Personalised learning: A way out to fix the problem of unemployable graduates
personalised learning. The age-old Gurukul system in India focused intensively on curating curriculum specific to each individual’s future career pathway. The Guru had a holistic view of the Shishya’s learning goals and future career needs, and was able to modify learning outcomes for each learner.
Most of our innovative educational practices were lost when the British overhauled our education system. As Ken Robinson describes, the British needed clerks to run the Indian bureaucracy. In an era devoid of computers, they needed Indians to obey commands as human machines not think as intelligent beings.
While Indian has shed most of its colonial hangover, making strides in polity and economy, the education system is a slow laggard.
India produces record number of unemployable graduates and has an alarmingly high rate of youth unemployment that only only risks getting worse with the changing landscape of future jobs and skills due to the rise of AI. Failing to make any significant evolution over the past three quarters of a century, the present system is in a desperate need of a overhaul, a need that has been identified as a top national priority of the Indian government in the New Education Policy of 2020.
One of the highlights of the New Education Policy, and the National Curriculum Framework of 2023 that followed suit, was the focus on flexible curricula without rigid boundaries between streams and domains.
