The Skill Dimensional Conundrum
If the blog title prompts you to think about inter dimensional travel then deepest apologies for misleading you. To AI enthusiasts well versed in dimensionality reduction, this isn’t another concept from the machine learning repository. This blog reflects the skill development landscape and the various redundancies it suffers from but before we even go there, let’s understand a bit about skills. To start with let me define what skill is. Let’s go with what Google throws us in a basic search
So quintessentially skill could be defined as the ability to do a specific job or task really well. It means to acquire expertise that could help an individual do a job being extremely productive. When a person is extremely productive then he can do a lot of quality work which essentially translates to more money and thus a better lifestyle. That’s the standard hypothesis on which the world is running or appearing to run. That of course does not take into account a lot of things required to master a skill. Now that we know what a skill is, let’s think through how skills are imparted to students currently. Students go through an initial 12 to 14 years of an education loop to acquire basic skills and knowledge. Well now that we have used the word knowledge, let’s understand what knowledge means. Knowledge is a basic and comprehensive understanding of a discipline. It takes one a lot of time to acquire knowledge which might come with some level of skills but it is mostly theoretical. It’s primarily information that serves to make people aware of details around a discipline. It does not take into account the theoretical aspects of a discipline. Then again there are certain disciplines that don’t have a practical aspect like History or Literature or anything similar. It’s good to have knowledge about the world we live in but it’s equally important to learn skills that’ll help us survive in this world. That’s where the school system fails miserably in India. But before we even delve there, let’s understand our school system before the Government came up with NEP or National Educational Policy .
Indian education system could be aptly called Macaulian education system because it was Lord Thomas Babington Macauley who passed the English Education Act in 1835 which completely revamped the face of Indian education system forever. Earlier Indian education system was known for its practical approach and learning methods. Students were given knowledge as well as skills and were asked to solve problems using the said skills. Scientific methods were taught and students were asked to use them in experiments. Technology back then was advanced and the education system invested in skill development rigorously. That led to students becoming experts in their respective crafts. Macauley witnessed the education system and was stunned. He was petrified and understood the fact that with the current education system that breeds curiosity, most folks would start coming up with questions. They would start questioning the system and it might create an existential crisis for the crown so they had to devise something to decimate it. Keeping all that in mind they went for the English Education Act where the medium of education would be English and most of the books would teach students about the glory of the British culture. Nobody was allowed to ask questions and everyone had to memorize everything and reproduce the same in their exams. No amount of creativity or innovation beyond the syllabus and curriculum was allowed and people doing the same were punished by the school system. From the crown’s perspective it was an ingenious move to decimate the culture of a great civilization by moulding them in anything and everything British but again from a commercial standpoint they wanted to create clerks, sevadars or babus or bureaucrats who could be assigned duties that they would carry forth nodding their heads without any fuss. The system crushed any amount of creativity that out country had and built an army of bots for the British empire.
Almost a millenia later when India got it’s independence from the British, the education system still continued with minimal changes. Today after 75 years of freedom we still have the same education system preying on children and victimizing the entire society by virtue of mediocrity. This is where I’d like to bring forth the terms ‘dimensional jumps’ . Sorry to disappoint folks who are presumably fans of Interstellar, Hawkins or Machine Learning.This has nothing to do with either of them. Dimensional jumps refer to the jumps a student takes in his educational and professional life where he isn’t well versed with the environment and how will he use his skills and competencies to mingle with the environment. For that instance it’s not even clear if the student has the right skills to thrive in a completely different dimension. It might sound way too Hawkinish but believe me it’s a tad simple concept. Today when a student is progressing in his educational career or his professional career, there are multiple dimensions that exist in these said paradigms. Anytime a student jumps from one dimension to the other there is no underlying support or skills that student has to understand the operating environment or dimension or more appropriately the physics of this said dimension and act accordingly using a set of skills that he has or has to learn. What’s even grosser is the fact that not many realise there are these dimensions that they have traversed.
Capitalism has weaved the fabric of society and pop culture in a way that there is insane focus on people making more and more money. Say hi to free trade and nay to conscious capitalism unless Naomi Klein sues you but the itricate design of our socio economic utopia is such that only a few folks end up making majority of the capital. Thomas Piketty spoke quite vociferously about the inequitable distribution of wealth in our current society in his bohemian bestseller ‘Capital’ which I would urge everyone to read whether you understand it or not. But what Piketty missed out on is the apocalyptic effect it has on the supply side of the equation. In our society we have bought the capitalistic dream that working way too hard is sure shot way to becoming rich. That has led to the creation of supply side entities that have created tools like marks and grades to create an artificial system that focuses on vanilla parameters to evaluate the potential of candidates other than focusing on building real world skills that could come handy any point in time a student makes a dimensional jump.
