23. Ed-Tech Gap — Pilots, not Grand Planning

There is an age-old debate of what’s better: the German system of planning everything before doing anything, or the American system of doing it first and then figuring out how to do it well.

Applied to the field of education in India, I feel like the cop-out answer of “both are required” is right, but if I absolutely had to choose one, I’d choose the American system. Just try something on a small scale, find ways of improving it in the same small scale, then find ways of scaling it up. I think the mindset of the government needs to change from “let’s build a grand plan” to “let’s encourage innovation and help entrepreneurs scale it up”.

Speaking simply, the great resource that governments have is the ability to tax people. If they find that a private initiative is working very well, they can just subsidize that initiative using taxpayer money (with a high probability of success) instead of spending that taxpayer money on R&D and planning (with low probability of success).

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Chronicle of a life spent figuring out what life is about.