Not Everyone Can Teach Themselves, And That's the Whole Point

Let's talk about education, shall we? I was reading a post on LinkedIn where one person was saying that colleges in India are so bad: the teaching is the worst, people are still writing code on paper, teachers aren't skilled themselves, and that this is exactly why students can't get employed. The other person said, no, it's on the students to figure it out themselves. If they don't find the gaps and fix them on their own, using the internet, upskilling properly, then that's on them.

On the surface, both arguments sound reasonable, don't they? But I lean toward the first one, and I have a reason for it. I'll use my own privilege to counter the second argument.

Here's the thing: I'm blessed to come from a financially well-off family, and I got a better education than most of the population. I was never in a fancy school or college, just a good-enough one, where the job got done in a good-enough way. The teachers weren't the best, but they were better than most. And I got fortunate; my school, my engineering college, and my master's all had some of the most passionate teachers I could've asked for. If they didn't know something, they'd put in 110% to make sure the concept landed anyway. But that's just luck. That's not the case everywhere.

By the time I got to engineering, I already knew software was my thing, even though I ended up studying electronics. It was my own knowledge and talent that let me coast through it. My dad had a credit card, and I'd use it to buy a truckload of courses on Udemy; that curiosity, that hunger for knowledge, was internal. And having good internet at home, having access to a credit card, having used computers since I was practically born. And these are privileges even today. By the time I reached engineering, I'd already explored most of what there was to explore, good and bad. Again, that's privilege. I already knew what to search for, how to search, how to explore, how to pull the resources I needed off the internet effectively.

So a few things line up here: privilege, resources, talent, and drive. Sadly, very few people have all four at once. And that curiosity mindset just isn't there for most people, not because they don't want it, but because most students in India are in survival mode. They don't have the time or the resources for curiosity. Their whole motive is to get to a point where they can start earning and put food on the table, as fast as possible.

But then there's another layer. Say you take survival out of the equation; the family and circumstances aren't a concern. What then? In those cases, the student might still lack the curiosity, or the talent, or simply the intelligence to go gather the resources needed to upskill.

I was talking to my best friend, who runs a music production academy, and I asked him: in this day and age, when everything's free on YouTube, why can't people just watch the tutorials and learn? He told me a story. He'd been running bootcamps for two years, small, expensive ones, where each student gets real one-on-one time with the teacher. He said very few people actually "get it." There was this one guy, a grown man, not some kid, that he sat with and explained everything to, and the guy asked a ton of questions, good questions, the kind that made my friend think he was really understanding the material. So he gave him an assignment, thirty minutes, right there in the room. My friend said the guy just sat there the whole time, doing nothing. Didn't even reach out for help, so it wasn't that he was stuck. He was just dumb enough. And my friend said this wasn't a one-off; there are plenty of students like that in every batch. I asked him, well, why don't they at least mess around and fail a bunch, just to learn the menus, the functions, what each knob does? But that's exactly it: the inherent curiosity isn't there. These students need to be guided through every single step. You can't expect them to go to YouTube and figure it out alone unless someone's holding their hand through it.

Now, I know what that sounds like, like I've just agreed with the second LinkedIn argument, that it really does come down to the individual after all. But here's the distinction: my friend's "he just didn't get it" students are the minority. They're the small slice of people who won't learn it no matter what you put in front of them, and no system is built to fix that slice; nothing is. What a college is actually responsible for is the majority: the people who would absolutely get it, the same way I did, if someone taught them the way my teachers taught me. Blaming the system for the minority is unfair. Letting the system off the hook for the majority is exactly what's happening in India right now.

And that's the core of it: students don't upskill themselves simply because they lack the curiosity, the resourcefulness, to go get what they want on their own. That's exactly where colleges are supposed to step in, as the place where these students get that handholding and get made ready to face the corporate world. The whole point of an education system is to provide this as the default. A student shouldn't have to go do it themselves; there's no harm if they do, but it shouldn't be the baseline expectation. And that's exactly where Indian colleges fail.

When I was in the UK, the university had such incredible resources that it left me wondering: if I'd had access to something like that during my engineering days, I could've been a genuinely great researcher. I didn't have to learn anything beyond what the university taught me during my master's. That's the point: getting a good education should be the default, not something you have to hustle for on the side.

This is exactly what I want to make my mission: teaching underprivileged students, upskilling them to a point where they're genuinely confident walking into the corporate world. Not because they've picked up a few hacky tricks, but because they've built real technical ability and a real sense of curiosity about the subject, good enough that they're ready to tackle anything. Now, we can't do much for someone who's just not going to get it. But we can absolutely lift the students who simply never had access to the resources, or never had someone teach them with any real passion, or never had anyone spark that curiosity in them in the first place.

Colleges failing to teach the subject itself is one problem. But there's a second, more cynical failure that happens even after you're out of the classroom: no one tells you what the job actually looks like once you get there. When I was learning data science, I interviewed a lot of people, asking what their day-to-day job actually looked like. Almost no one could describe it. No one really told me either, and I think that's a big part of the problem. A lot of people gatekeep this stuff because sometimes they're faking it themselves, not actually doing much, and they feel threatened by the idea of someone else rising to the top. That's the low-level thinking that keeps happening, and it's one more reason the education system stays broken.

So where does that leave the LinkedIn debate? Both sides are half right, but only one of them gets to write policy for an entire education system. Individual drive matters, sure, but it can't be the assumption a college builds itself around. Privilege, good teachers, and honest access to what a job actually requires shouldn't be the exception that a lucky few stumble into; they should be what a college is for. Fix that, and you don't need everyone to be self-taught. You just need everyone to get a fair shot at being taught well.