The pending Disruption of Education System

 The British were good at building systems and networks. Take for example, postal network, railway network, judicial system, administration system. They became efficient at it and it helped them build an empire spread across continents. With the industrial revolution, they mastered producing goods in bulk through manufacturing systems in factories. To run these factories, they needed lots of blue collar workers who thought and behaved alike (that is to take instructions and do repetitive work mostly). That was enabled by their education system where in the masses were educated with a common curriculum across the country. In other words, schools were run like factories with standard operating procedures of teaching the already defined curriculum. As you inspect the goods coming out of the factories, in a similar fashion, tests, exams, grading system were developed in schools. Individual attention, boosting curiosity or creativity or flowering what was natural talent in the students took a back seat as the objective was mass education of the society to become employable. All of it was fine until the society and the education system progressed at a comparable pace. That is changing now.

Technology changes the way we live and work. What was slow and gradual and is happening at a more rapid pace now. The internet completely dismantled the postal network which worked fine for centuries. Similarly robots are fast replacing the workers in the factories. Artificial intelligence enabled systems decide the credit worthiness of a borrower in the banks these days. Industries are transformed at a rapid pace. But the education system is failing to catch up. Don’t you remember many entrepreneurs complaining about the quality of education and the skill gaps of those passing out making them unemployed for a long time? As the technological transformation gathers further pace, the earlier education system of mass teaching will find no takers. As industry have to retrain the newer workforce, usefulness of the formal education will be questioned more frequently and it will have to go through a disruptive change to become relevant. What do you think?