Opinion | India's Classroom Crisis: Why Your Teacher Is So Clueless About Everything

Why are we discussing the revised NCERT history books for schoolchildren? In all likelihood, most readers will not retain the new facts beyond the exam room. Fifteen years later, they would struggle to even spell Akbar or Aurangzeb. As for stirring the communal passions, bleak as it may sound, our children need no assistance from their textbooks for that. When ‘education' - the whole eighteen-year stint with it for those with graduate degrees - fails to mark the student in even a rudimentary way, why even discuss its contents or philosophy?

I've spent the past month in my ancestral village, setting up a dream project. What I've encountered here, once again, is a paradoxical crisis - an education system so hollowed out that hope and despair now coexist in equal measure.

Teachers Who Can't Teach...

There's no shortage of applicants for teaching roles - many hold MA, MSc, and B.Ed degrees. And yet, subject knowledge is almost nonexistent. The degrees, in fact, seem inversely proportional to competence. Despite offering a competitive, scaled to match the local cost of living, it's nearly impossible to find a candidate who can explain concepts meant for 10-year-olds. Most arrive without even basic grooming or communication skills, something I'm willing to overlook if they exhibit even the slightest enthusiasm for the job. It's as if they've passed through their education years in a zombie-like state, absorbing nothing. One 26-year-old science graduate said mournfully, “Humein toh ye sikhaya hi nahin gaya” (Nobody taught us this). “This” being the VIBGYOR: the seven colours of the visible light spectrum. 

I find myself rejecting dozens of applications a week - young people whose aspirations outstrip their abilities. This is India's “demographic dividend” disaster unfolding in real time: a generation credentialed but not educated, credentialed but not skilled. Many possess neither critical thinking nor usable handiwork skills. 

...Make Students Who Can't Think

Socrates demanded that the educated citizen be one who could reason independently. Responding to the Athenian democracy on the brink of political decay, he prescribed not data or dogma, but dialectic: the ability to think. Today, India faces a widespread absence of education. And the failure lies where the future begins: in the classroom.

Teaching - the one profession tasked with cultivating the next generation of thinkers - has been reduced to a fallback job for the unemployable. The result is not merely disappointing examination scores or declining international rankings, but an epistemological crisis: a population that has not been taught how to think. Barring a few exceptions, most school classrooms in India are manned by underqualified, underpaid, and often semi-literate teachers who are, at best, unmotivated and, at worst, actively undermining the formation of young minds.

Why No One Has An Original Thought

A teacher is supposed to encourage students to engage the mind in a rigorous dialectic of ideas, to distinguish truth from half-truth, to interrogate, to analyse, and to discover - as the Greeks put it - the archai of thought, the deep principles of truth, goodness, and beauty. The land of sage-teachers like Dronacharya, Vashishtha, and Chanakya knows that education at its best stirs the soul toward these foundations. At its worst, it deadens the intellect. Today, the Indian schoolchild is often condemned to the latter. And this has been our tragic intergenerational bequest. “I did not write anything even remotely related to the question paper in the exam room but still have 80% marks in all the subjects,” confided an old acquaintance who proudly flaunts his law degree. 

Nathan Pusey, the legendary educationist who became the 24th president of Harvard University, once warned, “In the eagerness of the developing nations to achieve health and plenty, there are urgent pressures at work to emphasise the material benefits of the university.” This is no longer abstract philosophy. Its consequences are seen in the young job applicant who cannot write a coherent sentence or frame an original thought.

Anything Goes

Education is not a luxury for the elite. It is the bedrock of national character. Societies are made - or unmade - by what happens in their classrooms. But how can one move to the philosophical goals of education, the capacity for judgment, for reason, for moral clarity, when even the rudimentary needs of literacy cannot be met there? In India, a silent catastrophe is unfolding today. 

But what's most troubling is the apathy towards it. There's no public outrage, no reckoning. Education is seen not as a process of growth but as a transaction - degrees as passports to jobs. The actual learning, the life of the mind, seems irrelevant. Were it otherwise, we would see uprisings, not resignation. There is no simple fix. But we must begin by demanding more of our teachers - not merely in qualifications but in the spirit of education. Without teachers, for whom education isn't merely degree acquisition and teaching not the last shot at employment, no number of tablets, start-ups, or skill certifications will save us.

Amid eager schoolchildren waiting to be taught, I keep wondering: who will teach them, and what exactly will be taught? For now, I can only pray that they retain their spirit of enquiry for as long as they can hold on to it and not turn into zombies too soon. 

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based journalist and author)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author