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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ค. 2024
- Education in India is broken. It is a tragic waste of our potential. How can it be fixed? Why will pumping in more spending solve nothing? What is the link between education & development? Why do we need to redefine education?
Welcome to Episode 54 of Everything is Everything, a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma and Ajay Shah.
In this episode, Amit and Ajay give a comprehensive lay of the land in the field of education in India, challenging many conventional notions on the way.
If you like watching Everything is Everything, please like, subscribe, share, comment. :)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
00:00 Packaging
00:13 Introduction: The State of Education
01:44 Chapter 1: Understanding the Problem
17:34 Chapter 2: What About Private Enterprise?
25:13 Chapter 3: Fund Schooling, Not Schools
34:40 Chapter 4: Education and Development
52:58 Chapter 5: The Importance of Early Childhood
1:05:12 Chapter 6: What Should a Parent Do?
1:10:36 Chapter 7: What Should a Young Person Do?
1:26:01 Chapter 8: What Should Educators Do?
1:27:53 Chapter 9: What Should Policy People Do?
1:31:32 Chapter 10: What Should Philanthropists Do?
1:38:08 Chapter 11: Amit Recommends
1:39:29 Chapter 12: Ajay Recommends
USEFUL RESOURCES:
1. Amit on Twitter: / amitvarma
2. Ajay on Twitter: / ajay_shah
3. The Seen and the Unseen -- Amit's audio podcast: seenunseen.in/
(Also on all podcast apps. And TH-cam, though less than 1% of listens come from here: / @theseenandtheunseen )
4. Ajay's organisation, XKDR Forum, on TH-cam: / @xkdr
5. In Service of the Republic -- Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah: amzn.eu/d/hwGILb3
6. The Art of Clear Writing -- Amit's writing course: indiauncut.com/clear-writing/
7. The India Uncut Newsletter -- Amit's newsletter at indiauncut.substack.com/
8. Education in India - Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra): • Ep. 77: Education in I...
9. Fixing Indian Education - Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan): • Ep 185: Fixing Indian ...
10. Our Unlucky Children (2007) -- Amit Varma: tinyurl.com/yk7xtkuf
11. Why India Needs School Vouchers (2007) -- Amit Varma: www.wsj.com/articles/SB116882...
12. Fund Schooling, Not Schools (2007) -- Amit Varma: tinyurl.com/4env7dbn
13. Where Has All the Education Gone? -- Lant Pritchett: tinyurl.com/mrxxh787
14. The first PISA results for India: The end of the beginning -- Lant Pritchett: tinyurl.com/ctrt4wm
15. Geniuses and economic development -- Ajay Shah: tinyurl.com/4z3xt38h
16. Doing better than a competitive exam -- Nitin Pai and Ajay Shah: tinyurl.com/47f23npx
17. The Aser Reports: asercentre.org/
18. Accelerating India's Development -- Karthik Muralidharan: amzn.in/d/0eLqkVeb
19. We Are Brains, Not Stomachs -- Episode 20 of Everything is Everything (on population): • Our Population Is Our ...
20. The Long Road to Change -- Episode 36 of Everything is Everything: • The Long Road to Chang...
21. PISA by OECD: www.oecd.org/en/about/program...
22. Private Education Is Good for the Poor -- James Tooley and Pauline Dixon: tinyurl.com/5ak68wm8
23. How Much Does Free Education Cost? -- Study by CCS: tinyurl.com/3s8ka5hy
24. The Beautiful Tree -- James Tooley: amzn.in/d/0b0dB3A1
25. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity - Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen: • Ep 379: Lant Pritchett...
26. Karthik Muralidharan and the Bureaucrat’s Burden -- Episode 375 of The Seen and the Unseen: • Ep 375: Karthik Murali...
