Vide Rationale

There are two hundred million students in India today. While much of the developed world is deeply worried about their aging population, we can be calm on account of being a young country. Unfortunately, for the majority of kids, their true potential will be chipped away, slowly and systematically, by an education that fundamentally does not and cannot care about their talents, desires, or interests.

This is a tragedy. Worse still is how it goes unnoticed by parents, who, despite genuinely caring for their children’s well-being, are blinded to the costs of these systems by being so steeped in a culture that values safety and security above all else.

Imagine how different it would have been if we had a little more courage; if we trusted our children and encouraged them to pursue paths of their own creation, to follow their curiosities fiercely and intensely.

The people who do great things do so by pursuing what they deeply care about. But it seems that we’re trying to optimize for the opposite: for conforming with the crowd, for diligently doing what you’re told without causing any trouble, so that you can end up getting a job, paying your taxes, and perpetuating the cycle.

There is no greater ambition other than to perform well within a standardized system, so that you qualify to enter the next system, and then the next, and so on until you die. The pinnacle of achievement, and the highest obsession of our culture, is getting into IITs, or AIIMS, or becoming an IAS officer. To crack them all you need is unreflecting perseverance, which is all that we understand and all that we aspire for.

Who gets left behind in this race? Millions of children whose talents are undiscovered, whose potentials are untapped, who waste away their lives by being born into systems and cultures that do not value anything they can’t systemically test for. Such systems have no capacity to recognize, much less reward, creative ambitions and niche talents.

The amount of value lying dormant is truly unfathomable. What would really happen if we took 200 million kids and found a way to maximize their potential?

Luckily, we’re at a stage of technological developments where I believe for the first time, we have a way of scalably unlocking it. Because for the first time, we have developed AI systems that are just good enough to start a revolution in education. For the first time, you can talk to a machine and it can actually understand you. And this machine seems to know pretty much everything.

I see, at a distance, glimmers of hope for our future.

Our Schools are Broken

The core issue is the lack of resources. While every child is unique, with unique aptitudes and talents, we don’t have the resources to attend to them personally and figure out what’s best for them. Instead, we have standardized everything. Every student goes through the same conveyor belt, with countless hours, entire childhoods, spent attending classes, writing assignments, and stressing over exams, all with questionable positive outcomes.

There is no emphasis on finding your talents, honing them, and seeing what you can do with them. Instead, they focus on how to best fit you into their poorly designed boxes and programmes.

Nobody quite realizes the true horror of the opportunity costs of spending well over a decade of your life doing the same thing as everyone else, when each of you is so different, when the roles you take up in life are so varied, and requires very different sets of skills and talents. Just how much are we missing out on here?

It’s a happy coincidence that what you typically find most meaningful to do are also the things that you’re good at doing; it is also the place where, if you do it well enough, you can provide the greatest value to society. So by being forced to waste away your life pointlessly engaged in soulless standardized systems, we’re both depriving our children of their best lives and depriving society of their great value. Everyone is losing in this game.

Still, none of this is surprising—the system isn’t meant to cater to you, it was meant to scalably “educate” a society, to keep civilization running, forgetting of course that those who change the world, those who truly make a difference, those who push societies forward, do so despite the pressure to conform.

A Culture of Cowardice

The system survives partly because there’s no other way. But partly also because of the culture that depends on it.

It’s true that in India there is a scarcity of good education. But because the whole edifice is set up to reward those that do well in standardized systems, there’s an obsession with getting into the best engineering and medical colleges. People who get into IITs or AIIMS are revered by society, put on a pedestal, while those who had the courage to take a non-traditional path are shunned and discouraged. It is all driven by fear of the unknown, of what would happen if we steer away from the tested paths.

The mindset is of giving away your agency: simply do well in this test, and the system will take care of the rest. There’s really no ambition beyond that. The holy grail is getting into one of these elite institutions and it really doesn’t matter what happens next because it’s guaranteed that you will live comfortably afterward.

In doing so, we do so much disservice to our kids, who, with some encouragement, could have gone and done great things, but all of their dreams are usually nipped in the bud for being too outside the norm of the standardized tracks from which it is taboo to deviate.

To be truly creative—to generate insights and ideas that can transform the world—one must go deep into a domain, to areas that nobody else has ventured into yet for anybody else would be too bored by it. This is only achievable if we identify what each of us are uniquely capable of. And they’ll never be discovered naturally under the current paradigm. Those who do discover it are either lucky or they do it despite their “education”.