Now that I’ve used the word dimension gallons of times so it would be fair to talk about what it really signifies. Let me take my own example. When I went for my first job, the only couple of things I had built in my engineering were a bunch of easy projects. When it came to building a parser, I had no idea what it meant let alone go through the whole 9 yards to build it. I had heard a bit about it in a class called Automata Theory and understood how a compiler uses the parse function to compile a piece of code. That was perhaps my only exposure to it. So it actually made me read extensively about parsers, read code on the public domain on different parsers, skim through stackoverflow to understand issues around creating parsers and speak with a lot of folks I knew from the open source projects I had done in my college to get a hang of how a parser can be designed. That led me to write code to make a functional prototype that could parse simple things after a series of hits and misses and then gradual enhancement to it over time led me to create a parser that would exactly what the specification document mentioned. The code review after a series of iterations gave a green signal to the parser code which was eventually checked in and that was perhaps my first code submission in. a professional environment. Now if you tend to look at the dimensional jump that I spoke about it’s exactly the part where I jumped from my college to a job in a professional set up and all the skills that I learnt in my college did not really come handy at all in doing what the job required.
Imagine the plight of students who make these dimensional jumps from time to time. When I say students I mean students going through school and college to a job but it applies to professionals too. A lot of folks in the duration of their careers find their growth has stalled. They want to make one of these dimensional jumps but realise that they don’t have the necessary skills to make that jump , survive and thrive in the new dimension. The word to consider is ‘realization’. Most folks in their jobs realise their deficits in terms of skills so they take all necessary steps to ensure they remove these deficits. This isn’t the case with students who have no clue what’s really happening to them. So our protagonists for this blog would be undoubtedly and unabashedly students.Let’s first understand the educational curve of a student typically in India. Most students enter a pre nursery before school and school typically has around 12 levels where students appear for exams 3 times a year. Only in class tenth and twelve they appear for a certificate exam that will seal their fate for their upcoming future. If you dissect this into a few parts, you’d find that a student who is a child in the process of growing up end up jumping a few times across multiple skill dimensions and has absolutely zero understanding and realization of the existence of such a dimension. For instance most students in standard sixth are taught about atoms being these 2 dimensional circles with a nucleus containing protons and neutrons and electrons revolving around them. The number of electrons can be calculated using Snell’s law of 2n² but as soon as they move to standard eleven, they have inorganic chemistry where the 2 dimensional atom suddenly becomes 3 dimensional and electrons start taking spdf shells and their direction/ velocity is computed using quantum mechanics.
I mean I had absolutely no idea why calculus was being taught and why it was being taught. The word to notice is why. The current education system never really answers the ‘why’ of education. If you are learning calculus, why exactly are you learning calculus and how would it be used in the real world to solve a particular problem. Believe me when I tell you that I understood why I learnt calculus when I reached second semester in my engineering and had Engineering Maths where they asked us to calculate surface area of a geometric figure. It was again in engineering where I learnt why Descartes created differential calculus and once I knew the reason, it stuck with me. That’s called learning which I will delve into a bit later. So let’s be clear that our current education system doesn’t really help build skills that are required to survive and thrive in the real world. It imparts an education system that builds knowledge which is theoretical in entirety and doesn’t really have a practical element to it. If you go back to your growing years, you’d see that every skill that you learnt was by virtue of experientialism. When you started walking, it was after a series of falls where you learnt what technique doesn’t work if one were to walk effectively. That made you walk effortlessly in some years when you mastered the art of walking and even then you kept falling and learning from each fall while registering it in your brain to avert a similar situation in the future. The same goes for cycling, playing cricket or football or any game be it chess or carrom. So every skills that you learn is through experiential learning that involves a series of steps that I will talk about a wee bit later. Now when we talk about skills the entire 12 or 14 years that a student spends in the current schooling system goes waste because the focus of the schooling system is not to teach skills but to create bots that could be an active part of the rat race of mediocrity.