27. Murali Neelakantan's tweet: tinyurl.com/y23zzj3c
28. James Heckman at the Unversity of Chicago: tinyurl.com/5h4t7bba
29. The Heckman Equation: heckmanequation.org/
30. It is immoral to have children. Here’s why -- Amit Varma: tinyurl.com/3ukun6w2
31. Natasha Badhwar Lives the Examined Life - Episode 301 of The Seen and the Unseen: • Ep 301: Natasha Badhwa...
32. The Takshashila Institution: takshashila.org.in/
33. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs -- Episode 46 of Everything is Everything: • Stay Away From Luxury ...
34. Three page notes considered harmful -- Ajay Shah: tinyurl.com/ydctakja
35. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: amzn.in/d/0bGj3ZoE
36. Essays -- Lydia Davis: amzn.in/d/06KXJVUo
37. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee: amzn.in/d/0grQGDjk
Produced by Amit Varma
Shot by Vaishnav Vyas & Nomsita MS Haritashya: / vaishnav.vyas
Edited by Nomsita MS Haritashya: / nomsitaharitashya
Thanks to Gaurav Chintamani for helping with sound: / gaurav_chintamani
Chapter image by Simahina: / i_am_simahina
100% would want a “LEARNING HOW TO LEARN and more” compilation of subjects and resources.
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Same here... listened the episode while driving. And came back to request the same.
It is exhilarating to hear Ajay speak about the joy of pursuing a life rich in intellect and knowledge. I wish I could make a montage of all his clips from 'Everything is Everything' where he waxes lyrical on the beautiful possibilities of contemplative and deep, engaging life, far removed from the vacuity of mass culture. The montage can serve as a daily reminder, a daily dose of motivation.
Truly educating episode.
The one thing I have come to learn from "The Seen and Unseen" and "Everything is Everything" is that learning is a life long journey and if we stop learning then we are doing a disservice to our race.
It's a compliment coming from the space of deep gratitude.
Thanks.
A remarkable episode. Perhaps among the finest conversations on on education on the Internet. The only regret is that it is only 100 minutes long. What I find special about this show is that in other podcasts, one will not hear about a James Heckman, or a Lydia Davis. I wonder if during the Enlightenment across Europe this is what the salons and the cafes and the intellectual square felt like.
Excellent podcast.
Working backwards from the root purpose of life - which is psychological evolution - “flexible general intelligence” he calls it - “weaving & interconnecting the whole being” - is exactly the Yoga Mind.
Some thoughts:
- Vietnam's performance on PISA, despite low per capita income, is remarkable. Vietnam matched some high income countries.
- In the Young Lives Study, Indian children had a higher average score on Raven's CPM(cognitive ability) relative to Vietnamese children. Yet on later assessments of math and reading the Vietnamese children performed significantly better than the Indian children.
- is there any recent research on how diglossia might affect learning to read and write, in particular how this affects Tamil students.
- how does mixed medium(languages) environments of Indian schools affect learning, what happens to learning outcomes if the teacher isn't proficient in the medium of instruction
-what is the vocabulary size of an 8 year old child? how does multilingualism affect this? Can children become proficient in a language not spoken in the home?
-do teaching colleges incorporate the science of reading into pedagogy instruction. Does reading instruction for Indian languages need reform?
-why don't cities or states collect their own data?
-are there any teachers who write about their experience. India's schools seem like a bit of a black box.
- fluoride excess in groundwater and the food supply is a serious problem, high levels may reduce cognitive ability.
- In ASER 2018, female students in Kerala had the highest % to read at grade level, 63.8% could read the text. Only 40% of boys in Kerala could read at grade level in that same year. Why is there such a big gap between genders. Also what are they doing right so that the girls performed so well.
- why do Tamil learners have among the poorest outcomes on ASER, ORF. How do tamil learners in singapore perform on reading and writing assessments.
My 2 year old kid spends almost 4 hours daily watching youtube videos and shorts! The conversation(especially importance of early childhood portion) is an eye opener for me !
So glad you did this subject!