I’m not discounting other practical factors—the reality that not every kind of work is rewarded by the market in the same way. While we can debate its fairness, it’s undeniably true, and so it is that the “arts” are considered a bad branch to specialise in. But the thing about creative endeavours is that you can’t predict what you’ll create or how it’s going to be useful, in some sense you just have to trust yourself and move forward. Of course, that needs a little bit of courage, and perhaps it’s not for everyone, but God knows we could use a lot more of it than what we have now.

Our culture is one that is fundamentally too afraid. Somebody at some point has built systems for us, and we only worry about performing well within it. We dare not peek at what lies outside it.

AI Driven Learning

In the last few years, humanity was blessed with a new technology that fundamentally changes our relationship with computers. For the first time, if you ask a chatbot how proof by induction works, instead of responding with gibberish it gives you a clear explanation. That computers can understand us is a truly astonishing achievement of mankind and we should not take it for granted. Better yet – they not only understand you, they also have encoded within its brain a large chunk of our collective human knowledge, any part of which can be recalled upon request.

Sure, it has flaws. It sometimes makes up things, and it cannot plan effectively, and it gets distracted, and it has serious security concerns. It is not perfect. But it’s pretty damn good, and I’m certain that its descendants in the not-so-distant future can fully disrupt our education system.

All of our systemic problems can be solved, and the cultural problems consequently eased, by leveraging AI. Imagine just how much of a difference it would make, if every child had a personal tutor, who knew everything there is to know, and was intelligent enough to discover the child’s talents, and handhold them to see the kinds of things that would interest them, and guide them through a series of increasingly complex projects, and find them collaborators from across the world that had similar niche interests, and showed them how to ship it to the public, and connected them to those who found value in such skills and talents?

The combination of custom-built AI interfaces and tools, along with the connectivity of the internet, can make all of this possible. We are inches away from inhabiting a world with this capacity. We can build an entire parallel path of education that, for now, supplements the legacy systems, while eventually replacing them.

By such gradual phasing out of the legacy system, we can fix both the technical problems and the cultural problems and put our children out of misery.

We can build a future where every child’s unique talents are discovered and pursued, where it’s not about meaningless competitions and drudgery but about finding a unique corner for themselves in this world from where they can light it up.

Projects Are All You Need

One big problem with education is that even when they’re teaching the wrong things they do so poorly. That’s because classes (lectures) don’t fundamentally work. It’s based on an implicit cognitive model that a person speaks out words and then students understand, which is false.

Effortful engagement is the only way to true understanding. This is why we learn much quicker doing the work instead of watching videos.

In typical knowledge-work, most of your learning happens while doing projects on the job. Though you must have some background from your schooling, the real skills are developed by practise. In doing so you not just learn how something works in theory – which is important of course – but what it takes to get it working in practise. While lectures are important, they should just be instrumental to doing projects and not be an end in itself.

Your creativity is also only expressed and exercised when you do projects. You have to take your understandings and create something with it, something of value – a program, an essay, a piece of art, or anything else of that kind.

The true innovation required here is in being able to automate, using AI, providing a child with a series of increasingly complex projects and guiding them through them. Making sure that the projects are measured against their skill-levels and aptitudes, that they aren’t bored by it, that they are shown how to move forward when they’re stuck and struggling. Until now there was no technology which could do this at scale; not anymore.

And these projects need to be shipped to the public. To communities that value them and care about them. Leverage the connectivity of the internet, of what it’s truly useful for.

Even from the perspective of an employer or a sponsor, the signal that one would most care about is that the person can take care of projects well—not just that they theoretically know things and have been tested by an exam, but that they’ve put their knowledge to use and have created artifacts that they’ve published.

Traditionally we’ve been doing projects by the side of our standardised education — why not just do that full time?

Visions of the Future of Education

Schools are built to scale, and they do so by standardizing everything. Our culture then supports it by obsessing over doing well within the systems instead of creating your own, largely due to fear and scarcity of resources.

Through a parallel track of AI-driven education, spearheaded by the child’s own inclinations and interest, we can slowly build a system that maximizes a child’s potential, both for society’s good and to make their own lives meaningful and rewarding.

We’re in the early days. The technology is still at its nascent stage, but it is promising. It’s only going to get better, and this vision is only going to become more feasible with time. But why wait, why not start now? Help lay the groundwork for the much needed revolution in education.