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Notes -
On The Studied Irrelevance of Indian Schools
A note: this essay began its life as a reply to the wider discussion about Freddie deBoer and his god-awful takes on disciplinary standards inside schools downthread. I followed the link, encountered the paywall at speed. My prose went completely off track, sprawled out of control, and I've given it standalone status.
I would be more upset about all this if I believed my future kids stood to benefit from schooling. I cannot rule that out entirely, but I do not intend to start a college fund on their behalf unless the next five to ten years deviate sharply from my expectations. That isn't the same thing as not saving money on their behalf, which I absolutely do. Remember, money is fungible, and can be exchanged for goods and services.
I do not live in the States either, though some of these concerns map onto the British system, as dim as my understanding of that system happens to be.
My experience with the Indian education system, which I have more familiarity with than I would have wished, has left me with what I'd call a hot-take if most people back home wouldn't tacitly or vocally agree with me.
Bluntly: the schools you attend before college did not really matter. A prestigious name-brand private school could be expected to give you a marginally better education, but most parents who choose them are buying prestige and peer composition. The middle class and above does not send its kids to a government-run school if they can help it. The students at government schools are not particularly awful or ill-behaved, and we don't have the disciplinary problems Western schools deal with. Government schools are grossly under-resourced, and they serve a population whose parents cannot afford the parallel education system. Your kids would come out of it with an inferior social network, worse English, and a sense of shame. It's almost unheard of to pick one if you can afford better, even if that accordance requires severe tightening of physical or financial belts.
Why? The real answer is that nobody expects the teachers to actually teach you much in class. Including the teachers themselves. I am being serious about that. Even the best teachers at the prestigious school I attended knew, with the placid certainty of a thermodynamic law, that their star pupils and everyone else would be attending private coaching sessions outside school hours.
That's what you have to understand to make sense of anything that follows. School is the credentialing and networking layer. Coaching is the education layer. The two have been functionally decoupled for decades, and the entirety of Indian society organizes itself around the assumption.
You want numbers? I've got numbers. India's private coaching industry was about Rs 58,000 crore (about $7 billion) in revenue as of 2022, with projections to hit Rs 1.3 lakh crore (about $16 billion) by 2028. That's a parallel education system roughly the scale of a respectable national economy. In a country with around 250 million students in K-12, comprising almost 25% of the world's school-going children, that represents a lot of household income diverted from other purposes. Somewhere in the ballpark of 7.5 million students are enrolled in formal coaching at any given moment, with Kota alone drawing more than 200,000 annually.
The terminus, the thing all this preparation is for, is a small handful of murderously selective exams. 1.4 million students sit JEE Main each year for entrance to engineering colleges, of whom roughly 250,000 qualify for JEE Advanced, of whom around 17,000 actually get into one of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology. The Computer Science seats at IIT Bombay close out around rank 60-70 in the country. Roughly one in a hundred thousand students gets a CSE seat at IIT Bombay. NEET, the medical-school entrance, runs on comparable arithmetic: over 2.3 million students sit the test annually for around 110,000 MBBS seats, of which fewer than 60,000 are at the more affordable government colleges. Harvard's acceptance rates are only slightly lower than the odds of getting any medical seats in India.
This is what your kid is competing for, and this is why your kid is in coaching from age fourteen, or twelve, or ten, or, occasionally, five.
I have my own theory about why parental coaching enrollment ages keep dropping. It's not a particularly original one, since it reduces to the logic of any arms race. If the median competitor starts at twelve, the marginal advantage of starting at ten is large. Once enough people start at ten, the advantage shifts to eight. There is no obvious floor, until we've reached toddlers still crawling there. ThePrint recently profiled a five-year-old in Jaipur who attends two hours of tuition after a five-hour school day, carrying eleven books in his bag. His mother has already decided he will be a doctor. He might struggle to count to thirty. I strongly suspect that we won't be recruiting doctors by the time he turns twenty.
Back to the school itself. Why don't the teachers care?
Several reasons, layered on top of each other, mutually reinforcing.
The first is selection. A physics or biology teacher actually good at teaching physics or biology can run their own coaching center. This pays better by a significant multiple and selects for higher-functioning students who actually want to learn. The teachers who stay in regular schools are typically the ones who cannot, or will not, make that jump. A few of my schoolteachers moonlighted as coaches on weekends, and the fact that they could not sustain it full-time tells you where they stood in the talent pyramid. The very best teachers I encountered were either independent coaches or worked at the apex coaching institutes.