Great episode guys, the Amit-Ajay combo is a perfect mix of free flowing creativity and the structured, logical, data backed perspectives which is essential. Btw guys, ASER is the name of the survey, the NGO is PRATHAM, they do it. You can mention it in description so that more people know about this great NGO.
Schools offering alternative education are slowly growing in number. Education which prepares a child for life, not only for a job.
One of my favorite EiE episodes. Thanks a bunch. Taking away so much - concept of fluid general intelligence, How schools and organizations reward for Conscientiousness trait of the Big 5, role of parents, teachers and policy makers, work of Heckman... The list is endless, I'm leaving with so much to mull over
And yes, pls pls start a program on Learning to Learn. Cover statistics, communication, storytelling, emotional intelligence, relating with people, interesting mental models, and first principles thinking paradigms.
Sharing lots of gratitude, as a lifelong student to his teachers Amit and Ajay 🙏🙏
Was waiting for this
If you were to create the course, it would be great to include a section on how to find communities of choice. Additionally, it should cover strategies for introverts to navigate a world that often rewards extroversion.
On Life Lessons: Something on mental models, first principle thinking - experience and stories around them, war stories/ancedotes that Ajay sprinkles here and there - the ppl behind the thinking, working with constraints..
My 12 year old listens to SeenUnseen. Some of her favourites are: Ep 318 with Nitin Pai, Ep 329 and best is Ep 335 on Ukraine Russia War. She says she understood more from Shruti's episode (336) then from her civics text book. Currently we both are listening to Ep 387 of Rajeswari.
For your 12yo, engagement with such ideas, possibly as little as overhearing adults talk about them, will add up to the ultimate privilege. It is knowledge about the world, the power of language (precise and high quality language using a rich vocabulary, not plebian mistakes), critical thinking with disagreement and conflict handled in a friendly and polite way, seeing the richness of the world instead of cardboard cut outs, awareness of the world of books and the people making the ideas.
Ye! Yes! A thousand times yes to that bundle of life lessons!
Very imp subject
From 13:40 to 17:20 Ajay was talking seriously about OECD PISA, ASER and PPE and Amit was thinking furiously about how to work in 'upper tail bump' into a joke
Busted!
Excellent. I am 60 years old and since you guys had asked whether we would be interested in learning….so yes I would. Maybe how to leave my addiction to my phone- or how to learn, more specifically on how to use AI so that I can keep up with technology.
Learning how to learn. Game On. More power to what you. Grateful for sharing your wisdom.
17:30 WTF?! 😂
😂
Love this episode.
It would be great service to all of us to have such a curated package- life lessons -
Most resentment of education professionals comes from preference falsification and is solved by accepting that the service they wish to provide is a non-essential luxury good.
Can you elaborate? Are you saying education is a luxury? Or I'm getting this wrong
Life taught me everything. Nice Amit, last part is excellent.
I’m a big fan of the podcast. But Overall - I feel a lot more fleshing out and driving your arguments to fruition would have helped.
1) If education doesn’t lead to development, what’s the model for development that we need?
2) I understand other aspects that are needed beyond industrialised education. But You maintain that capitalism is better, implying the benefits of competition. Shouldn’t the benefits of that apply to industrialised education too? Also, for most India 2 folks wanting social mobility, signaling value and standardised tests might be a more democratising force than subjective assessments where elites might benefit more. Hence isnt current model net net beneficial?
3) What exactly is the recommended model of education - more details would be helpful on a principle level as well as practical changes required
I am all in for "Learning how to Learn". I agree that there is some approach to these, have had the success of learning something just out of curiosity, and getting a job on it in the past, and whenever i spend sometime on any technology, it kind of helps, as IT and real world as Amit says, most of the problems are multi-disciplinary !
Learning how to learn wow. Please bring this soon.
This was a wonderful episode
Simply amazing👍😍
52:01 great idea. Highly appreciated. Kindly make it accessible to everyone.
