Reimagining Education: Learning from Academia’s Failures
This compelling panel dives into one of the most critical yet often overlooked conversations in the development sector: the failure of academia in nurturing minds capable of transformative impact. Moderated by Chintan Vaishnav, the discussion features voices from some of India’s most respected institutions and changemakers, including Geetha Narayanan, Ambuj Sagar, Sanjay Purohit, and Manu V. Mathai. The panel unpacks why academia often falters in preparing young people to engage with real-world challenges and how the system’s rigid structures, ranking obsessions, and outdated metrics stifle creativity and innovation.
Geetha Narayanan delivers a sweeping critique of the university as a mechanistic institution, likening it to a “gilded cage” that produces compliance instead of creativity. Manu Mathai offers personal reflections on his disillusionment with technical education and the absence of value-based discourse, questioning whether universities can teach us how to live well together. Sanjay Purohit brings in a practitioner’s perspective, chronicling multiple attempts to seed societal transformation through design thinking and sharing learnings from repeated failure. Ambuj Sagar closes with humility, calling for academic institutions to shift their focus from publishing papers to building spaces that foster self-reflection and social impact.
Through their candid stories and incisive critiques, the speakers move beyond blame to explore what it would take to make academia a nurturing ground for changemakers. Their message is clear: we must create spaces where students are not only trained for jobs but are empowered to think, reflect, risk, and reimagine society.