The second reason is incentive. Schoolteachers are paid the same whether their students learn or do not. A coaching center operates on something closer to a results-based payoff structure. Parents pay a coaching center for performance on entrance exams, and they will pull their kid out and switch institutes if results are bad. It's much harder for the school to lose your tuition this way, because admission to a desirable school is itself a scarce good. Parents pay for the brand and for the peers. They do not pay for instruction. They pay out the nose for that elsewhere.
The third reason is information. Everyone in the system knows everyone else knows. The teachers know the students are getting taught elsewhere. The students know the teachers know. The parents know everyone knows. School ends up being an attendance requirement, a social environment, and a credentialing function. Nobody with their a functional frontal lobe mistakes it for the place where the learning happens.
Imagine this scenario: you're an Indian parent, and dear Ramesh (I had to pick a maximally stereotypical name, because my skin color allows me to get away with it) can't solve the Riemann hypothesis. He can't even prove the transcendental nature of pi! You accost his school teacher, and harangue him on the deficiency of his didactic approach. He is genuinely shocked. “But madam, I gave him the homework exercises. I told him it'll come on the test. I scribbled hastily on the blackboard and rapped knuckles, including his. I made sure nobody was snoring in class, or using their phone. What more can you expect of me?” You deflate, and feel suitably chagrined. You are overcome with shame, you grab Ramesh by the wrist and drag him off to whatever sprawling network of coaching centers is in vogue today. I haven't quite kept up.
The end result is a level of self-aware double-bookkeeping that I do not think most Western observers fully grasp. When you ask an Indian student "did you learn this in school?" they will laugh, albeit internally. The real answer is that they learned it in their evening coaching, with a private tutor, or by self-studying their books.
The coaching layer functioned as its own form of tracking. The smarter, harder-working students would study on their own or get more intensive and dedicated tutoring. The smart but constitutionally lazy ones, like me, attended too, probably with worse results. My ADHD was at the time unacknowledged and unmedicated, which I now realize accounts for considerably more of my misery than I appreciated at the time. Lucky for me, my parents ensured I had 1:1 private tutoring for most subjects for most of my life. It's hard(er) to daydream or procrastinate when someone is watching you like a hawk for two consecutive hours. Thanks, mom and dad? I suppose it worked.
There was also more explicit tracking, which I expect that American educators would find appalling. The duller kids got diverted into the humanities by 8th or 10th grade. Kids from mercantile backgrounds who wanted to stay in the family business opted into commerce. The would-be engineers, doctors, and professionals took the science track, with some discretion over whether to include biology, programming, and so on. Maths, physics, and chemistry were core and immutable. English literature and a native language rounded things out. I'd like to claim I did History and Geography until 12th grade, but it has been long enough that I genuinely cannot remember. On reflection, the answer is probably yes.
I have younger cousins, and I vicariously observed a rather interesting trend through them. An increasing fraction of Indian parents have recalibrated on the importance of sending their kids to the “best” schools, or at least have decided that the return on investment isn't worth it. So it went with them. They moved, around 10th grade, to a “worse” school. Why? Because that institute had subtly advertised that it did not give a hoot about in-person attendance metrics or regular grades. The understanding was that the students enrolled only as a legal formality, they were expected, even encouraged to not show up to class and instead spend that time studying on their own or attending private coaching. A remarkable innovation, really. I wish it had been around in my time. I'm surprised it took so long to show up, that's what every incentive leant towards.
After high school: well, bud, better give the college entrance exams your best shot. Your future hinges on them. For the sufficiently wealthy, paying out to put your kid in a private institution was an option, though it came with a degree of stigma. Everyone knew that the kid who got into a government-run engineering college like an IIT had more intellectual horsepower than the best private alternatives. I will set aside the affirmative action issue, partly because I do not want this essay to be about that, and partly because anything I say about it will infuriate someone. Same went for medical schools, law schools, business schools, the entire prestige hierarchy. Government meritocratic top-tier sat at the apex, followed by a long tail of private institutions of variable quality, some genuinely excellent and some basically diploma factories.
The dimmer kids? Too bad. Barring their parents, nobody expected much of them. Did they learn anything in class? Who cares. Did they learn anything from the extra coaching? If the answer was no, that was on them.