Thanks for this conversation. Ajay's thought on every topic broadens my knowledge. For the course you're talking about, I think I would be interested to learn more about Audio/Video productions.
lovely conversation
Even among the upper layer that’s ‘cool’ according to Ajay, there’s very little reflection by the students at various points. At every point of life most of us take a predetermined path - what after 10th class? do science - but what if someone wants to do history? What after 12th - do engineering or medicine, what after college? Get a job, get married, have kids. We very rarely pause to reflect and understand what one likes or doesn’t. People who take gap years are ostracized. And people who don’t follow the script are made to feel insecure about their choices. One great thing about the internet though, has been the democratization of knowledge. That doesn’t mean all of us have become smart automatically, but if we want to go down rabbit holes and really learn about something we’re not gatekept by institutions.
As a fellow Fergusson alum, I’m a bit offended that Amit considers that he doesn’t have any cred. Just a bit 😊
Life Lessons! Yes please!
+10 to the idea of a learning how to learn episode.
please do make that! cover ideas that are both unintuitive, and likely useful for everyone (eg probabilistic thinking, positive-sumness of the world)
Interesting discussion.
Agree Friedman’s voucher system can get the desired effect. Yet it cannot be used in here.
Rural areas need support badly. Taught craft briefly at a Zilla parishad School in a town 25 km from Khed (Maharashtra). It only had 3 teachers (including the principal), but covered grades KG to 7th. Where would the children there go with vouchers? No alternative schools around. Go to the next town 7 km away? Okay. But who will take them there and back? How much diff is the school in the next town going to be?
Even Ajay’s idea of letting govt schools continue as meal centers won’t work. There are no school clusters at all around in towns there. Let alone quality of teaching.
Everything breaks down in India. As one of you said, the India that you and I know is just that living in a few cities, the elite, perhaps the truly uneducated. The real challenge is in our rural areas.
I would even challenge the idea that we are educated. If we were, we wouldn’t have allowed India to develop the way it has. Everything is concentrated in a few cities, mostly about software, racking up concrete matchbox type apartments, networks and relationships, nepotism and what not. Everytime somebody lobbied, govt let them have their way.
We are just not about growth. We are about preservation of ourselves and our money. Our policies are designed that way. Our attitudes and behaviors are such. Look at the Tatas. When they saw $10B on the table for semiconductor manufacturing, they even put together a new company - Tata Electronics Pvt Ltd. Come on, where is the economic freedom?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a devotee of Milton Friedman. He was a champion of individual freedom which enables a group of individuals to come together to collaborate and cooperate to start an enterprise. Where is the economic freedom for such cooperation in India?
Elitism and privilege are so desired in our society that we killed local traditional crafts, skills and tradee. Elitism or privilege is the reverse side of the coin of preservation of ourselves and our wealth, not growth.
Guess it is we who need education more than the rural children. I found their cognitive capacity to be much better than that of the children of the wealthy when I taught craft in that rural school. Even though my marathi was not the best, the children were excited and came back with more craft questions and ideas.
At the time, I was teaching at J Krishnsmurti’s Sahyadri School in the vicinity at Tiwai hill. The children who paid large sums to Sahyadri School were not inclined to dirty their hands.
Unless there is a critical mass of people living in every rural town of India, Ajay’s ideas of a better quality school sitting within a short distance from a govt meal centre school will not fly. Only a true change in our economic policies will bring about the atmosphere of freedom and the opportunities thereof in rural areas to enable a critical mass of people live there. Rural doesn’t mean backward. Rural is synonymous with natural surroundings. In the west, most live amidst nature. Suburbs are rural in nature. Why do we have to concretize and wreck every place the educated live in? Why can’t we decongest our cities? The population densities in our cities is way beyond healthy limits.
Ajay talked about exposure to diff things and experiences. Our country is devoid of experiences for us or our younger ones. Where in our cities are our libraries, playgrounds, parks, museums, footpaths, trees, nature? Education is every experience throughout our life, right? Recently Air-India sold its jumbo jet for scrap. Why couldn’t they have pioneered again after a long time in building the first proper aircraft museum? The plane was being retired. It had already paid for itself and a lot more. Our cities don’t have adequate experiences commensurate with our humongous population numbers.
