Education as Drip irrigation

I am part of a drawing group that meets every Sunday to draw our city. We’ve been doing this for a decade and a half now, and I have learned to always carry an extra sketchbook and additional drawing material with me during these sessions. This is because there is almost always a curious child who ambles over to peek into our sketchbooks.

Seeing full-grown adults drawing out in public must be an unbelievable sight for children, especially the little ones. Drawing is considered a hobby in Indian society, something that children dabble with and eventually grow out of. I love the look of astonishment on their faces when they realize that there are adults who take drawing seriously enough to draw, out in public.

Over time, this has become a personal mission of sorts. Inspire children to see drawing as a natural way of thinking. One child at a time.

In our experiments at Nabachika, I have executed projects on teaching critical thinking through visual art and craft, and I feel like there is a breaking point when we attempt to do this at scale. Our Playjam program, for instance, was aimed at creating parental bonds in children over shared art projects. We never worked with groups of over 20. The results were great.

On the other hand, things did not go as expected when I tried this at a much larger scale.

When I received an invitation from Byjus, an Indian Edtech company, to build a similar product for them, I jumped at the chance simply because I could reach more people with these ideas. At the time, the company claimed a user base of over 150 million students, so you can see why this interested me. As I said, things did not go as expected.

We hit a wall. There are difficulties when scaling educational ideas, moving from small groups to massive ones, the least of which is educator autonomy on pedagogic decisions. At this scale, there are no separation of concerns between curriculum development, teaching, logistics, sales and marketing. There is also a very imbalanced power dynamic among the various groups that build services like this. I observed for instance that educators, have no power at all, which means that people who are in charge of the P&L, Sales, Operations and Project Management actually change pedagogical methods to suit their needs. I witnessed people with a business mandate, sitting in on Lesson Plan reviews, revising the curriculum so it can better fit a sales pitch or a cost-trimming exercise.

Towards the end, I did not even recognize the product that my team had originally built.

I think this is a natural phenomenon, and I’m not sure if workarounds exist for situations like this. Educational startups, especially those who have accepted venture funds, are under tremendous pressure to show growth, which means that almost all aspects of education are fair game for growth hacks. A lot of times, these hacks verge on the unethical (allegedly, of course) and sometimes spill over into a lot worse, much of this has been documented in the public domain.

I’m beginning to think that scale in Education may only work with certain types of subjects. Perhaps subjects like Math are more convenient to teach in Edtech style setups, given the algorithmic ways of numerical thinking. Subjects such as Art and Design, on the other hand, require a lot of hands on experimentation which raises the cost of teacher training, student-work evaluation, educational infrastructure and so on. I have not yet written down a decisive set of factors for this. Things are still a bit vague, but I do reflect on my experiences from time to time.

For now, I simply carry an extra sketchbook for curious children who want to draw with my group. Someday, though, I’d like to attempt building at scale again, this time accounting for the internal power dynamic and for external market realities I encountered in my last round.