I should admit I do not have great visibility into what happens to the genuinely subpar in academic terms. Even the dullest tools in my school shed came from reasonable wealth. They probably had a sinecure waiting for them in a family business, a comfortable middle-management slot somewhere, or some equivalent arrangement. The default outcome for those not quite so lucky is probably a dead-end job and a long slog. You cannot expect better from a poorer nation. They manage. They have to, because there are hundreds of millions of them.
Disciplinary measures were far stricter than in the West. Expulsion for unruly behavior was a rare but real possibility. If you were a bad student, you had better be a well-behaved one while lessons were happening. I’m just about old enough to remember going from corporal punishment being the norm to mostly frowned upon. Mostly. The legality of it was never the primary concern for anyone involved, including the parents who knew it was happening and either silently approved or tolerated it as the cost of having their kid in a serious institution.
Reading the Freddie deBoer discourse from a distance, I am consumed with cynicism, mostly because I perceive it as charitably misplaced idealism. The Western debate around discipline often proceeds as though the alternatives are "strict enforcement with consequences" versus "permissive chaos," and we are arguing about which moral failure to commit. After serving time inside the Indian system, I observed that strict discipline turns out to be the easy part. It isn't hard to produce a quiet, orderly classroom through any number of methods, some humane and some less so. The hard question is what happens inside that quiet, orderly classroom. The answer in India is: surprisingly little, by design, or by tacit acceptance.
Do I think this is a good thing, something to advocate for? Oh god no. I find it depressing. I'd like to claim that better schooling inside the schools would help, but surely you've understood that this is another Red Queen race right? You run as fast as you can just to stay in place, and making everyone faster doesn't change the composition of those making a podium finish.
Kota, the city in Rajasthan that has long been India's largest coaching hub, makes the Indian news with depressing regularity because of student suicide. A handful a month, from memory. There would be more, if they weren't incredibly strict about preventing them. If you imagine they achieve this by improving living standards or reducing the load? There's no hope for a quokka like you. They just make it harder to kill yourself, including through the kind of anti-suicide measures usually seen only in in-patient psychiatric wards, combined with draconian surveillance. The students are teenagers, sent away from home to live in hostels and crammers, with the expectation that they will spend two years of their lives doing nothing but preparing for one exam. Most of them will fail. A small number will pass and go on to lives of unevenly distributed satisfaction. The wager their parents made on them, financial and emotional, will turn out to have been a bad one in the median case. They were never going to be in the top one percent. Almost nobody is. The maths doesn't math.
If I had to place this in wider context: imagine something halfway between the laissez-faire approach of the West and the all-consuming grind of East Asia. Thankfully it was not quite that bad. I am not fond of the system at all. It almost chewed me up and didn't quite spit me out again, and the only affirmative defense I can make of it is that the chewing has not stopped since I left, despite my having moved far, far away. It is just not as bad as it could be, which I say while noting that explaining why sacrifices were made to Moloch is a different exercise from condoning the practice or wishing it to perpetuate into the future. We burn our children to prepare them for the flames ahead. The fires do not really cool off once you are out the other side. The forms of suffering reorganize themselves around your changing life circumstances, and that is roughly the most many of us can hope for.
What I can say is that I had some slack. I had opportunities to be a child rather than meat slurry waiting to be packed into a mold. The front-loading of suffering arguably bought me optionality for the future, though I am no longer fully confident this is true. Well, it's the thought that counts.
As someone who was on the local equivalent of a pre-med track, I might have spent between two and four hours after a full school day with private tutors, but the real pressure ramped only up after 10th grade. I can't blame my parents for that either. They weren't tigers. They were on the slightly upper end of strict by upper-middle-class Indian standards, largely because they had gone through the whole ordeal themselves and knew the value of higher education in a country where higher education is the one ticket out of a great many situations. I would do the same with my kids if I had to. I do not expect to have to. If I have kids, I hope they grow up somewhere the pressure is not nearly as bad.
Then again, it is hardly that much better in the West. An aspiring American doctor better start working on extracurriculars well before finishing high school. In the US, even more years of their limited life get spent in pre-med coursework, after which they apply to medical schools that admit a small fraction of applicants and that publicly weight non-academic considerations heavily. All you have done is trade the legible, harder-to-fake signal of excellent grades for excellent grades plus sob stories about digging wells in Africa, plus the presidency of the Underwater Basket Weaving Society, with an added interest in supporting weavers from under-represented minorities, which should help look past the uncomfortable fact that you yourself are not an under-represented minority.
