As the contemporary world is moving towards a neo-liberal economy, the market is the axis on which human lives revolve. In such an economy there is more privatization, less government intervention and individuals are entrepreneurs. Education is considered a private good determined by market forces, where skill development will be aligned to enable markets to flourish. The influence of a neoliberalist economy on the education sector depends on the country's context; and the capacity of teachers, policymakers, and communities to ensure in making education universally available as a ‘public good’.
In India, education is defined as a public good, universally accessible and socially transformative catering to the needs of all, especially the poor and marginalized sections of society. However, with the rising inequalities in the country, elite schools cater to the rich and the wealthy whereas the poor are left with no access to schools or access to less-resourced schools. This stratification becomes even more explicit with the interplay of gender discriminatory practices where poor families tend to send their male children to relatively well-resourced private schools leaving behind their female children. With the commercialization of the education sector, education is a market good, widening the disparities and distortions, which is already existing in the country. Despite visionary enactments and policies like the Right to Education Act and the National Education Policy respectively, our country is still navigating through the challenges of access, quality, equity, and equality in school education. Though we have an age-appropriate curriculum in the country, the heterogeneity of students and the learning journeys varies in each classroom. Teacher education is an area that demands investment to encourage the imparting of 21st-century skills to students. Teachers will have to see their role beyond completing the syllabus, ensuring textbook contents are memorized by students and reproduced in written examinations.
With the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in schools, the elite schools have SMART classes just like any other school infrastructure. In the less-resourced schools either ICT is not available or not readily accessible. However, with the play of market forces, most of the schools have designed ICT programs in schools where teachers and students are passive users who readily consume programs designed and implemented for the school system. ICT is not only outsourced for procurement, installation, and maintenance to private companies, but also for its curriculum and teaching leaving ICT activities nonaligned to the pedagogy in the school. The grave concern of ICT-enabled education is the mushrooming of private sector platforms which might monopolise or oligopolise the provision of Ed-Tech Services. It can lead to private and profit-oriented control of educational processes thereby leading to deskilling of teachers and exploitation of the poor and illiterate parents. While school education is beating such complex realities, it is critical to unpack AI in school education so that the neoliberal economy does not drive the education sector to an AI-enabled market.
AI models should not consider teachers as mere last-mile users, but encourage their participation in designing and implementation of AI products and services, like the BOOT model. Though many states in India implemented this model, it failed to consider the teacher preparedness or school readiness. The process begins with computer installations in the school and teaching of computers by a resource person of the vendor. Gurumurthy Kasinathan cites that Kerala has moved beyond this model with a participatory approach where teachers led the integration of ICT in schools. The Kerala model of integrating ICT through teachers is now gradually being taken by up other states as well, thus avoiding the outsourcing of core curricular and pedagogical processes to external business entities and ensuring teachers as co-creators. This example underlines the core principle of AI programs as well.
Moreover, to democratize data management, algorithms must be released as open source, so that they can be subject to public review and audit. Teachers should be able to understand the workings of the algorithms and provide necessary inputs. This extends the role of teachers as cocreators in the transaction of curriculum through AI. To accomplish the vision of the National Education Policy 2020 and the Right to Education Act, a free and Open AI with teachers as collaborators will be a non-negotiable baton in the Indian context.
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