To enable future readiness in children, start with their teachers

A hundred and fifty years ago, a blacksmith earned considerably more than an accountant. Then the factory arrived. The blacksmith’s productivity rose enormously, and the trade all but disappeared. Accountancy went the other way. The work grew more complex, productivity barely moved, and wages climbed. The rule underneath is unsentimental. Where productivity rises sharply, wages fall.

Now think about a lawyer. Today you pay a substantial fee for a standard contract. Tomorrow, you will get it off the shelf, and the fee will fall with it. The plumber and carpenter sit somewhere else entirely. Nobody is about to multiply their productivity the way the factory multiplied the blacksmith’s, so in relative terms they gain.

The knowledge worker is about to become a discounted product.

This should trouble us, because our schools exist to produce exactly that person. We built them in the industrial era to supply standard skills to a standardised economy. A standard classroom, a standard curriculum, a standard output. Knowing things carried a premium then. It will not for much longer. The ability to learn will.

We are enabling the wrong people

Almost the entire national conversation has settled on children. Should they learn to code? Should they use AI? Which 21st-century skills belong in the syllabus? These are reasonable questions, but the larger one is whether teachers can use these tools to teach better. A teacher whose only method is recitation will not produce an adaptable child, whatever the curriculum promises. No child reaches a destination the adult in the room has never visited.

The teacher stands in front of 30 children every day and, whatever the system rewards or ignores, carries some real concern about whether they are learning. That concern is the genuine foothold we have, and we have built almost nothing on it.

The National Education Policy already asks for 50 hours of professional development from every teacher each year. The provision exists. What is missing is any reason for a teacher to want those 50 hours. We legislated the hours and left the motivation alone.

What actually moves a teacher

People act for one of three reasons: intrinsic motivation, a future benefit, or an incentive from the system. If we are waiting for the third to arrive from government, we may wait a very long time. That leaves the first two, and we have barely tried either.

Consider a teacher learning to use an ordinary transcription tool in her own life. She records a conversation at the bank and comes away with a transcript and a list of what she has to do. The value is immediate and has nothing to do with education. But she has picked up a capability, and capabilities travel. Six months later it turns up in her classroom.

Or approach it through her own child. Give her something that sharpens her understanding and that she can then teach her son or daughter. It helps them in their exams. Nobody has mentioned the school.

The point is not the tool. We have spent two decades trying to motivate teachers only through the school, and the school is precisely where their motivation is weakest.

The parent is not the obstacle

Every conversation eventually reaches the parent who wants marks and a government job, and treats her as a wall. She is not. You cannot change what parents want, and you need not. Show instead that curiosity and the ability to learn also produce better marks. The parent gets what she wants, and you get what you want.

Some years ago I worked on an effort aimed at the five weakest children in a class. Against a control group, their outcomes improved by 28%.

The syllabus covered Banavasi, the old Kadamba capital in Karnataka. We taught the children nothing. We showed them photographs of a temple surrounded by dense forest, told them a kingdom had stood there 16 centuries ago, and asked what they thought.

One child looked at the forest and said the city could not have been large, so the empire was probably small. Another saw pillars but almost no walls and concluded the place must be hot. A third saw the discoloured roof and said it must rain heavily there.

A small kingdom, a hot climate, heavy rainfall. Every conclusion was correct. Children who knew nothing about the place had connected architecture, geography, and history. A child who can read a photograph that way can read an examination question that way.

What the classroom would look like

Leave infrastructure aside for a moment. Infrastructure is the hardware. What we teach and how we teach it is the software, and much of the gain sits there.

First, break the compartments. Our system divides knowledge into history, geography, and biology, but rarely puts them back together. Every subject can be joined to another.

Second, reverse the lesson. Do not begin with the formula. Let the formula be the conclusion of an activity rather than its premise. Children can work out similar triangles by drawing maps, laws of motion from football, and statistics from cricket. None of this needs new infrastructure.

Where to begin

None of this needs a policy change, and I would not wait for one. Fifteen schools will do. One grade, one subject, and teachers who have a reason of their own to care. Then let other teachers come and see it.

But the sequence matters more than the scale. We have spent years asking what children need for a world arriving faster than our syllabi. We have spent almost no time asking the same question of the adults standing in front of them.

The child will not get there first. Nobody ever does.

(The author serves on the board of advisors at Mantra4Change and is Venture Advisor at Capria Ventures. Views are personal.)