The Indian system is more legible and crueler about it; the American system is less legible and crueler about hiding it. I'd have to be a touch daft to claim that the former is superior to the latter, I know which one I'd choose for my kids, warts and all.
It could be worse! South Korea has roughly 75% of students enrolled in around 100,000 cram schools nationwide, and Japan has over 65% of ninth-graders attending juku. India's coaching enrollment is enormous in absolute terms but smaller as a share of total students, largely because most Indian families simply can't afford the fees. Our middle class might out mass the entirety of the United States (albeit not in a literal weighing setup; gotta wait for the Ozempic to kick in to make that a fair fight), but there are a lot of poor people here. They never had a chance.
There are games where the winning move is not to play. Those Indians should consider themselves lucky that they can't afford to play them, at such a scale. Somehow, I doubt they'd feel comforted if I were to tell them that. In fact, I strongly suspect that they'd get angry at me.
At the end of the day, schools (or education in general) are a selection device for a tiny number of slots in professions that pay disproportionately well in societies where most professions do not pay nearly as well. As long as those differentials hold, you can expect parents to pour everything they have into making sure their kids end up on the right side of the divide.
Good thing all of it is about to be moot anyway. I am writing this in 2026, after all, and you know what I expect of the near future. I will not belabor the point. Anyone reading this knows what I am referring to. If you don't, well, you have other things to worry about than your kid's MCAT score, and this essay is not the place to acquaint you with them.
God. It sucks to grow up and realize that your parents, despite their flaws, loved you and wanted what was best for you. That the pressure they put you through, or the pain they expected you to endure, was for your own good. Positive expected value, at minimum.
It would be easy to rail at my parents. I have, on bad days, indulged the temptation. I would have done the same in their shoes, however, and I would have hoped my kids forgave me for it later. The forgiveness comes easy now, long after I have passed the stage of needing my parents to shove me out of the nest, and discovered the entirely different qualia of suffering that is charting your own path while holding yourself accountable. I am told that some people find this easy. Good for them. I will settle for prescription stimulants and a regularly-examined internalization of parental expectations, which turn out to be remarkably portable and follow me wherever I go, whether I want them to or not.
I do not much like that fraud, Freud, but this is classic super-ego stuff. Where’s my suspiciously penis-shaped cigar? I could use a smoke after letting all of that out. Or, given the times, at least a good puff on a vape.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. I tried to connect them but I don't think they tie up neatly. So first I think you have way to much of an Asian perspective on Western education and are missing a few key things.
But the issue is Western classrooms and Western pedagogy are are not doing that. You may say it's easy and for sure it is but if teachers are not allowed to use the methods that would produce that and are taught that doing so is wrong in teachers colleges, then it doesn't matter how easy it is. There are a whole bunch of factors that prevent Western teachers from establishing discipline in classrooms so until that is fixed it doesn't matter what teachers do. And prior to the collapse of discipline and tracking and all the things that Freddie DeBoer complains about there was quite a bit of learning going on in Western classrooms. AP courses are almost exactly what you describe for tutoring centers. They are advanced classes which give college credit and have an Exam at the end so there is an objective measure for the teacher.
And on that topic I think you are way off on tutoring centers. As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, they are not selecting for better teachers simply more entrepreneurial ones. The fact is that virtually any teacher except the bottom 10% will be much more effective in a tutoring center environment. Because of smaller class sizes, often even one on one tutoring, and a more motivated student and parent body. Regardless managing the constant shifting schedules of working in a tutoring center is very different then A school. Additionally while school admins are often apathetic bureaucrats training center admins are often just after the bottom dollar and have no particular concern for education
I think this is a function of the yawning chasm of Indian society in general, you could end up a shipbreaker or something equally horrible, and Asian education style in general. America. while the red queen race exists it's much less of an all or nothing proposition. Virtually any above average American can be a doctor. Don't have good grades in high school go to community college. Don't have good college grades do a post bac. Don't have money for school join the military as a medic get healthcare experience and a full ride. Still have only an ok application apply for DO schools instead of MD. There's just so much more flexibility then an all or nothing exam that determines your entire future. I think another aspect is that in general it's much easier to make money in America then India. Kids who are just after the bottom line do an MBA or study computer science or hell start a plumbing business the entrepreneurship and opportunities make it much less of a win lose zero sum propostion.
