The state of the country’s ed-tech platforms shouldn’t have been this deplorable. It’s time for all of us to get serious about who an entire generation is learning from and who they’re idolizing.
Sometimes the teacher themselves comes to live class and flirts with students, argues, tells tasteless jokes from 2012, and sometimes shares stories about how his girlfriend once sat at TSC and cut his toenails. Some even think of themselves as the Andrew Tate of Dinajpur and upload videos of vulgar abuse on Facebook. All of them are self-proclaimed teachers! All of them have not thousands, but lakhs of students.
Their class durations are four-five hours, even six hours (with a few exceptions), yet the depth of learning is less than the country’s most dying rivers. They are quite successful, however, at using the country’s flimsy education system to hand everyone a GPA-5. Almost all teachers on these platforms are students of the country’s top educational institutions. Instead of pouring their knowledge into students, they tell pointless stories. They extend class durations. Because in the industry, there’s a competition over who can take the longest class. No, I’m not against getting a little break or life advice from a teacher between studies. But when that break descends to the level of tastelessness, a student realizes that their time, effort, intellect, money — everything has been wasted in the wrong place. But like a car, there’s no reverse gear in that student’s life; they can never get back the time that’s gone from their life.
Education is certainly a business — there’s no doubt about that. No objection either. But I object to those ’teachers’ who see business as bigger than education. Most ed-tech platforms in the country have lowered their content quality so much because they know their target audience is still underage, naive. If you put a plate of nutritious food and a plate of delicious food side by side in front of them, they’ll choose the delicious one. That’s why they’ve focused more on making their classes delicious rather than nutritious. They’ve deceived thousands of students by trapping them in a web of words.
Being a good student or having a smartboard doesn’t make one a good teacher. Teaching is a profession of great honor and restraint.
’edTech' Second March, Two Thousand Twenty-Four
(This was written long ago. Keeping it here. This writing is riddled with code-mixing and various spelling errors.)