Customised classes for the elite

What significant feature separates at least some car models made by Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Bugatti, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Koenigsegg from those made by Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, Peugeot, Hyundai, Kia, Audi, BMW, and many others? The former are, in some part at least, handmade and even bespoke, making them expensive luxury goods in stark contrast to the latter, which are mass-produced and can be had by just about anyone. 

Greater automation enables the mass production of goods to achieve greater efficiencies and allows pricing them within the purchasing power of more consumers. However, that also makes those goods less exclusive and lacking in customisation. Thus, the old way of making and doing things becomes an exclusive niche for those who can afford the cost of inefficiency for the artisanal personalisation and customisation it allows. For the cost-conscious, there are the efficiently mass-produced, cookie-cutter alternatives.

This has been the fate of many goods. In every category – clothing, textiles, shoes, bags, watches, jewellery, kitchen and tableware, food, beverages, furniture, artwork, decor, musical instruments, etc – in each one can find options ranging from factory-made vs artisan-made.

Production of goods is not the only sector that has seen this evolution. Services have also long been on a very similar trajectory. In healthcare, patients in large hospitals receive standardised medical services where patients follow systematic procedures vs. those using boutique or concierge medicine offering personalised care plans, and extended consultations with 24x7 access to physicians.

In travel and tourism, group tours and package holidays with fixed itineraries vs. bespoke trips with private tours by local experts and exclusive experiences like private island stays. In home design and architecture, mass-produced, prefabricated house designs and modular construction vs. custom architectural designs, and artisanal interiors and landscaping services. In transportation, public transit, and ridesharing vs private chauffeurs, custom car services, and private jets/yachts. The list goes on in fashion and styling, technology, childcare, events, entertainment, fitness, wellness, dining, etc.

There is little reason to believe that education, another service sector, should escape this trend. According to a 2022 report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 1820, the global literacy rate was only 12 per cent. Since then, it has risen to 87 per cent and has reached as high as 99 per cent in the developed world. Other sources put the literacy rate in the pre-partition India of 1901 at 5.4 per cent.

The WEF puts the literacy rate of Pakistan and India today at approximately 59 and 75 per cent, respectively. The point I am trying to make is that, on the scale of human history, universal literacy is a relatively recent goal and, despite local differences and lagging behind the developed world, the countries of South Asia have come a long way in the past 12 decades.

Today, the world’s population stands at an all-time high of eight billion with a record literacy rate (that continues to rise as lagging countries continue to catch up) implying a record number of children attending a record number of schools that require a record number of teachers. But many countries, especially ones that are more resource-constrained and even some that are not, are finding it challenging to build enough schools and attract or retain enough of their best and brightest to the teaching profession.

School education, the way it exists today, one teacher for a classroom of thirty-ish students, has essentially remained unchanged for over a century. With many countries unable to find enough qualified teachers to deliver quality education or unable to attract the level of talent they seek (for any number of reasons), school education seems ripe for a change (I cringe to use the way overused word ‘disruption’).

Let me outline the scale of the challenge here at home: The existing education workforce, in both public and private) institutions, comprises 2,573,993 workers. Around 39 per cent of them work at public institutions while the remaining 61 per cent work in private institutions. Despite these huge numbers, coverage in many existing institutions remains far below what is required. For example, 23 per cent ( around 26,000) of primary schools are staffed by a single teacher and 24 per cent ( around 27,000) have two teachers.

Together, this army of workers delivers education that can be described as ranging from adequate to in-name-only to approximately 30 million students in the public sector and another 26 million in the private sector, while still leaving another 26 million out of school. If I had to make a rough estimate, we would need to double this workforce to cover shortages in existing schools and have enough to serve all children who are not in schools but ought to be.

If these numbers scare you, they should. They scare me. Unless this country grows much more prosperous than it is now and then chooses to use its good fortune to address the education challenge it faces, I cannot imagine how we will ever be able to realise the dream (because that is what it is right now) of universal education.

The delivery of education is crying out for a step-change in efficiency to aid the tens of millions of children currently unserved or underserved by existing school systems. I do not pretend to know what that will look like. Much of the ed-tech startup sector is searching for the answer to this question.

Over ten years ago, the introduction of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms, interactive books, inexpensive computers, smartphones, tablets, and high-speed mobile internet access led many to predict the end of traditional school and university education. That prediction has yet to come to pass. The latest technology wave that has the ed-tech sector excited (not without reason) are advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal Generative AI (GenAI) models – models that input / output not only text but can ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘speak’.

Whether it is these technologies or others that are yet to emerge, sooner or later if the delivery of quality education services (emphasis on ‘quality’) continues on its trajectory of rising costs, we may see its automation and (further) standardisation. The higher-cost mode of delivering education by a qualified, motivated, and dynamic human teacher to small groups of students may then become another luxury within the reach of fewer and fewer people.

We may already be seeing some of that future today. In his 2024 book ‘The Anxious Generation’, Jonathan Haidt talks about, among other things, how many senior leaders of Silicon Valley tech companies in the Bay area opt to send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, an expensive private school that does not allow the use of technology until students get into their early teenage years. Waldorf schools originate from Germany and seek to develop students’ “intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity”.

Counter to the global trend of standardisation of school education, assessments in Waldorf schools are qualitative where teachers are given wide “autonomy over curriculum contents and teaching methods”. Of all the teachers in all the schools of the world, how many would know how to use such freedom in service of better student learning outcomes? In many places, standardisation and strict oversight become the means for under-resourced school systems to deliver a minimum viable education. In such circumstances, in time, technology might enable the delivery of good-enough, basic education to those who have access to none today or even bring an improvement over what some are receiving today.

You have to ask yourself: if heavily technology-augmented learning such as might be delivered by multi-modal GenAI models as was demonstrated a few months ago is so great, why would places like Waldorf schools still exist? Moreover, why would the people developing this technology continue to stick with the more traditional, more expensive largely technology-free schools?

When it is done well, the old way, the more expensive, the more inefficient way might still be the superior solution. Eventually, everyone else might have to make do with what’s scalable, what’s efficient, what’s good enough.

The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.