Indian Education System Doesn't Trust Students?

Indian education system recently moved to online learning. we are using Google Meet to conduct classes and keep the students engaged. But what about assignments? How are our school handeling those?


7 November 2020
Read time: About 2:18 minutes, or the attention span I had in scho... oh look a butterfly!

we don't have trust in ourselves. Recently I visited my cousins and saw how their school is dealing with education from home.

With all the technological advancements, most of our students are still using paper.

And yes, I am talking about the privileged student group. Homes who can afford a laptop for each of their kids. Things are still worse for underpprivileged families.


Assignments before lockdown

  1. Written on A4 Sheet, (with margin, as everyone knows, that how you measure our discipline)
  2. Submitted to the teacher in person,
  3. The teacher would read it, rate it, and trash it.
  4. That's was the life cycle of a paper.

Assignments during lockdown

  1. Written on A4 Sheet, (again with margins),
  2. Take photos of it via camera,
  3. Share it with the teacher via email, WhatsApp or other,
  4. The teacher would read it, rate it, and delete it,
  5. The student will pill it up,
  6. The parents will sell it to raddi,
  7. That's was the life cycle of a paper.

How far have we moved on? How is this efficient? How are parents ok with this? and how are school managements coming up with this.

What is going on?

Don't take it the wrong way, but it's a stupid system. Let me give some fun analogies.

  1. It's like upgrading from bicycle to a motorbike and refusing to use the engine. Imagine sitting on a bike and using your legs to push the bike by 'walking'.
  2. It's like, having a drill machine, and using it as a hammer.
  3. It's like throwing away a phone battery after a single-use.
  4. It's like throwing away a newly sharpen pencil after it's sharpness is gone.
  5. It's like using a vacuum cleaner stick like a broom.

I can go on and find more, but I think you can understand what I am trying to say.


What are the solutions?

If you believe in our current education system, I am pretty sure you'll be reading this with a fit of certain anger.

you must be thinking "do you even have anything concrete to say?".

Sure I have a few ideas for assignments.

  1. Ask students to record a video narrating what they learned. It might not be scalable but neither is reading handwritten assignment's photos.
  2. Type the assignment. How can't this be an obvious solution?

What does it say about us

all the solutions I offered, I am sure the commute who came up with current solitons, had these solutions as well. But they discarded it because of one question. "What if the student cheats?"

We are a low trust nation. It's clear in the real world, and it starts at our schools.

We want someone to keep an eye on us. all the time. We have been told you won't get paid unless you work. This habit exists for our daily wage labour to our to top-level executives.

Daily wage labour gets paid at the end of their work. We even threaten them to cut their pay if they don't work properly. I am unfortunately guilty of this.

Every employee get's paid at the end of the month. Took a few sick leaves? you are going to see a pay cut.

These thoughts came to my mind when I heard Kunal Shah and Ankur Warikoo did in their companies.


Kunal shah gave MacBook pro to all new employees.


Ankur Warikoo on Building trust.


What do I mean?

This is just an example. I don't mean to say schools should give out MacBooks to students. What I mean is school should start trusting their students. Enable students to develop a sense of accountability and responsibility.