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00:00This session focuses on inclusive learning and education for the unknown.
00:05How education system must involve innovations and nation building.
00:10Please join me in giving our speaker a big round of applause.
00:15Let's invite the great personality of course, it's none other than Shri Acharya Prasanthi.
00:26Education for the unknown, most wonderful and relevant topic.
00:33We want to say as if the system is somehow broken.
00:38The system isn't broken, in fact the system has been magnificent.
00:45When something unpredictable is happening outside, how can you rightly respond to it
00:50with a predictable kind of reaction.
00:55The students that emerge from the campus and the very design of the campus is intellectual enough.
01:03It has the wherewithal to deal with external change.
01:06But you cannot deal with external change if you remain frozen in some concept of who you think you are.
01:15There is the human being and the human being does not know where his impulses, drives, likes and dislikes are
01:20coming from.
01:21What to do then?
01:22Because what is threatened is not a physical fact but...
01:36I am glad to be here with you all once again.
01:44Education for the unknown is a most wonderful and relevant topic.
01:59I will try to look at the whole spectrum, starting from education and moving to the unknown.
02:06So, you see, the first thing that I gather is that we want to say as if the system is
02:21somehow broken.
02:26The system isn't broken.
02:28In fact, it has delivered superbly over well over a century, but we must investigate what it was designed to
02:47do and hence, what it has delivered.
02:50It was designed to take in human beings and convert them into functional economic units and the system has done
03:03that brilliantly.
03:04I am talking about the education system.
03:09Sometimes we want to say that the system was well-intended, the design was right, the execution hasn't been proper.
03:26That is not exactly that.
03:29You see, the product when it comes to, let us say an IIT, was an engineer and the engineer was
03:41made for a certain kind of factory.
03:48What was not realized was the relationship between the engineer, the product of the education that is, and the factory,
04:03because that was never in the design of the education system itself.
04:12The factory moved on.
04:14Why did the factory move on?
04:16Because that is the very nature of time.
04:18Things will change, the world will change.
04:23And when the factory moved on, which is happening now, the engineer found that he is not in a place
04:36to respond, rightly respond.
04:40Why?
04:40Because the education system had not just trained him, but also trained him to take the training
04:52as his identity.
04:55You see, the external environment to which the engineer proceeds from the campus is a flux.
05:07It is very fluid.
05:10But that is a thing of philosophy and that is something that the campus does not adequately prepare the student
05:22for.
05:23Instead, what the student gets from the campus is an identity.
05:30Identity and identities, as we all know, are frozen things.
05:36Identities will not prepare you for change.
05:41In fact, when change happens, identities panic.
05:46So, we have posited and kind of pretended as if the world outside would either remain still or move at
06:02a predictable pace.
06:05That the change can somehow be governed and predicted and therefore be managed and controlled.
06:18But that is not how the world is and the world, the self and the relationship between these two is
06:27not something we cover in the campuses.
06:31So, now when we see this collision, we feel it is between the capacity of the product from the campus
06:43and the demand of the industry.
06:46No, the collision is actually between the expectations from the product and the very nature of the product.
06:58When we do not understand the nature of something, our expectations are misplaced.
07:04And that is what is happening.
07:07This product that is going out has very little self-knowledge.
07:17And that is the real unknown.
07:19That brings me to the second part of what I must say.
07:22We are talking of education for the unknown.
07:24When we say education for the unknown, what we seem to mean is that the unknown lies outside
07:30of us.
07:31That the unknown lies in industries that rise and fall within a single decade.
07:36That the unknown lies in the form of the AI tsunami that we are witnessing over the last five years.
07:45No, the unknown, real unknown lies somewhere else.
07:49And neither society nor family.
07:54And surely not the education system prepare the candidate in any way for it.
08:02The real unknown lies in the self.
08:04The real unknown is in the user of the technology.
08:08The real unknown is the one who reacts to external change.
08:14That is the real unknown.
08:16That is the real unknown.
08:16But we seem to act as if the human being, the center he operates from is very well known.
08:25And all that remains unknown is the world and the shape the future will take.
08:32The real unknown is within.
08:36And unless the education system addresses that, we might find ourselves scrambling again and
08:45again, not really knowing how to respond.
08:49And often the responses are also very predictable.
08:53When something unpredictable is happening outside, how can you rightly respond to it with a predictable
09:01kind of reaction?
09:05See, we are talking of adaptability.
09:12We are saying when change happens outside, the product from the campus and the campus must
09:19adapt to it.
