we never learned to think, or to be seen

this is the sixth piece in a series about how india keeps solving the wrong problem.

so far: roads, bikers, tax, the room a woman scans, the air we breathe. this one is closer to home, because i work in tech and design, and i watch it happen to people i know.

i keep seeing two kinds of people.

one did everything school asked. perfect attendance. every assignment in on time. the mandatory summer camp, the winter camp, the certificate. genuinely capable. and they can’t get hired.

the other spent less time on any of that, but they’re visible. they network. they talk. they’re a marketing lead for a big name in my field today.

it’s easy to be bitter about the second person. i’ve been. but that’s the wrong read.

neither of them was taught what actually mattered. one was rewarded for a skill school treats as cheating. the other was punished for trusting the rules.

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what school actually measured

step back and look at what our education system optimises for.

attendance. assignments. internal marks. mandatory camps. a degree at the end. compliance, basically. did you show up, did you submit, did you tick the boxes.

now look at what that compliance buys you in the real world.

the economic survey of 2024-25 found that only about 8% of indian graduates hold a job that actually matches their qualification. by one widely used industry index, fewer than half of graduates are considered employable at all, and that number has been slipping, not rising.

here’s the one that should stop us. graduate unemployment in india was around 29% in 2022, far higher than the unemployment rate for people who never finished school. the more you studied, the harder it got to find work.

read that again. we built a fifteen-year machine, and at the end of it the people who completed it most obediently are often the least able to find a place.

a system that produces that result isn’t underperforming. it’s measuring the wrong thing.

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the two things it never taught

if attendance and assignments aren’t what the world pays for, what is?

i think it comes down to two things, and school taught neither.

the first is how to think. not facts. reasoning. how to frame a problem, sit in ambiguity, question an assumption, decide what’s worth doing. the closest thing to this is philosophy and first-principles thinking, and we treat those as luxuries, or leave them out entirely.

the second is how to be seen. communication, writing, selling an idea, being visible. we don’t just skip this, we actively frame it as a distraction from “real” study. then we act surprised when the visible person wins.

employer assessments back this up bluntly. the weakest skill among indian graduates, year after year, isn’t technical. it’s creativity, and the soft, non-technical skills around it. we are strong at the thing machines now do, and weak at the thing only humans do.

look at my own field. a developer today is mostly a translator. you take a concept, turn it into an idea, turn the idea into a working system, increasingly with a machine writing the boilerplate beside you. that’s the job.

so why does so much of our computing education still front-load things like assembly language onto eighteen-year-olds who will, realistically, almost never write at that level? i’m not against fundamentals. i’m against teaching them in an order, and with a weight, that has nothing to do with how the work actually happens. we teach the machine’s layer and skip the human one.

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it’s the same gap in every professional course

this isn’t just engineering. walk into the other big professional streams and you find the same hole.

in design, where i spend a lot of time, we still teach tools and aesthetics. but where is the serious teaching of accessibility, so the thing you build works for people who aren’t you? of usability, so it’s actually understandable? of lovability, so people want to use it? of the behavioural psychology underneath every good interface? these aren’t electives. they’re the job. and they’re barely in the room.

in medicine, we produce graduates who can recite pathways but get thin real clinical exposure, and we somehow never teach them to keep themselves, or their patients, actually healthy. we treat disease and skip wellness.

in law, in management, pick your field, the pattern repeats. heavy on theory you can test, light on the judgment you can’t.

the national education policy of 2020 actually names a lot of this. it talks about critical thinking, creativity, breadth across subjects. on paper it’s good. but reviews of how it’s landing keep finding the same thing, slow rollout, undertrained faculty, gaps in funding and infrastructure. the policy named the problem, and then the delivery lagged. if that sounds familiar, it’s the same gap i’ve written about in every piece of this series.

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the wrong problem, in a classroom

here’s where it connects.

we decided the problem was measuring effort. so we built an enormous apparatus to measure it. attendance registers, assignment deadlines, internal marks, mandatory camps. all of it tracking how compliant you were.

but compliance was never the thing. thinking and being seen were the things. and those are exactly what we don’t teach and can’t easily grade.

so we optimised the measurable wrong thing and ignored the unmeasurable right ones.

and the cost lands, as it always does in this series, on the individual who trusted the system. the diligent student who did everything asked and finds the market doesn’t care. they weren’t lazy. they were loyal to a set of rules that quietly stopped mattering.

the visible person didn’t cheat either. they just happened to have the one skill the system never rewarded and life does. we should be teaching that skill to everyone, not resenting the few who picked it up on their own.

we keep grading how well students follow the system, when the whole game is learning to think for yourself and to make that thinking seen.

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what i try to do as a mentor

i mentor students now, and this is most of what i actually do.

i don’t help them with assignments. i help them with the two things school skipped. i help them think. what problem are you really trying to solve, what do you actually believe, what’s worth your time. and i help them be seen. write the post, ship the project in public, say the thing out loud, stop hiding behind another certificate.

that’s it. not because i’m against degrees. but because the degree was only ever supposed to be the floor, and we’ve been treating it as the whole building.

if you came out of the system feeling capable but unseen, or busy but unprepared, it probably wasn’t you. you were optimised for the wrong target by people who meant well.

if you teach, or hire, or mentor, the most useful thing you can do is reward thinking and visibility early, in small ways, for everyone, instead of waiting for the market to do it unevenly and late.

next, i want to write the hardest one for me personally. healthcare, and what it costs you when the system only works if you know someone.