Innovation in Education: The Hidden Challenge
Even when the limitations of an education system are quite obvious, innovations are hard to come by. This is a lesson many well-meaning investors and hard-charging entrepreneurs have learnt at great cost, yours truly included, but why this is so has evaded them completely. Usually, one finds soul-comforting explanation in bureaucracy or in institutional politics. But this do not explain why there is so little demand for all these 'innovative' offerings and why, unlike other sectors, the customer preferences - employer demands and students' desires - do not overwhelm the traditional sectors and ease the path of innovation. And, even where swelling demography and broken education seem to be hurtling towards certain disaster - like in Asia and Africa - new ways of educating appears more, and not less, difficult. For example, India, faced with the task of educating a huge workforce at a time when automation and reversal of globalisation threaten most jobs and indust...