09:22We seem to suggest that adaptability is some kind of a skill.
09:28Soft skill, communication skill, adaptability skill.
09:32Is adaptability a skill really?
09:37We seem to suggest that adaptability is something like a layer on what you already are.
09:46So you can put it on.
09:48No, adaptability is what naturally remains when the ego identity is removed.
09:58That is adaptability.
10:00You cannot teach adaptability.
10:02You can un-teach rigidity.
10:06You can un-teach rigidity.
10:07And that's what the campuses must be doing.
10:10Un-teaching rigidity.
10:12Instead, unconsciously, we train the students in identities that are related to their departments,
10:29to their certificates, to their certificates, to their CGPA, to their packages.
10:38And when that happens, flexibility and adaptability are gone.
10:43Adaptability is not something you can learn.
10:49Adaptability is when free of the inner rigidity, you flow.
10:57You respond rightly to the flux.
11:01That is adaptability.
11:01So, all the discourse about adaptability, that's in the direction of learning something extra.
11:18Probably we might come up with a course on adaptability, which is all very fine.
11:25But that course cannot be in the positiva.
11:29That course cannot be in the additive sense.
11:32That course has to be in the negativa in the sense of unlearning.
11:40And when you are no more tightly bound to what you know, when you have not made it the centre
11:48of your life, when you have not let it become your identity, then you find that it's not very
11:57difficult to respond to what is happening.
12:00Because what is threatened often is not a physical fact, but a mental identity.
12:11And a lot of panic is around that only.
12:14The mental thing.
12:15Not the physical instability.
12:18The students that emerge from the campus and the very design of the campus is intellectual
12:28enough.
12:29It has the wherewithal to deal with external change.
12:33But you cannot deal with external change.
12:36If you remain frozen in some concept of who you think you are, then it becomes very difficult.
12:44Then you cannot flow.
12:45Look at AI.
12:49Is AI actually a threat that we must respond to?
12:58Is AI actually a changed environment that we must adapt to?
13:05No, not really.
13:08AI is not really a disruption.
13:12From where I look at it, it is rather a revelation.
13:17You see, is it not revealing if what I have been taught over four years can be taken over
13:29by a machine, by a system that cannot even experience itself, by a system that has zero self-knowledge.
13:42AI is just revealing to us what we have anyway been doing for far too long.
13:49So, that's the question to be asked.
13:55If a system that consists of programmed responses, of pattern matching, of logical deduction, can
14:09even substitute a conscious product of an intelligent system, then is the product conscious enough and the system intelligent enough?
14:23That is the question I invite that we must deliberate on.
14:30If we remain fixed to the center we operate from and our institutions operate from, then the very foundation of
14:43the discourse will remain shaky.
14:47So, we will say a lot, but a lot of that will remain mostly reactive.
14:56It will not take us to a new dimension.
15:02Then we come to the matter of the industry academia interface.
15:13And yes, the gap is real.
15:15I do not deny that.
15:17What the industry requires, it's a fast-paced environment.
15:22And what the institutions and the academia provide, yes, there is definitely a gap.
15:29The gap is real, but probably misdiagnosed.
15:35You see, when it comes to bridging that gap, we often say that let there be more apprenticeships, internships, joint
15:48curricula, joint research, and such things.
15:53Basically, we want the academia to listen to the industry.
15:58The little problem with that is that industry is the most reactive institution that there can be.
16:11The industry exists to react to the market.
16:16And the market is a society.
16:19And the society is determined through a lot of factors, including some in which the causal chain can't even be
16:28neatly established.
16:30There is just so much randomness.
16:32And the industry reacts to that.
16:35So, the industry is reacting to the society.
16:38The society is composed of human beings.
16:40Please look at the chain.
16:42There is the human being.
16:43And the human being does not know where his impulses, drives, likes, and dislikes are coming from.
16:49Right?
16:49Aggregation of such human beings is the society.
16:54The industry exists to cater to the society which it calls as its market.
17:00So, individual, society which is the market, the industry, and then the academia is saying let the industry tell us
17:10how we should develop our students, how we should train them, and such things.
17:16Academia is supposed to be the most formative institution.
17:20Industry is the most reactive institution.
17:24If academia is to follow industry, there would always be a lag between the academic product and the direction of
17:37the wider world.
17:39Always be a gap, a phase lag, whichever way we want to put it.
17:45What to do then?
17:47Why wait for the industry to tell what is going on?
