I recently stumbled upon a nugget of educational absurdity so profound that it left me momentarily speechless. And for someone who can hold forth on mediaeval (yes, that’s how it is spelt in British, and hence, Indian English) military logistics or 1990s Bollywood trivia with equal enthusiasm, that is saying something.
It turns out that one of Pune’s most reputed schools (I shall, with great restraint, not name it) introduces the concept of email to its students in the 7th grade. And by “introduces,” I mean they make the poor child write a note on paper, just like a letter we used to write back in the 1980s, stripped of all context, practicality, or technological scaffolding, and ask them to treat it with the same reverence as they might a Sanskrit shloka or the Preamble to the Constitution. The email is not typed. Not explored through an actual device. Not embedded in the real-world ecosystem of digital communication. It is written, by hand, on a sheet of paper. They might as well be chiselling it onto stone.
These children have no idea what a subject line is for. They do not know how to attach a file. Or what CC or BCC does. Or how to forward an email. Or what the infernal ‘Reply All’ button can unleash if wielded carelessly. No interface is ever opened. No inbox ever explored. It’s like teaching someone how to swim by showing them a painting of a pool.
And then, the school, in its infinite wisdom, not stopping at this performative parody of tech literacy, asks for, wait for it, this exact ’email’ to be reproduced in the examination under the pretext of, once again, wait for it, ‘creative writing’! Not another subject. Not another body. Not another recipient. Not another word. Just what is given in class. Word for word. The email taught in class isn’t to be adapted, modelled, or considered a template. It is THE email. Period. No guidance is offered on what constitutes tone, structure, appropriateness, or etiquette. The learning outcome, if one can call it that, is not about writing an email. It is about vomiting a pre-approved string of English words onto ruled paper under exam pressure.
I can’t even begin to start to commence to think about what I feel about this, as someone who considers himself the child of the net because I turned 18 in 1990, the same year as the Internet as we know it today ‘came of age’ as W3C deployed the World Wide Web on the Internet (here’s the page, in case you are interested). I mean, how?
It gets worse. Because when this was mentioned to some parents within the school, they weren’t even mildly surprised. A few even said it was ‘an interesting point’. Not one of them thought it important enough to act on. The general mood was, “Oh yes, that’s been happening for a while. Isn’t it good that the children can score marks in a scoring subject? And anyway, it’s not like email is that critical, right?” I was stunned. If this is the attitude, then everything is up in the air. I don’t even know what to say.
And as if this curricular comedy needed a punchline, the very same email is taught again in the 8th grade. The same names. Same addresses. Same subject line. Same body. Same indented paragraphs. Same everything. It even ends with ‘Yours faithfully’ (something that we, all the way back in the 1980s, were taught was a relic of our colonial past and must be discarded in all forms of sign-offs). One might even suspect that the school has only one email in its archive since its formation two centuries ago, and is determined to wring every last drop of pedagogical potential from it. Now, let me pause here. I need to breathe!
You see, what gets my goat is that this is not some back-of-beyond establishment scraping by with four ceiling fans and a chalkboard held together with hope, duct tape, and one Masterji who teaches five classes in one single room in the hinterland. This is arguably the most premium school in Pune. A school whose alumni populate Ivy Leagues and TEDx stages. Whose parents, many of them educated, accomplished, and apparently unaware, pay for the illusion of 21st-century readiness.
And yet, here we are. Teaching email like it’s 1831 and Charles Babbage has just made the first drawings of the Difference Engine.
What hope, then, for the others?
I am not claiming that all schools are like this. I know there are educators fighting the good fight, often with fewer resources but far greater imagination. But if this is the benchmark at the top, it chills me to imagine what the middle and bottom look like.
We often ask why our graduates are unemployable. Why they freeze in interviews. Why they don’t know how to write a basic work mail, file a report, or craft a proposal. Why we have engineers who can’t code, or indeed even make a decent flowchart? MBAs who can’t write a cover letter. Professionals who prefer WhatsApp voice notes over structured communication.
Well, here’s your answer. We never taught them how. We taught them to obey, memorise, and regurgitate. We taught them to stay within lines drawn decades ago. And now, as they stare into a world brimming with uncertainty, technology, and complexity, we have left them with nothing but a well-memorised, handwritten email addressed to nobody.
Indeed, we handed them a world of cloud computing, driverless cars, and AI, and armed them with a fountain pen. Like bringing a sword to a gunfight.
A quick guide to what to bring…
