You cannot fix someone’s cardiac fitness by recommending a hair transplant. That’s what this artifice amounts to. To address our problems in education, both school and higher education, there are just two ways ahead and both are needed. For cardiac fitness you have to eat right and exercise, there is no other way out. Similarly for our problems of quality and equity in education, the government has to invest more money and improve its performance.

The third-generation children are fearless, articulate, independent, rational (capable of a high degree of analysis on “what is right and wrong” for them), impatient, non-hierarchical, and have wider methods of accessing knowledge. Therefore, what is likely to work with them is not position, age, seniority, power and experience, but strategies that promote equality, democracy, placing before them hard data for them to analyse and infer, and where required, allowing them to take charge of their own learning.

Between the drunk and the good teacher is the average teacher. She teaches, because that’s her job. Accepting of her milieu, and of the difficult nature of her work, she neither demonstrates a spark, nor shirks what she thinks she has to do. The large majority of our teachers are the average teacher. 

One, at a real, practical level the ability of the user to “shop around” for alternative providers is very limited, because the rhythm of schooling makes location an almost insurmountable constraint. Two, the school is responsible in very deep ways, for the present and future life of the child, and by the collective future of its students, it also influences society. In this situation of asymmetry, to do an honest job of its professional obligation, the schools’ cost structures become such that the fee required to make it sustainable (forget profitable), is not available. It’s not available primarily because it’s simply unaffordable by a very large majority in the country.