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A few points about these government funds for education. For primary and secondary education,   these funds have to be given as grants. For tertiary education, for higher education, these funds have to be given as loans which have to  be repaid once the person is employed.

So the key point here is that  government should not be in the business of running schools or colleges.    It should not fund schools either.   It should fund students.      And that will make a big difference.    Among all the challenges that India faces, as  it seeks to transform itself,   perhaps none is more important than education.

To summarise, the 3 key messages which I want to share: a new set of skills are needed for success in our world which is information and internet access.  The world is changing and I think the skills that are needed to succeed are going to be  a different set of skills going forward, and a wider dimension of skills. Technology is not the answer to problems that are not technological in nature.  The government’s  primary business should be funding students  –  not schools.

The role of government in education is the third topic I’d like to address.   There are three important facts we have to keep in mind.   First,   at the core of the system of education is  a human being, an individual, a person.  He or  she learns skills during the process of education and becomes a more useful  member of society.   Education thus makes the individual more productive and therefore promotes general social welfare.  Education therefore has  both private and social returns.   So,  it is in the interest of society to make sure that everyone is educated to the degree  that one has the ability to.

Professor Kaushik Basu talked about it in the morning –  that we underinvested in basic education post- independence. In fact, I was talking to a friend  and he put it very well.   He said all we had to do in India  post- independence was to educate one generation of Indians well.   If you are educated,  then you will ensure that the next generation probably will   get more  education than you.   But, we did not do that well.

Second, the returns to education takes time. The   investment has to be made first and then some years later the benefits arise.   Because of the time lag between the investment,   the net present value of the future gains,  depends on the rate one uses to discount the future,  which is related to paying for it now and enjoying the returns later.

This leads us to the third fact  –   that some people are poor enough, they cannot afford to invest in education.    If they had the money,  they could have paid for education now and recovered their investment later.

These facts define what the role of government fundamentally has  to be in education. The role is simply this – to make funds available to those who don’t have the ability to invest in education.

There’s another relationship between  information and education. Education gives people the skill to transform information into knowledge.   Sometimes we tend to confuse what information  is,  and what knowledge is.   Information may be presented in books or over the internet. Regardless of that,  how effectively one uses the information,  depends on how good the education system is  in training people to use that information.  So the role of technology in education has to be understood as that of a tool  or an  instrument.   Tools enable us to do tasks more effectively.

Let’s take an example.    A spreadsheet makes manipulating data – tabular data – easy.  How to use the spreadsheet is a skill that can be learnt.  We are teaching that today in many computer courses.  How quickly one learns that depends on how educated,  that person is.  But how to calculate is the basic skill.  The more advanced skill is what to calculate.   And finally,  education teaches us to appreciate what the result of that calculation means.

Technology certainly  speeds up the  information  dissemination and access,  but because technology is a tool,  it can only  be as effective as the skill of the user.   Most importantly,  a broken education system cannot be fixed by introduction of technology.   An analogy  is useful here. You know you have a roomful of mediocre writers and we give them computers,  word processors and printing software, printers   —   that’s not going to make their writing any better.  Their writing will stay as poor as it is.

So,  digital technology cannot fix a problem that is not digital in nature.   Computer hardware and software, PCs, laptops, search engines, softwares, broadband connections, internet  are neither necessary nor sufficient for education.     That   they are not necessary is clear from the fact that billions of people were educated before these tools were invented.   That these tools are not sufficient  is also clear.   There are thousands of schools in rich countries that have all of these and yet fail to adequately educate their students.

Essentially, technology is not the answer to problems that are not technological in nature.  I think we need to keep this in mind when going out there, and going overboard on technology and devices.

The second topic I want to talk about is the role of technology in education.