My wife who is a pediatric occupational therapist says children of construction workers who play with gravel, stones, sand, sieves and such other construction material are better able in both physical and mental respects than children and adults whose apartments are being built. We educated and elite are far removed from natural stuff and nature.
Long and short, education may not be our problem. Our policies do not give us economic freedom. That ties us down a huge lot. Let’s set our policies right. Let’s also educate and set children free. Why push them in one or the other area? Let them choose. Friedman’s free to choose. And whatever local or rural skills children come up with will automatically enable them to earn a living right where they are. Let’s revive local crafts, skills and trades through rural freedom.
Had once traveled to the West Godavari region in AP. Was Visiting an educational institution there and representing an MNC in hardware design. I gave a talk on tech and how it could help them come up with their own ideas. I didn’t sell jobs there. Later that evening, the Vice-Chairman of the institution told me something interesting. He told me how most MNCs would come there to market their jobs. That people in cities do not understand that their children know how to live amongst things in nature. They are not worried about jobs. They know how to live and earn with the help of nature. What we’ve done over the years is snatched away their local skills, knowledge and trades away from them through our bad policies.
Even more foolishly, we are treating education as a means to livelihood only. It’s very wrong. Education is far more importantly a pathway to understanding and knowing human life as it is, making us realize who we are and our potential. It is about becoming aware of the life that is us and to know and experience life. Absolutely disastrous and foolish to tailor education towards employment.
Forget the West. The West are in a quandary today. It’s all finally coming home to roost. I admired the brilliant in the West though, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Friedman, Hayek and others, for their perseverance in digging deep down at and into the truth. They’ve of course provided a huge amount of information for us and posterity. Plus we have our very own ancient wisdom. Do not ever underestimate the Indian way of life and thought.
The West however has been, all through a long time, about ensuring they can leverage their economic ascendancy achieved mostly with the help of the ideas of individual freedom to keep shoring up their economic position now and then. Initially perhaps they did bring themselves up economically from the trenches of poverty from a pure self-interest (not selfish interest as is demarcated by Adam Smith) point of view. However, since WWII, the West has been trying mostly to maintain their economic ascendancy at the expense of the rest of the world. This has never been better exemplified than in the formation in the 1970’s of the original group of G5 nations (France, Japan, Germany, the UK and the US) and then the formation of the G7 nations (G5 + Italy & Canada). From the beginning, neither G5 nor G7 seemed proper. The populations of India and China was already more than that of either the G5 or the G7!!!
The West has never been about establishing democracy globally. Thinking of the West as an usher of the ideas of individual freedom is no further from the truth than what the West has been up to around the world. It is a great tragedy of human thought and human sympathy, hijacked and misplaced with self deception.
India chose democracy cuz it took to it like a duck to water. It wasn’t because of the 90 years of its being a part of the British Empire. India’s ancient cultures and traditions were already steeped in democratic thought and ways. Democracy, otherwise, is too foreign a concept for an unexposed people to adopt. It’s what’s been observed mostly in the 20th century. There are regions more politically stable under dictators. There’s been more violence and more heinous crime after these dictators were forcibly ousted. I’m not arguing for dictatorship at all. Yet one has to give the idea of individual freedom some time to mature as a thought in the minds of people who are insecure yet about it.
