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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 considered bringing up the issue of the caste system and why it triggers such a visceral resction in a lot of Westerners in last week's thread on Indian immigration but I felt it might come across as uncharitable or needlessly antagonistic. But now that the topic has come up again I might as well say my peice.
All the talk of Indian cultural and genetic diversity is a distraction from the root issue that there are really only two sorts of immigrants from the subcontinent.
The first sort is people like yourself and other users here who see the caste system as simply "natural" and "correct". (Note that I am purposefully side-stepping the question of whether it is "good"). Thier reasons for leaving the subcontinent and coming to the West are ultimately opportunitistic, they're chasing a better job or a better school that they can leverage to raise thier status amongst thier peers back home.
The second sort are the ones who leave the subcontinent explicitly to escape the system.
Ive known plenty of both and have always found the latter far more amenable to work with than the former because as a rule they work harder and are far more grateful for the opportunities presented to them.
Americans love an Apu. What they hate is having thier good will exploited by people who not only do not share thier values, but who actively look down thier noses at those values and the people who hold them.
To be very brief: the fuck?
No, seriously, I invite you to find any evidence of me arguing that the caste system is "natural" and "correct". Please. Take all the time you need.
I am incredibly impressed by the sheer chutzpah on display here. Apparently I've moved to the UK, and want to move to the States to "raise thier status amongst thier peers back home"? That's news to me. I should take notes.
Anyone who knows me would find your accusations laughable. Anyone who doesn't know me should at least check before saying something this remarkably, fractally incorrect.
It's astounding that you can read that whole-ass essay and decide that this isn't a working description of me. I really want to know the chain of logic that lead you to that conclusion.
To be painfully specific:
It would be too much to hope for an apology from you, so I'll settle for receipts.
Like i said, i initially held my tongue because i understood how my statement could be read as uncharitable or antagonistic. It was not my intention to offend you, and if did i apologize.
That said, can you see how someone might come away from the your post with the impression that you believe that demographics determine individual outcomes more than quality of schooling? If so, do you understand how such a claim is going to be read by a lot of Americans?
That is an utter non-apology after serious, unfounded accusations.
"It was not my intention to offend you, and if did i apologize." Your intent is not my primary concern. The factuality (or lack thereof) of what you said about me is. An acknowledgement that your accusations are baseless would be an improvement. If you wish to persist in that mischaracterization, then provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory it is. In this case, a simple search on the index for this site should suffice.
I am not sure what linking to an ancient press release from GW Bush is supposed to help with. It's a 2006 address about Republican outreach to African American voters, the Voting Rights Act, HBCU funding, and the legacy of slavery. It does not mention Indian immigrants, the caste system, or any framework for distinguishing "good" from "opportunistic" immigrants.
It certainly doesn't help with misrepresenting me as having made claims I have literally never made, and then not walking them back.
Look around, my man. Do you see any of the other Americans in this forum full of Americans accusing me of endorsing the Indian caste system? No? Not surprising at all.
You have the gall to make a clear Motte-and-Bailey argument on the Motte? You didn't "intend" to be offensive, but 'oh, some readers might come away with that impression'. I wasn't born yesterday.
Would you agree with the statement that demographic factors determine individual outcomes more than quality of schooling?
If so, i would argue that my accusations are far from baseless.
Please recall that i very purposefully side stepped the question of whether the caste system was "good", to focus on whether it was a "correct" or "natural" way to organize society. I never claimed you liked or "endorsed" it. Please also recall that in that in the line I quoted you implied that the US also has a caste system and that it is simply less legible.
The link was to George Bush's famous speech about "the bigotry of low expectations", which is the first thing that is going to come to a lot of Americans' minds if when they hear someone trying to argue that some demographics are just bad at stuff.
You've offered three rationales for the original accusations in three consecutive replies. First they stood on their own. When I asked for evidence, none came. Then it became "some readers might come away with that impression," which is the motte-and-bailey I already called you on. Now: if I agree to a proposition you've just invented, the accusations were "far from baseless."
This is what bad faith looks like when it's trying oh-so-hard to stay within the realm of what won't be moderated on this forum. Impressive work, law school must have helped.
Pick a position. Defend it properly. Or retract. Don't waste my time by manufacturing new justifications until one of them sticks.
The "demographic factors determine individual outcomes" question is empirical, and the real answer is "it depends." For caste-correlated outcomes in India specifically, I think genetics likely plays some role. I said so openly upthread. That is a descriptive claim about how the world is. Endorsing caste as "natural" and "correct" is a prescriptive claim about how the world should be. These are not the same thing and you're not getting away with laundering one into the other through sleight of hand.
You now want credit for "very purposefully side stepping" whether caste is good, in order to focus on whether it's "correct" or "natural." Please examine what you've just said. "Correct" is straightforwardly normative. "Natural," deployed in defense of a social arrangement under attack, is also normative. You picked loaded words, fired them at me, and are now claiming a neutral reading was always available. Nope.