In India, somewhere we got our focus wrong. In schools, it is all about setting up computer labs. It’s about getting those ten computers in there – a mix of  thin clients, desktops with some connectivity. Content is always given an after-thought,  and I’ve seen this happen in states,  multiple states, time and again.   If one state does it,  then other states just replicate the tender  and repeat it all over. Content  is an afterthought.  It is getting the hardware infrastructure in place.

The same stupidity is being replicated in the higher education system, where we are now looking at devices, all sorts of devices out there.  And we’ll talk about that in a minute. So thousands of crores are being spent, there’s no assessment, of whether this really  makes a difference in education.   I mean all of us got educated without computers!

This spend on free devices helps to win elections, and perhaps its good pocket money for the value chain, but a different perspective needs to be understood.

Technology has always had a role in education.  In the history of the use of technology in  education, technological advance in printing was the most radical and innovative.    Books were the first of the information  and communications technology. They were the  means to store, disseminate and access information.  The modern innovation  – the internet  – which helps production, distribution and consumption of information on a large scale.   The role    information plays in education has to be recognised. What we know, our knowledge, is a function of what information we internalise. We need access to information together with the ability to comprehend that information. Education requires that information is available  for internalisation and conversion into knowledge.

From a post a year ago about a visit to Nageshwar temple in Madhya Pradesh:

This week’s reading:

• Natural Gas: A survey in The Economist. “New sources of gas could transform the world’s energy markets —but it won’t be quick or easy.”
• India and China’s Growth Challenges: from WSJ. “China doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes—such as triggering a property bubble—that it made in its all-out response to the global financial crisis of 2009. India, meanwhile, is struggling to carry out structural economic reforms it failed to enact during its recent boom years.”
• Why Walmart is like a Forest: from strategy+business. “Thinking about your company as an ecosystem yields lessons for innovation, growth, and renewal.”
• The Opportunity Gap: by David Brooks. “Equal opportunity, once core to the nation’s identity, is now a tertiary concern.” In India, we need to shift focus from equality of outcome to equality of opportunity.
• Urban World: A Mckinsey study. “Understanding cities and their shifting demographics is critical to reaching urban consumers and to preparing for the challenges that will arise from increasing demand for natural resources (such as water and energy) and for capital to invest in new housing, office buildings, and port capacity.”

Critical thinking skills, ability to ask meaningful questions, how to  ask questions right, ability to seek out answers from sources , ability to communicate effectively,   ability to work together,   to collaborate effectively  — these are skills which are going to be much more increasingly important going forward,  irrespective of what kind of jobs people are doing.

This latticework of skills is really changing and  has to really change  what higher education looks at.   So whether its basic economics, numerical literacy, finance, sales, the best ideas in psychology, history, a bit of software programming , manipulating data, writing macros and Excel, these things are very important today as we go forward.

Writing, presenting – these are skills needed for success in tomorrow’s world,  and very little of this is actually being taught today.   In fact education has not changed as much in the last 20 years since I graduated from IIT Bombay in 1988.   In my own education, we had the Humanities department teaching economics courses. I realise the value of economics now,  in the last few years.  And at that time it was almost looked down upon, the arts and humanities.  It’s one of those courses where the lectures were skippable, you could just learn up something, the grades did not matter and  all that stuff.

It took me  nearly 15 years to really undo that bias against economics, sociology and some of these subjects and that’s a big big  drawback in the world that we’re living in today.   What you need to get across to people,  when you talk about multi-disciplinary skills,  is a mix of humanities, business and technology. It needs to be drilled into people at a much earlier age.

You have today,    6-7-8 year old  kids, very familiar with computing, they play video games , they are on facebook with email addresses and so on,   uploading photos, and so on. That’s the world we have to really  look at. These are the kids  who are going to be the customers of higher education going forward.   Are our schools and  universities preparing us for this?   This is one fundamental point which needs to be thought about.  It is almost  that we need to hack  education for tomorrow’s world, and that is not happening.