The Western form of education, an economist by the name of EF Schumacher describes, is that which discourages people from being able to look after themselves. It is all about training generations of young to become employees. The metrics you talked about are essentially that. It’s a cleverly worked out ploy. It is what has helped us destroy any leftovers from colonial times of the local skills, knowledge and trades. So, on the one hand, economic freedom is taken away through clever policies helping a few. On the other, limited directed education is provided to mould us into employees. While many prefer being employees, we must also try to restore the freedom of individuals so that they can collaborate and cooperate to bring about the growth of ideas and so many more other things. Unemployment will take care of itself. It’s our interference through wrong economic policies that has brought about such disparities and such a landscape driving us into people clusters (our cities) that boast of limited things (concrete construction only, schooling culminating in entrance tests, queuing towards software related and medical professions, entrepreneurship mostly in the form of middle agencies (apps), or in physical forms such as eateries, vanity fair, smartphone and laptop stores, apparels, footwear, hold and jewelry, and service centers for things that go wrong). Where is the freedom of the individual when we have been pushed so hard into these narrow channels in every which way? Where are those experiences that Ajay refers to? My childhood Bombay in the 1960’s and early 1970’s was by far and away a much higher reflection of individual freedom and enterprise!!!
a. the essence of the voucher idea is that giving parents purchasing power would incite a supply response. self-interested entrepreneurs would start schools, that serve the interests of parents, in a way that the unresponsive Indian ruling class does not.
b. Yes, there are remote locations that are under-served. But the bulk of India is in dense population congregations. It will be good to make progress on the 80 and then figure separately what to do about the 20.
c. Your text runs through many things. Three elements are worth clarifying (and they are overlapping).
First, there is the question of prosperity. A lot of your complaints about India come from just one thing: a low GDP. We're a poor country. Change that, and many things will change. Hence, economic growth is the highest priority.
Second, there is the question of the state. The state is the community that wields coercive power. So focus on the use of the coercive power and wonder if that can be done in better ways.
Finally, there are societal ills which are about you and me as persons. We should become better people. That's on us. There are plenty of bad elements of values, culture, behaviour, which are for us -- one individual at a time -- to recognise and fix. E.g. in this episode Amit and I talked about the harms of test-prep culture and of mass-culture. More of us need to wake up to these things and start living differently. By default it's just a country of cricket and bollywood and low end labour - but can it be more than that?
Absolutely ready to subscribe to learning how to learn course. I would really like some emphasis on numeracy, numbers, and probabilistic thinking, economic thinking, and cost-benefit analysis to improve decision making- both personal and professional(including policy)
Great episode. I have a few questions:
1) "Industrialized education" brings in scale. Ideally, this should lead to the development of 50 "industries" of education offering 80 different education models (similar to 80 types of soaps in a supermarket). Do you think this hasn't happened because we haven't allowed markets to function in the education sector?
2) Following from 1), assuming high levels of education is a good thing and we need more of it - how do you think
about educating millions of kids at scale? (homeschooling seems to require high time/energy commitments from parents; Gurukul style integrated classes without age-segregation, require high student-teacher ratios, pose difficulties in assessing skills among other things)
Few thoughts not questions:
3) Emphasizing early childhood interventions at the level of the family seems to be putting too many expectations on a family wherein parents might have to substitute other productive activities to raise a child (notwithstanding the actual ability to have complex conversations/cognitive discourse at home). This substitution is more salient in low-income settings like India. This is probably why you'd start thinking about schools as not just daycare centers/canteens but as outsourced educational institutions.
4) I am not entirely sure of the "drenched in mass media" middle class argument. For a country which had 1 TV channel for decades, it is only natural that people will gravitate towards content they find relatable, now that we have a variety. In fact, particular media is mass media because it speaks to a large section of the society. To say that the population watches cricket & Bollywood leading to poor cognitive development in kids seems like a stretch.
Again, thanks for the great conversation. The setting is lovely!
Dear Utkarsh,
I fear that along with the scale came a major loss of signal. We have scale and we have the chasing of brand names. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of what it was all about.
Yes, Heckman also worries that in many families, the correct early childhood interventions are hard to organise. But it's important to have a sense of direction of what's desirable. Early childhood interventions are desirable. Master/apprentice (a.k.a. guru/shishya parampara) is desirable. These are difficult for all persons and won't scale, and they won't deliver easy brand names using which status conscious buyers/sellers can operate.