You're claiming I implied "the US also has a caste system." That paragraph is about American pre-med admissions and the difference between rank-ordered exam grinds and "holistic" admissions weighted with extracurriculars. The "it" in "more legible and crueler about it" refers to the selection function of education, which I had just spent several thousand words describing. Reading "caste" into a sentence about MCAT prep is a failure of your reading comprehension. It does even worse as an argument.
You found a phrase that sounded adjacent to something you wanted to say, linked it without explanation, and are now reverse-engineering a rationale rather than concede the link wasn't doing what you needed it to.
Yeah. Right. Being against Indian affirmative action or the US focus on "holistic" admission criteria is "the soft bigotry of low expectations". Sorry, I'd say it's the opposite. Eschewing explicit AA or putting primacy on standardized testing, without lowering the bar for certain demographics? That is called having the same expectations of everyone. Words have meanings, whether you like them or not.
Now, I specify (with rapidly diminishing patience): you made specific claims about my views and my motivations. That I see caste as "natural" and "correct." That my emigration is opportunistic. That I am chasing status among peers back home. Three replies in, you have produced zero quotes from me supporting any of these and have shifted the goalposts twice without retracting an inch. Substantiate the claims with what I actually wrote, or withdraw them. I am not here to argue whichever question you'd prefer to be answering instead.
I am not offering you different rationales I am trying to walk you through a chain of reasoning step by step, link by link.
When taken together, your comments in @Gaashk's thread on Freddie DeBoer and your top level post here appear to be arguing that what school you go to and how well you do in it doesn't really matter, and that instead we (as society) should pay more attention to demographic factors.
The obvious question that comes to mind is "Why pay attention to demographic factors at all?" the obvious answer that comes to mind is "As a means of predicting (and thus potentially manipulate) individual outcomes".
Now If "demographic factors determine individual outcomes" And "we want to predict (or potentially manipulate) individual outcomes" Than "It is rational to discriminate on the basis of such factors".
If "It is rational to discriminate on the basis of demographic factors" Than We have just established the "correctness" of instituting some sort of demographic caste system from first principles.
Again, please note that at no point have I made any statement regarding whether said system is "Good" "Moral" "Just" or even "Desirable". "Correct" is not a normative word, it is a descriptive one. If I wanted to make a normative statement I would not be using words like "Correct" and "Incorrect" I would be using words like "Right" and "Wrong".
Is there a step in the above chain of logic that you feel is in error? If so, which step?
Meanwhile "The Bigotry of Low Expectations" isn't something that I just pulled out of a hat. It's been a recurring GoP talking point for over a decade. It is most commonly deployed in opposition to Affirmative Action, and declining educational standards. The "bigotry" in question being the unstated assumption that some demographics simply can not compete on a level playing field. Ask @FCfromSSC if you don't believe me.
Blue Team: Students today just don't have the attention spans to read the classics, we need to revise our expectations.
Red Team: Students today would be able to read the classics just fine if you actually tried teaching them to read.
You made specific factual claims about my views and motivations across four replies now. You have produced no quotes from me supporting any of them. The syllogism you've finally offered, even if it worked, would not establish that I "see caste as natural and correct," that my emigration is "opportunistic," or that I'm "chasing status among peers back home." Those were the accusations. They remain unsubstantiated.
Even granting some form of statistical discrimination as efficient on some specific measure, a caste system is not just any discrimination.
Why? Because it's hereditary, hierarchical, totalizing across social, economic, marital, and religious domains, and self-perpetuating across generations independent of individual merit. That is literally what caste means.
You're skipped roughly the entire content of what makes a caste system a caste system, and now you're calling the missing steps "from first principles." Perhaps you'd like to examine my debate with @2rafa where I advocate for meritocracy as pure as can be feasible? I'd like to see you reconcile that with accusations of casteism. Group differences, even if real, require additional values being injected to decide what to do about them. Balanced standardized testing would be the strongest form of Bayesian evidence against any accusations of inferiority wrt background. I'm all for it.
"Correct" not being normative? Pure sophistry, poor sophistry. Calling a social arrangement "correct" is necessarily a judgment that it is a proper way to organize society. There is no descriptive sense in which a social system itself can be "correct" or "incorrect." You can describe whether it exists, whether it produces certain outcomes, whether participants endorse it. The moment you call the system itself "correct," you have endorsed it as proper. And worse? This isn't just something you're doing yourself, it's something you've accused me of doing.
I'm out. I've asked for receipts multiple times. You've produced none, and have instead built impressively rickety scaffolding around the original claims while refusing to retract a word of them. Anyone reading this thread can decide for themselves what that pattern indicates. I have an exam to study for.
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