The world has changed and the education system has to reflect that change. Earlier,  information was hard to access and distribute.  Now it’s possible to, quite cheaply,  have all the information that we need  out there.  You don’t have to memorise when  the first battle of Panipat happened — just go to Wikipedia and it’s all out there.  One search and it gets you right there.     You have YouTube,  Khan Academy, you have US universities like MIT, Harvard spending tens of millions of dollars  putting their lectures online.

The role of the system is therefore to teach students how to learn and how to critically evaluate information. Rote learning is not at all useful in a context where facts are easily available, but understanding what the implications of facts are is what  matters.    In fact, if you look at many of us as parents,  especially when I look in Bombay,  at some of my colleagues, we all have gone through the rote learning system in India, we have all done professionally very well, but given the  choice,  we want to send our kids to ‘IB’ schools.

There is a much wider set of learning that is taking place, and in a way it is reflective of how we are seeing the world change outside.   These are a set of skills that are important in the world going forward.    There’s a book I was reading recently ‘The Art of the Sale’, and in there towards the end,  a friend of the author asks the author “ You have a young kid,  if you were to die tomorrow and you wanted  your kid to know one ability, what would it be?”    And the author answers, “The art of Selling.”    He says it is all about —  a lot of what you’re  doing here — persuading.  Even here, over the next two days,   the idea is to try and persuade different people to a set  of ideas which we can then go out and implement.    Is that  taught   in schools and colleges? Not really.

I think one of the most important things we can teach children and students is to get rid of the fear of failure and we are not doing enough of that for going forward.     The fear of failure should not act as an inhibitor.   I was talking to someone the other day and he made a very interesting comment. He set up a company in the US and he is hiring a lot of people in  Chennai. He said, “I see all these resumes of people with 6-7-8- years of experience  – and you know – the shocking thing,  is that instead of  really being 7 years of experience, it is 1 year of experience done 7 times over,  because they have changed jobs every year!    And he says you just cannot call that experience.”

Experience is very important, and we’ll come back to that.    We need to do  a lot more deeper thinking and introspection on the future, on what we want to create in India.   We are at  a very interesting time. It’s great we’re having this discussion here today. I think we have a singular opportunity in India to really redefine what next generation higher education should look like.    Whether you want to do imitation or innovation  is really something we have to decide.   Innovation needs skills, and skills need the combination of these three E’s that I just referred to – education, entrepreneurship and experience.   And the core of it is,  how do you get high quality education.

I want to cover three topics — the type of education, the role of technology in education, and the role of government in education.   These are large areas,  but I’ll cover brief aspects of these.

I’d like to start with a small story.   I was at Columbia University about 3 weeks ago giving a talk on transforming India.   Columbia is my Alma Mater where I did my masters in EE about 23 years ago.  The talk  was in the Lowe Library. I was a student of the School of Enginering  and the Lowe Library,  the biggest structure  and pretty much visible as you enter the campus.

I realised I’d never been in there throughout the time that I was in Columbia.    My focus was so narrow  — School of Engineering and my room.  And when I look back over my last 20 years,   most of what I have learnt has come outside the school of engineering! I should have spent a lot more time in the Low Library, because a lot of things which are in there, are what I have used afterwards.    And that’s something you don’t realise when the education process is going on, but hopefully we can make some changes when I talk about some of these things.

So this informal learning, the ability to learn outside the classroom, I think is very important.  I became an entrepreneur, I tried multiple things.   I failed many times over;  I succeeded a few times. Much of that entrepreneurship  stuff,  I did not learn from the educational institutions.   I learnt it from my father, and ironically,  it is something which we could have probably focused on a lot more in our educational system,  because what India needs going forward is a lot more innovation.

These are some facets which we  will explore as we go along.   In today’s India, we are really  not letting that education happen. This can really make a difference and which people can make the best use of in their lives. That needs to change.   We are not really encouraging people. In many cases, we are actually discouraging people from becoming entrepreneurs by stigmatising failure and not creating a climate where people are willing to accept risk.