Cognitive development: the issues go way beyond childhood. Learning and intellectual development is a lifelong journey. It requires an elevated state in terms of priorities, lifestyle, communities, passion.
@@ajayshah5705 Thank you for answering, Ajay.
Agree with your idea about having a sense of direction wrt what is desirable and the problem with chasing brand names.
However, when we talk about/propose policy solutions to improving education as an end in itself (irrespective of its effect on economic prosperity), it is hard for me to not think about scalability. While I agree with the idea of learning and intellectual development being a lifelong and personal pursuit, when we envisage systems (public/private), a minimum viable product of sorts only seems possible by an "industrialised" approach. This MVP is especially important if we think education leads to economic prosperity. Adding over and above that MVP can & should be a personal endeavour.
So good. I would most definitely be interested in the course.
These are some of the things I wish I had focused more on earlier in my life -
Math (Numeracy, Probability, Statistics)
English (Clear Writing, Speaking and Presentation)
Computer Skills (Basic Programming, Linux, Git)
Microeconomics (Supply/Demand, Marginal Utility, Opportunity Cost, Market Competition, Factor Markets, Market Failure)
Psychology (Big 5 Personality Traits, Persuasion, Cognitive Biases, Game Theory, Evolutionary Psychology)
Personal Finance (Compound Interest, Budgeting, Debt, Index Investing)
Health and Nutrition (Basic Biology, Evolution, Genetics, First Aid, Diet and Exercise)
Philosophy
The episode also reminded me of Bryan Caplan's rather provocative books - The Case Against Education and The Selfish Reason to Have More Kids
Btw, listening to the Seen and the Unseen and Everything is Everything is a good thing for the development of not just 5 or 17 year olds but also 50 and 70 year olds. ;)
Definitely interested in a course like that. Just make sure not to dumb it down too much. Your 'gentle viewer' is generally pretty well read and already knows a thing or two. The level of such a course should ideally be higher than undergraduate study imho, even if concise.
TSTU episodes keep playing on Alexa at my home. Two pre-teens at home are the subjects.
Brilliant! Add discussions by adults in the room of that material.
Would love to have a course by the two of you.
Chapter6 Great Advice! Could be a template for your life lessons course.
Topic requests for the life lessons course -
- something on research . Yes dive into rabbit holes from scholar but most of it is behind paywalls , and a lot is inaccessible even via sites like scihub or the preprint directories . Subscriptions for say elsevier are unaffordable for those interested but lacking institutional access or well a community online or otherwise .
- you sometimes talk of communities of choice (ajay seems less keen on it than amit though it'd be nice if he could explain more) and chance . What if you're remote/restricted - geographically , socio-culturally . Sometimes , it doesn't even feel possible in any substantial tangible way .
-second the numeracy and prob thinking and anything else you have in mind run with it ! A lot of the times you don't know what you need or like till you're in it.
Coming to the topics that the course on life should cover are (Somethings that I am deeply enjoying to learning and helping me lead a better life):
- The art of holistic health. Looking health beyond physical and mental health but also integrating social health and spiritual health as a part of it.
- How to view nutrition and exercise and find what works for us and how actually educate outselves about these fundamental knowledge. (PS: My most fav reccomendation by Ajay was when he once recommended Tea in the episode and how he told eating different natural masalas and veggies is important. Such a simple yet profound idea)
- How to identify a problem, research about it and write it down for a) For our understanding. b) To propogate it to other. (And how to back it up by numbers)
- How to work in a collaborative way and build accountability for each other collectively.
- The art of action bias and how to play to play :P
- The art of prioritising and do things you deeply care about.
Looking forward to hearing from the community in the comments on what topics should be covered in the course!
I am genuinely excited for this project and I hope it pans out well.
Thank you for this discussion
Could you make an episode on ways to tweak social behavior in order to curb bribe giving and bribe taking at the last mile service points, through technological means and otherwise?