Isn’t getting into med school in the US actually quite selective and requires a rat race ahead of time?
Of course you don’t have to be a doctor to be successful.
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I have little to say on the topic of the regulatory and cultural failures that prevent stricter discipline within Western classrooms. Which is why I didn't get into that topic. What can I add that someone here can't do better? This is more of a comparative analysis of a very different system, with minimal focus on discipline because classroom discipline isn't what makes that system what it is.
I don't think that selecting for entrepreneurial tendencies is mutually exclusive with selecting for better didactic skills. Quite the opposite. If you're a poor teacher, you are simply not going to be able to pull off the moves I've described.
Note that I went to a good school, whatever that means. High tuitions, teachers with stronger credentials, above average students to be taught. There was a massive gulf in skill and effectiveness between how they taught and what the better class of private tutors (including the ones with larger class sizes) demonstrated.
In fact, the best tutors had bigger classes. I remember cramming in 20 to a room for some of them, the main limit on class sizes beings the size of the room. Many of these private tutors taught from their homes! They physically couldn't fit in more students! 1:1 teaching was never their core concern, at best, they'd be more open to talking to individual students and clearing up idiosyncratic confusions or answering questions.
The ones who specialized in 1:1 tutoring at home (theirs, or the student's) were usually not as talented. If they were, they'd be organizing larger classes.
Even the comparison to AP lessons is somewhat misguided. The syllabus for normal schools and what gets tested on those college entrances exams are the same. The private tutors simply tend to teach it better. They put more effort into making things intuitive, they devote more time to teaching specific tricks. The teachers at even the best normal schools are phoning it in, even if they could technically go to such lengths. They don't, because they know that would be somewhere between pointless and redundant, for the better students, since they're going to private coaching anyway.
Remember, nobody cares about the dull ones. Their failures are on them. They may or may not go to the private lessons, but that's usually just their parents being unwilling to give up on them.
I agree with your later points. After all, I do know that you don't have to go to a top 1% or even top 5% institute in the States to have a good life or make a lot of money. Even a mediocre doctor makes a whole lot more than I do in the UK, let alone India. The competition is nowhere near as stiff to have a decent life in general.
But I think a lot of the reasons that modern American education fails is basically cultural. We don’t have a meritocratic culture. The closest thing we have to a meritocratic culture in America is actually select sports. The system rewards athletes who not only have talent, but those who work hard to develop that talent to high level. That system is the tryouts that athletes go through if they want to play. Nothing beyond the ability to play the game will get you on the team, and nothing but performance will get you on the field or court. Not good enough? You’re off the team.
Compare that to American education. In American education, you don’t have to do much work to “earn” a place. You don’t even get rewarded if you’re better than average. Advanced classes are often under threat because they are selective and not enough “disadvantaged students” get in. The law doesn’t mandate them, and if there’s a budget issue, advanced classes are often first to go. There’s no advantage given to tge child who is good at school, and they quite often end up bored and develop poor work ethics because they’re actually much smarter than the class is designed for, and thus they aren’t challenged, and can get good grades without having to work for them.
Minimal focus on academic achievement and discipline are a predictable result of a system designed primarily to warehouse kids in peer groups regardless of whether or not those kids are academically in the same league, have the same work ethics, or have parents who care about either issue. The parents who are trying to keep their kid chugging along despite the fact that he’s not achieving nor even trying to achieve don’t help creating the environment that rewards work and achievement. And since we elect school boards, those noisy parents mad that their children are going to fail (despite the fact that they don’t study and don’t understand the material) and demanding the standards be lowered.
The other problem is that colleges are not incentivized to be selective. All student loans are guaranteed, no matter what happens to the students after they graduate. This means admitting a kid who cannot read or do math at grade level (which is honestly a low bar) is not a problem. And since millions of relatively low achieving students can now go to college, the need to make sure that the kids graduating from high school are prepared for college or trades is really not there. They’ll graduate, continue their education and not be a problem for the school system they graduate from.
When no part of the system is punished when kids graduate incapable of doing anything productive, they don’t care if those kids achieve anything or learn the habits that make achievement possible. The school doesn’t lose anything if vast swathes of their graduates are economically useless. There are no “games” that the “team” must win to stay relevant. If they graduate an entire class of illiterates, the schools don’t close. They don’t lose anything. They still get to have the same structure. A baseball team that continues to place last will quickly fail.
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