On his recent visit to India, Bill Gates described Indian education as one of the disappointing features of this country. And the ASER report released last week indicates that secondary education fails to impart basic skills to Indian students. Indian gurus have gone global but our gurukuls have remained wrapped in the cobwebs of time. Indian doctors are considered among the best in the world, yet Ayurveda occupies a small niche in global healthcare in the category of alternative medicines.

If the Greeks had their gymnasiums, India had her ashrams. Why have the gyms far outnumbered ashrams in the modern world? Ustad Zakir Hussain is teaching students to play the tabla at Stanford. Yet, the tabla has not attained the global popularity of the modern drum as a percussion instrument. In the land of Nalanda and Takshashila, in a nation touted as vishwa-guru, foreign students coming to India’s higher education centres have come down from the projected 5 million to a trickle of less than 40,000 students in the last 3 years.

India’s extraordinary knowledge systems and institutions of learning can be on the global stage if only we were better organised to adapt to the 4.0 world where learning has moved from hardware to software and is finally everywhere. Education 4.0 is about flexpertise – teaching expertise that is flexible enough to adapt to different learning styles and needs of the contemporary world.

Illustration: Chad Crowe

Blended learning that uses both technology and face time between teacher and students will come into play as the dominant pedagogy. Learning will move from painful data dumping to the quest for creativity, collaboration, problem solving ability, higher order thinking and the sheer joy of discovery. Learning 4.0 is no longer just about cognition in a classroom, it is about total immersion of the learner in real life situations. Ananda or delight, which is the Eureka moment or touchstone of all peak learning experiences, will have to be created in our learning spaces.

Two stubborn assumptions about education have been seriously challenged in the 4.0 world of digitised, open source, globalised and personalised learning. The first assumption is that learning is a function of place (building) rather than space (psychological). The second assumption is that learning is a function of time (period) rather than attention. Education 4.0 is about asynchronous (anytime) and digitally dispersed (anywhere) learning. Yet, our universities and schools are stuck in the designs of the past. They perpetuate factory like classrooms, rows and rows of chairs, the ubiquitous clocks and bells – all of which remind us of Industrial Age learning behaviour.

Universities in India are more territorial than universal. It is difficult for students from one Indian state to get admission in a university of another state. The affiliation system of universities have killed autonomy of institutions. The education regulators UGC and AICTE still continue to be fixated on land size, laboratories, library buildings and lecture hours.

Well-intentioned regulations end up becoming like mouse traps or thief catching devices. They choke, as it were, the life out of quality education processes. Regulators end up being strangulators. Academic bodies obsessed with fixing the curriculum rarely pay attention to the informal curriculum consisting of spontaneous conversations and learning outside the classrooms.

Let us look for solutions. Quality rather than just qualified educators have to be identified from a large cross-section of Indian society. Education, like healthcare, should be seen as a vocation rather than a career. The salary of quality primary teachers should be equal to if not more than clerks and plumbers in our society.

A vast majority of Indian teachers are not exposed to new age learning and teaching methods. We need globally networked learning hubs rather than anachronistic BEd colleges that churn out these teachers. Education 4.0 is about accelerated and personalised learning rather than high handed teaching. Teachers have to evolve from being ring masters to Zen masters who would enlarge the horizons of knowing. Know-ability will have to displace knowledge reproduced from memory banks. Incumbent university structures will have to yield space and legitimacy to insurgent Khan Academies and Super 50s.

Branding of Indian education is also about imbibing the consistency of our perennial human values in an inconsistent world. The values of truth (satyam), sustainaibilty (nityam) and wholeness (purnam) have deep connects with the modern world. Education 4.0 will cease to promote narrow competitive instinct through marks and remarks. This is the same instinct inculcated in the colonial education culture for years that have bred parochial and self-seeking leaders of today’s India. We have to transcreate rather than translate our sacred texts for a new generation of learners.

Our gurukuls have to be laboratories of living questions rather than ossified fortresses of answers. The classical Upanishads and the Bhagwad Gita were nothing but insightful, open-ended conversations and questions about reality and our place in the universe. Education 4.0 will be an experiential continuum between our expanding self and the larger universe: between jivatma and jagat. Our educators have to be rooted in the conviction that they can shape the future of the world through their students. Teachers will begin to see the linkage between inner transformation of students and the broader societal change taking place in India.

These may look like the stuff of dreams in the present Indian educational context. Yet, one cannot but wonder: where have our great dreamers gone?

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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