It is important to identify the two predominant teaching philosophies, or pedagogical worldviews, that have shaped our classrooms. The first belongs to the older and culturally deep-rooted tradition of Guru Bhakti (devotion to the teacher),in which the teacher occupies an elevated moral position. This is where the student approaches knowledge through reverential submission to the Guru. The second belongs to the neoliberal university, which speaks the seemingly liberal language of student autonomy, experiential learning, and learner-centred pedagogy.
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The neoliberal reorientation of Indian higher education under the National Education Policy (NEP) popularised the vocabulary of learning outcomes, stakeholder satisfaction, employability, student-centred pedagogy and measurable performance. In this transition, what I have observed is that the student is supposedly liberated from the commanding Guru only to be recast as a stakeholder whose satisfaction could be measured, surveyed and managed.
Needless to say, there is an increasingly bureaucratic culture of measurement established by NAAC accreditation, NIRF rankings, quality-assurance mechanisms, and institutional audits. Educational experience and learner autonomy are being measured through indicators, metrics and comparisons between institutions.
Now the educational apparatus speaks through outcomes, satisfaction scores, rankings, and ratings; teach in ways that can be measured, rated, and verified. The old command mode has now become more dispersed, digitised and bureaucratically documented and micromanaged.
The possibility of a poor rating or institutional performance indicator can quietly tell the teacher what kinds of teaching are safe. Professors learn to anticipate what is likely to generate favourable responses: difficult readings are replaced with accessible ones, demanding assignments are softened, uncomfortable debates are avoided, and complexity is repackaged as convenience via Edu-tech tools. Thus, the teacher gradually becomes less of an intellectual interlocutor and more of a service provider managing student-customer satisfaction.
‘Marketing gimmick’
If every moment of intellectual discomfort is treated as a pedagogical failure and every difficult concept is repackaged as an Edu-Tech game, education risks becoming another form of marketing gimmick. The higher goal of the classroom is not to make learning simple, but to make students capable of thinking beyond what is immediately pleasurable, familiar, and easy. Some learning can be time-consuming, frustrating, repetitive, and intellectually unsettling.
A vibrant classroom can occasionally make students uncomfortable, not necessarily through humiliation or authoritarianism, but by confronting them with difficult questions and challenging tasks.
In fact, the ability to respectfully question the professor is one of the greatest achievements of secular education. Feedback matters a lot in this process. Nevertheless, the trouble lies when student autonomy in providing feedback gets translated into a managerial technology of measurement and surveillance.
When students provide testimonials on teaching delivery, the feedback should be used primarily to enhance course delivery rather than as a yardstick for firing teaching staff. Finding a raw average score as a measure of teaching quality does not ensure accountability. It can just be a statistical simplification. More often than not, student evaluations do not take into account factors like course difficulty, inflated grade expectations, popularity of teaching personality, strict classroom policy and adherence to classroom discipline, heavy workload of faculty, class size and prior perceptions of the instructor.
This is where Gary Smith’s Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics offers a useful analogy. Smith reminds us that numbers do not speak for themselves. They depend on what you choose to measure and how you collect the data. What assumptions do you make about it? Most importantly, they depend on what you decide to do with the results. A numerical score may look wonderfully precise while telling us very little about the messy world behind it. It would be naïve to assume that students’ experience of intellectual growth can be measured through a rating on a feedback form.
In the Indian context, where many faculty members already work as precarious employees, a statistical average can have serious consequences. Contractual, temporary, adjunct, and early-career teachers may not have any institutional protection against the consequences of a poor feedback evaluation.
In many elite universities, faculty from disadvantaged backgrounds who are marginalised by caste, minority, or disability can become vulnerable to attitudinal hostility during anonymous feedback surveys, as students who come from socially and economically privileged backgrounds do not want to entertain a faculty who challenges inherited prejudices.
In the Indian context, where many faculty members already work as precarious employees, a statistical average can have serious consequences. Contractual, temporary, adjunct, and early-career teachers may not have adequate institutional protection against the consequences of a poor feedback evaluation.
Teaching is not a trading terminal that can be accurately judged through a single numerical score. A professor should be given sufficient time to understand students’ needs. Sometimes, it takes time to recognise the different learning needs of diverse students in a classroom and make necessary adjustments to teaching methods and classroom delivery. Just as a struggling student needs time, support, and opportunities to improve after a poor performance at a particular moment, a teacher also needs the space to learn from feedback and to experiment with different pedagogical approaches and course delivery. A meaningful feedback system should be about helping people improve and build a community, not punishing them for falling short.
Now, let me return to the crucial question: Can we imagine alternatives to the predominant models of Guru Bhakti or student-customer satisfaction? Perhaps, this is where we need to imagine students as change agents. A change agent, rather than simply worrying about the status of scores, does something more disruptive to the learning experience and asks whether the existing system itself needs to be questioned. The question, therefore, is not merely “What score did the student achieve?” but “What did the student do with that knowledge, whom did it serve, and what was the student willing to question?”
A genuinely transformative university cultivates the courage to question concentrated power whenever it turns corrupt, unjust or indifferent to the public good. The student who takes learning beyond the classroom and, whenever necessary, into the streets to peacefully demand accountability is also an outcome of meaningful education.
What matters is not what students can reproduce in an examination, but what they can do with what they have learned. Can a student studying economics understand why a neighbourhood settlement is trapped in a debt crisis and imagine possible solutions? Can an engineering student identify an environmental problem and design an affordable and accessible solution? Can a literature student reimagine the world aesthetically or recognise how caste, gender or class shapes everyday experience and use that understanding to question received assumptions of success and failure? Can a management student think beyond quick-rich ventures and imagine forms of enterprise that are socially and environmentally responsible?
Beyond scoresheets
Scoresheets can be poor indicators of what students can actually do. When grades are inflated and assessment is reduced to predictable outcomes, a high score can reveal little about students’ capacity to think independently or solve unfamiliar problems. Employers seeking workplace-ready graduates may need to look beyond the marksheet to find evidence for sound judgement, initiative, creativity and problem-solving skills.
There are challenges posed by changing times and changing demands of the market. For the emerging generation of students, the attention span has largely been shaped by the chaotic rhythms of reels, shorts and fun bubbles. In that sense, a student’s difficulty in sustaining attention cannot simply be treated as indiscipline.
In conclusion, what matters is a learning space that recognises the hidden habitual perceptions behind unequal relations of power, and considers how things could be done differently. This does not have to happen only through textbooks, course plans, or examinations. A classroom discussion, a field project, a community intervention, a product prototype, a piece of research carrying divergent thinking, or even a disagreement with the teacher can become an important part of learning.
Let students leave the campus with more than the ability to produce the right answer in examinations. Let students develop the confidence to ask better questions, experiment with new possibilities, and understand that the world they inhabit is not finished or fixed. The world is still incomplete. There is enough scope to reimagine it and to participate in creating what comes next.
(Dr. Sudeesh K is a faculty member in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, Yeshwanthpur Campus. Views are personal.)
