An interview series examining how to fix our broken education system

A lot of people are very critical of the current education system (particularly k-12 education in the US and in India). You can easily find 100+ articles online that point out what is wrong with the system: really important things (eg: financial literacy, sex education, rights) are ignored, teaching styles are often ineffective, and standardised tests are often the only determinant of success. These are absolutely valid issues to point out. But they’re also kinda obvious - I’m sure the people in charge of running the system have thought about it.

This begs the question: why are things the way they are? Why are our leaders unable to improve the education systems? Surely, many influential people must’ve tried solving it (it’s such a big long-lasting issue)? What are the obstacles? It could totally be the case that the answer to this is simply “the education minister is incompetent, corrupt and lazy”, but there’s probably more to this issue and diving deeper will reveal a lot of useful insights. There’s not a lot of information on this online - at least not easily accessible information.

The proposition is to conduct a comprehensive series of interviews with everyone involved in the space. You’ll probably start small, with principals of good schools, principals of bad schools, teachers etc, and climb up to government officials, ministers, and ed-tech entrepreneurs. The purpose of these interviews wouldn’t be to grill anyone and try to hold them accountable. Rather, you’d put forth commonly raised concerns, suggestions, hear what they have to say, try to empathise and understand and eventually solve.

Eventually, as you start to develop an understanding of it, you could start compiling your interviews into short clips that answer common concerns and issues (eg: why were we never formally taught what our rights were? or how to support someone emotionally when they’re feeling suicidal?). You could release them, hear what the public says, and accordingly frame further questions to ask to your future interviewees, and dive even deeper.

Such a comprehensive exploration into the issue would provide an unprecedented level of understanding about the problem - which both helps solve the problem, and helps change public perception towards the education system (by highlighting what is actually working and all the progress that is being made). It will encourage us all to go beyond the superficial (they don’t get enough funding) to the intricacies, opening up a pandora box of issues that people can try to address.