For educators and institutions: what must change

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The worker the system was built to produce

Most schools and colleges in India still measure what they measured in 1996: marks, rote retention, performance on a fixed-format examination. Even then the system was optimising for a particular worker — one who could be reliably plugged into a hierarchy and do well-defined work to a well-defined standard. That worker was what the post-liberalisation economy needed, and the IT services industry was built on the back of them. The system delivered.

The problem is that the well-defined-work-to-a-well-defined-standard worker is exactly the worker being automated first, and the system is still producing them at scale. Most of them have no idea the world they are being prepared for is contracting, because the people preparing them did not navigate the contraction themselves and have no language for what is happening to their students.

Change one: what you measure

The grade is a shadow of capacity. For a long time the shadow was an adequate signal. It is not any more, because the shadow can be produced without the capacity. Measure capacity directly: projects, portfolios, structured work a student has built and can walk through line by line. A student should leave a four-year programme not with a transcript but with five things they can show another human being and defend. The transcript can be supplementary. The portfolio is the product.

Change two: what you teach

Information transfer was a defensible model when information was scarce. It is not scarce. What is scarce is the ability to think clearly with information, to direct powerful tools, to make judgement calls where judgement cannot be formula-ed. Teach what is now scarce. The framework is one version of that teaching; there are others. The point is that most institutions have not yet asked what their teaching is now actually for.

Change three: who you trust

The institutional model assumes the institution is the trusted authority: complete what it asks, exit with its certification, and the world treats you as competent. The certification can now be produced without the underlying capacity, so it means less, and the institution is slowly losing its place in the trust hierarchy to direct evidence — a project, a piece of work. Institutions need to start producing direct evidence, not just stamps.

Why it will be slow, and where the faster reform is

None of this is new; all three have been written about for a decade. They are not happening at scale because institutions move at a generational pace, and by the time most update their model, two or three cohorts will have been failed. The students in the system now are mostly not going to be saved by a reform. They are going to be saved, if at all, by people three years older than them who have been through the new world and can say how to navigate it — a cousin on the phone, a brother helping with a festival. That reform is faster, it can begin now, and it needs no institution's permission. "It doesn't announce itself. It feels like a phone call with your sister."

What an educator can do this term

• Set one assignment a term that must be done with no AI and defended orally — not to catch anyone, but to give students the mid-term that told the book's nineteen-year-old which kind of mind he was building, while it was still cheap to change.
• Teach the two questions — do this for me versus teach me how — explicitly, and grade for the second.
• Replace one exam with a portfolio piece the student chooses and must walk through.
• Use the tools yourself, visibly, in front of students. The same asymmetry that undoes a team lead undoes a teacher.
• Give the AMQ to a cohort at the start and end of a course; the shift is the evidence.