Thanks for sharing your insights on the topic. It highlights the challenges in the education system really well - specially government schools. But there's very little talk about why public goods need to exist in the first place - the "sub-saharan" standards are also reflective of the rural realities in India. It was surprising that Ajay did not talk about development economics at all and why things like healthcare and education or even basic infrastructure in rural areas have to be led by the state because the "profits" are just not there for private enterprises to foray. The discussion on challenges was great but just like any policy maker/intellectual arm chair discussion, this left a lot to be desired in terms of understanding of executional challenges and discussing some realistic solutions.
We have a few episodes on this: See
th-cam.com/video/wArMaqpNvFE/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/DUga6kSttr8/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/_CBIW4iU9Hw/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/jIilzNHgllg/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/_CBIW4iU9Hw/w-d-xo.html
An episode on the foundations of development economics is coming.
@@ajayshah5705 thanks for sharing. Yes, would appreciate the nuance around challenges of development economics while treating issues like healthcare, education, rural India and role of State. Questioning outcomes of State initiatives and your reference to the amazing work of the likes of Lant Pritchett were eye opening. But loosely stating things like education budget is better spent paying debt and everything education is something that the private sector can do better felt like a conclusion which could require more thought and deliberation
Great episode. The last one oabout cycling opened up a new world for me and this episode has repeated that. Both of you look like you pulled an all nighter, it's funny that this happened for the episode on education. Also please consider having guests on the show e.g. having an expert of pedagogy could have taken this to another level. Maybe something to consider for episode 250?
Life Skills course 🤚 where do i sign up? What to include - How to unlearn and learn new Mental models, Health and Wellness (there is much research that we know now about our body and mental state), nature and environmental knowledge, Financial literacy, money habits and models for different stages of life (budgeting, investing, insurance etc), worldwide historical civilizations we can learn from (not think that we are the only one that is great), social rights (friends, family, parent, grandparents, cousins, co-workers etc), basic law and legal rights of individuals, building failure mindset, conversational skills, how to argue, negotiate, .... i could go on and on. Please dont make it only videos, interact with the audience (atleast asynchronously).
6:22 i think Amit meant 7 and a half lakh crore here
one question amit , i understand that our schools are very bad in villages .
i also know a lot of villagers are sending students to private schools which are also not better.
However i have heard that public schools in Delhi have become better.
So should'nt governance and accountabiliy be a solution rather than converting government schools to mid may meal centers or giving school vouchers.
A. The better schools in Delhi are better in inputs. It is not yet clear that there is much of a gain in outputs or outcomes.
ASER shows a steady exit, by parents, in the cities, away from public schools to private schools. Parents are turning their backs on a free product and choosing a paid product. Imagine that.
B. No politician in India has shown any inclination to solve the problem of accountability of school teachers. Vouchers will actually push for this : the better public schools will get more money. For the rest, the most optimistic future for government schools is as canteens.
one can find a hepatologist or a psychiatrist easily while finding a good men's tailor is an arduous task!
Where are you in H.P.? Looks like a great place to spend some time in.
This group of episodes is called The Bir Sessions.
when will the next writing cohort start
August.
Amit you did not say anything about the teaching standard of Kendriya Vidyalaya a govt funded institution with better quality of education than a private school. Any comment ?
A. Some KV are very good.
B. It's analogous to AIIMS being very good: when senior civil servants are users, this creates feedback loops for quality. Also, the peers in class carry more human capital from home.
C. This breaks down in some KV and it does not apply for normal government schools. In normal government schools that serve the people, there are tenured school teachers with zero incentive to teach.
D. Teaching is not easy as (say) a vaccination program is. In the four-part classification of difficulty it is : number of transactions (high), discretion (high), stakes (low) and opacity (high), or 3/4.
I read somewhere KVs haven't succeeded much. Most of them are limited to producing govt. servants (iAS/IPS, Armed Forces).
Not much on creative side.
man does ajay really hate quadratic equations
so no recommendations for philanthropists.
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Kuch kijiye
Can I give you an upper tail pump 😂
we want life lessons!
make it up @amitvarma