BANGALORE: The emergence of a knowledge-driven society demonstrated that everything can and must change and that the process is a continuous search for better solutions. Indeed, new scientific discoveries and technological innovations have become an integral part of our everyday biography. Objects we had grown accustomed to have been replaced by newer and more efficient products. If anything is truly permanent, it is change itself.

Yet the vast majority of people continue to have a pathological anathema towards change. They harbour feelings of great mistrust because they perceive change as an explicit acknowledgement of failure. Consequently, they are steadfast in their refusal to accept that the failure to shift thinking would, most certainly, lead to their obsolescence.

Research has substantively established an inter-linkage between countries that embrace innovation and thus, change, and economic prosperity. People in such countries think different. They are more adventurous, less risk averse and open to experimenting. Governments and the bureaucracy in emerging or developing economies, on the other hand, tend to suffer from an acute disavowal of all that challenges existing paradigms. New ways of seeing worry them. Consequently, our schools and colleges are unable to respond to the rapidly changing educational needs of a knowledge economy.

This has serious consequences. First, it adversely impacts economic growth because the quality of education is the principal driver of the growth engine. And second because bad education does not lead to employability in a globally competitive environment. This is a profound and not imagined disaster that India credibly faces and will, most certainly, undermine India's aspirations as a global thinker.

So, what is the role of education?

To paraphrase Nietzsche, all human action needs to be based on what we wish to achieve. Education, similarly, must have an end-objective. For students, it is productive and sustained employability. For governments, this translates into contributing to the GDP. If education underachieves in this stated objective, it would be perceived as a failure, since more and more young people would become unemployable.

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