17:52Because the industry itself is not autonomous or sovereign.
17:55The industry is taking its cue from the society which in turn it's taking its cue from the individual.
18:02And if it all boils down to the individual, why can't the academia connect the individual to the individual which
18:09is to himself or herself?
18:12That is the way to not just stay on the curve but actually always stay ahead of the curve.
18:22Otherwise, we would always be reacting.
18:24Now something has happened in the society and the industry is reacting to it and then that gets communicated to
18:29the academia and that takes four months or six months or one year to come up with a solution.
18:35And by the time the world has moved on.
18:39So that won't help.
18:41I understand there is a gap.
18:43But following the line of the industry is probably not the way to bridge that gap because we have institutions
18:51in the West which are very closely and organically connected to industry.
18:57But the debate we are having here is very much present and relevant there as well.
19:05How can matching pace with the industry help when the industry itself does not know which way it's going to
19:16take the next step?
19:17So the institutions must realize that what they are doing, they are fantastic at it, but they are doing only
19:31half of what they must be doing.
19:36It's like having a question paper of 100 marks, two problems of 50 marks each.
19:43Our institutional setup, including the IITs, is very good at attempting one of those two problems.
19:4950 out of 50 maybe.
19:50Wonderful.
19:51I am glad to be an IITian.
19:53Proud.
19:55But the other question, the other 50 marks, they are not being addressed at all.
20:00Not at all.
20:02That's where we are probably getting a big zero and that brings in a lot of nervousness.
20:12That brings in anxiety and sometimes panic also.
20:17We are not diagnosing the problem correctly.
20:19When we find that we stand at 50 by 100, we start exerting ourselves even more on the problem that
20:29we already know how to solve.
20:33When it comes to the 50 marks, we are already doing well and we are already excellent there.
20:39Pushing ourselves even more there will not cause a dimensional improvement.
20:47There is something that is lying on our blind spot.
20:50That is what needs to be addressed.
20:52And that is the individual knowing himself.
20:57That brings me to the last point of my humble submission which is the matter of continuous education and lifelong
21:11learning.
21:11You see in popular discussion, what does lifelong learning mean?
21:17It is basically a statement of anxiety.
21:23Unless you are updating yourself, upskilling yourself, you may find that you are no more employable.
21:32Almost like a credit card subscription that you must renew every year.
21:39Otherwise, you find that you are out of credit.
21:44And then we say, yes, yes, to take care of this problem, to take care of the problem of obsolescence
21:49and being rendered redundant.
21:52I must get into something called continuous education, continuous learning, lifelong learning.
22:01There is some kind of a motivational poster that you show to a nervous person.
22:09It helps, but only for a while and only very superficially.
22:15You see, lifelong learning is something that happens on its own when you stop considering yourself a finished product.
22:28When you stop considering that by entering the portals of an IIT, you have already arrived.
22:36When you stop considering that you are somebody special because you are BTEC in Computer Science from IIT Delhi or
22:44some other place.
22:46Or because you have a great GRE or GMAT score and you are now moving to the topmost Ivy League
22:54institution.
22:56So, again, learning is the nature of the human being, the conscious entity.
23:04What impedes and stops learning is the feeling that I am now identified with a top degree or a top
23:15job.
23:16And therefore, what is the point in learning?
23:19Learning will otherwise continuously happen.
23:21You know, one thing that our institutions, the IITs, are very well positioned to do, better than any corporation or
23:33any other institution,
23:34is to bring this question again and again to the student in some sustained form.
23:46Who am I?
23:47What's my relationship with what I am studying?
23:49What am I doing in this campus?
23:51What is this entire big world about?
23:55How is it moving?
23:56And therefore, what is my position in it?
23:59And therefore, what does this world need and what I can supply?
24:04If this question remains present to the student continuously, well, adaptability, resilience, innovation, entrepreneurship will follow on their own.
24:16You will not need to teach those things.
24:20But if this question is not there, then we are producing a very circumscribed kind of product.
24:30And the product is very proud of itself.
24:34The product says, I am the one who has arrived.
24:37I am the one who is finished.
24:39I am done.
24:40And I am now out to declare my position, earn and consume.
24:47And that's what is called the happy and good and successful life.
24:51If that's what we are producing, then we will never really be able to respond well to the environment.
25:01And the remaining 50 marks question, that's the thing I want to leave the audience with tonight.
25:13Thank you for hearing me.
25:15Thank you so much.
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