves even more there will not cause a dimensional improvement. There is something that's lying in our blind spot. That's what needs to be addressed, and that is the individual knowing himself.
That brings me to the last point of my humble submission, which is the matter of continuous education and lifelong learning.
You see, in popular discussion, what does lifelong learning mean? It is basically a statement of anxiety. Unless you are updating yourself, upskilling yourself, you may find that you are no more employable, almost like a credit card subscription that you must renew every year. Otherwise, you find that you're out of credit. And then we say, "Yes, yes, to take care of this problem, to take care of the problem of obsolescence and being rendered redundant, I must get into something called continuous education, continuous learning, lifelong learning."
That is some kind of a motivational poster that you show to a nervous person. It helps, but only for a while, and only very superficially.
You see, lifelong learning is something that happens on its own when you stop considering yourself a finished product. When you stop considering that by entering the portals of an IIT, you have already arrived. When you stop considering that you are somebody special because you are B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi or some other place, or because you have a great GRE or GMAT score and you're now moving to the topmost Ivy League institution.
So again, learning is the nature of the human being, the conscious entity. What impedes and stops learning is the feeling that I am now identified with a top degree or a top job, and therefore, what's the point in learning? Learning will otherwise continuously happen.
You know, one thing that our institutions, the IITs, are very well positioned to do better than any corporation or any other institution is to bring this question again and again to the student, in some sustained form: Who am I? What's my relationship with what I'm studying? What am I doing on this campus? What is this entire big world about? How is it moving? And therefore, what is my position in it? And therefore, what does this world need, and what can I supply?
If this question remains present to the student continuously, well, adaptability, resilience, innovation, and entrepreneurship will follow on their own. You will not need to teach those things. But if this question is not there, then we are producing a very circumscribed kind of product, and the product is very proud of itself.
The product says, "I'm the one who has arrived. I'm the one who is finished. I'm done, and I'm now out to declare my position, earn, and consume." And that's what is called the happy, good, and successful life. If that's what we are producing, then we will never really be able to respond well to the environment. And the remaining 50-marks question, that's the thing I want to leave the audience with tonight. Thank you for hearing me. Thank you so much.
