Where are all the self-directed learners?

We are hiring.

We received over 2,500 job applications. Fewer than 100 filled a form with open-ended questions. About 15 went on to complete a reasonably simple real-world challenge. We are a nation with the cheapest internet and a billion internet users. Where are all the self-directed learners? The eclectic ekalavyas?

(OK, technically the absence of genuinely interested applicants is NOT an indication of drive. However, please note the context: It’s a brutal job market at the entry level in India at the moment. That’s why we are flooded with applications. Candidates either know this, or quickly figure this out. And yet, that does not translate into many giving their application serious and creative thought?

It is a problem they have never been asked to solve for: How to stand apart and demonstrate ability without relying on the usual credentials. It needs creativity and independent thinking and some agency. It is the lack of these that baffles me and makes me search for answers.)

Learning is not just the know-how and knowledge you acquire for doing a job. It is everything else you need to navigate life and also, in this narrow sense, the skills you need to apply for a job, make your case that you are the right candidate, or at least that your candidature deserves attention. It is a very learnable skill. Especially now.

We are 25 years into the MOOC era. We have near unlimited access to the world’s best teachers on YouTube, and yet our education system isn’t producing independent thinkers. How is this possible?

It struck me that our education system is not just “useless” it is actively hurting all learners. We keep devising ways and means to keep them in artificial bubbles where all learning is boiled down to information transfer.

Like wild animals raised too long in captivity, our students have lost crucial survival skills for the real world. Our education system isn’t just failing them — it’s domesticating them into helplessness, training them for a life of being spoon-fed.

We’ve known this for a while now. This wonderful paper diagnosed this problem forty years ago. Knowledge isn’t abstract — it’s tied to context and authentic practice. Yet here we are, actively constructing these walled-off sealed-off classrooms.

Source: Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning)

And then to make it worse, our exam system is fundamentally broken. It’s like forcing Serena Williams and Magnus Carlsen (and Gukesh) to compete in 400m hurdles to figure out if they are fit for their respective sports. We’re STILL measuring the wrong things and rewarding regurgitation over creation. (I jumped through these pointless hoops as an IITian, and what Kevin Zhou says here rings very true)

And that’s how we end up here. Hundreds of millions of graduates with nothing to show for except keyword stuffed resumes and certificates.

This failure is an existential risk in the AI era. We’re training humans to be second-rate computers, and they’ll always lose to first-rate ones. We need transformation from test factories to problem-solving hubs. There are demonstrably better ways — enabling “learning to learn,” and project-based education that produces better results with personalization and less pressure.

And we need to do this NOW. India’s “demographic dividend” becomes a disaster if we can’t turn graduates into problem-solvers rather than instruction-followers.

It needs work at multiple levels and in many ways. We operate a school because we saw this was broken. But to truly empower alternative learning, we have to enable it with an ecosystem of tools.

Intelligence is increasingly “on tap” in the AI world. This is a huge opportunity if used well. It needs a culture of problem solving. One that the right learning ecosystem can create.

That 40 year old paper advocated for “cognitive apprenticeships” — learning by doing real tasks in authentic contexts, with guidance that gradually fades as competence grows. This is finally possible now with the right use of AI tools.

Here’s one example of what we are doing. We’re building AI copilots that can (eventually) create these “cognitive apprenticeships” and scaffoldings on the fly.

BUT that is not enough. We need many, many more initiatives. We need an open-source ecosystem that can become a self-enlarging sphere.

Every frustration in India is an opportunity waiting to be seized. And converting into a learning challenge! Instead of artificial and pointless problems we are made to solve. My brother-in-law spends 80 minutes traveling 5km in Mumbai — a distance he could walk faster! That’s maddening — but it’s also a problem that can be solved with creativity, collaboration, and hustle. (Apathetic bureaucracy, a big part of this mess, is a solvable problem too) The intelligence required you increasingly get for cheap (worth taking a look at this!).

We have an immensely urgent task on our hands: build learning tools that bridge classroom knowledge to real-world applications — tools that untrain learned helplessness and enable independent thinking rather than dependence.

Want to transform education and employment? Come work with us or contribute to building the best open-source meaningful learning ecosystem.

Or find/catalyze one of your own. The future of work depends on us getting this right.

And yes, we are still hiring!