Since the focus is to build knowledge than build skills, an artificial system of assessment is created to segregate people on the basis of their performance in these assessment examinations. They are labeled as winners, mediocre or losers based on their performance. This categorization continues till it leaves an indelible impression on the minds of these evolving kids. When they see preferential treatment being doled out to the winners and when they are at the receiving end of apathy, punishment or worse ostracism then they have absolutely no motivation to do well. These folks end up being the backbenchers who learn real world skills by learning from the environment around them as opposed to academia. Surprisingly it works. Most of the losers and backbenchers from my school who teachers predicted won’t do really well in their lives are doing exceedingly well. None of them could cross 60% in their grades and yet they managed to build a successful life around them is all because of the skills they built while we were solving Euclidean Geometry problems. Now that its formally proven that school education doesn’t really help build skills it explains why students are vulnerable whenever they make these dimensional jumps where things are relatively different, it’s time to focus on what it takes to build skills required to enter a new dimension.
For the time being let’s forget about dimension and talk merely about skills. How does a human being learn skills. I spoke about the experiential nature of skill development earlier. Now let me delve deep into how this learning happens. Scientifically human beings learn skills in 4 phases- Cognition, Creation,Community and Rest. Most people learn a new skill when they are taught as it happens in India or teach themselves like it happens in Ecole 42 an experiential coding school in Paris where students learn everything themselves or through peer learning. That is followed by using that skill to create a solution to a problem where they understand how the said skill could be used practically to solve a problem. Any 2nd year Computer Science Undergrad would tell you how sorting can be used in search effectively so if you have the skill of sorting, you should be able to use it while building search for your product or creating a search engine. Then comes the next phase where you interact with your peers and a wider community to receive feedback on your solution or see better solutions or brainstorm ideas to optimize your solution.Like the first two phases, community too plays a vital role in your understandability or your learning process. Devoid of community you aren’t really sure about the quality of your solutions. Last but not the leat comes the part where you need to rest adequately so your brain can form the necessary neural connections effectively for the skills to be deeply embedded in your psyche. This is how effective learning happens. That’s how a skill is learnt. Unfortunately that’s not how a skill is taught. I remember most of the skills that were taught to me theoretically. A teacher would come and scribble something on the board and we were supposed to blindly copy it and memorize it. If I ever asked anything on the why portion then I’d either be admonished or thrown out of the class. I still remember in one of my classes on quadratic equations in class 9th, when I asked the teacher why we use quadratic equations, he threw me out of the class. I never really knew till my engineering the role of pi while calculating the area of a circle till I read many books to find out the exact reason. The current system kills any amount of curiosity an individual has and curiosity is a necessary and sufficient system when it comes to learning a skill. Isn’t that the reason why students after 12 or 14 years of education have no clue which educational degree to go for or what career to take. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that entropy increased with time and thus as we start growing the chances of failing become even more as we jump from one dimension to another but nonetheless that isn’t a bad feat if we have the necessary skills to be able to survive in the new dimension. In fact failure becomes a boon for students as they start learning more by creation and subsequently community. Devoid of skills one might feel like a stranger lost in the Amazon with zero chances of survival.
Today in the job market, the biggest issue while hiring Indian students is their dissonance. Dissonance emanates purely from a lack of realization and a deficit of skills that a student needs while making dimensional jumps. What is taught in our education factories is quite different from what the real world needs. Skills are packaged as knowledge boxes without any practical component. I remember seeing an ingenious idea that an entrepreneur came up with. This entrepreneur built an AI where the kids would undergo an assessment and would be tested on their problem solving abilities. Based on the way the kids perform on a set of these assessments, the AI will pick up areas where majority of kids are making mistakes and predict with 90% plus accuracy that the kids will most likely repeat the same mistakes unless they are taught the same concepts again and again till they start not making the same mistake and after several iterations the AI can effectively predict the change in scores of kids in the future based on their current results. It’s purely adhering to demand and supply economics. Today there are loud claims about India being the next global talent hub for the rest of the world. These statements are undoubtedly populous and nationalist in nature but what they essentially do is to create a false impression that everything is running well and India is indeed producing a lot of skilled people year after year but the reality is stark different. The reality is that we are creating one of the largest pools of unskilled people year after year and as technology starts taking over most of the mundane jobs it will be a bloodbath in the next few years. A scenario of jobless growth over a long period of time could destabilize our economy and pave way for anarchy to roll in. What’s ironical is that it has nothing to do with unemployment but more to do with unemployability. The skill dimensional conundrum is here to stay unless policy makers, educators, edtech companies and the industry align and create unanimity on the skills required by the industry that the education sector can teach it’s students vying to become part of the workforce. Luckily for us NSDC has already done standardization of skills for every sector and for every job. The students need to be taught these skills along with a host of other survival skills they would require outside their educational utopia. Unless these skill dimensional jumps are adequately addressed , it would be difficult to utilize our demographic dividend that Nandan Nilekani spoke about for the betterment of our nation.