Who Was the School Day Built For?

In 2019, invigilators at exam centres across Bagalkot district in Karnataka switched off the CCTV cameras. Teachers posted to watch the students instead solved the objective-type questions themselves and passed the answers around the room. While there was some noise around that, not much happened.

Because it would happen again in April 2023. Sixteen teachers were suspended in Karnataka’s Afzalpur taluka for permitting mass copying. In both cases, the teachers were trying to move their schools up the state’s district ranking table. Because pass percentage was the number their districts would be judged on, and everyone in the chain understood exactly what that number required of them.

The root of this lies in a version of a mechanism that begins at 9:00 am in every school under the same administration. A bell rings, and an assembly forms in straight lines. Children file into rooms where the desks face one wall with a teacher at the front and a board behind the teacher.

The underlying logic between these two examples is identical: whatever a system measures, it eventually teaches everyone inside it to produce—whether or not anyone intends it to. Bagalkot and Afzalpur need a number to get on a ranking table. A school morning needs stillness at nine and silence by position. Neither was designed by the people performing it. Both were handed down by a system that stopped needing instructions a long time ago.

What 1835 replaced

Before there was a bell or a board, Indian education already had a design. But it was a different one. In the gurukul system, a student lived with a teacher, was fed and taught as family, and followed no fixed syllabus. Learning was at whatever pace the guru judged right. That design had its own exclusion built in: Manusmriti barred Shudras entry into it altogether.

In the 1830s, a Scottish missionary named William Adam travelled through Bengal and Bihar and counted roughly one lakh village pathshalas teaching over two million children between them. No fees or printed textbooks, no benches or exams, no fixed timetable and classes paused for harvest and resumed once the crops were in. A teacher taught what a student needed, not a syllabus. Adam filed his reports in 1835, 1836 and 1838. In the same years a very different argument about Indian education was being settled in Calcutta.

That argument had already run for two decades by the time it reached Thomas Macaulay. The Charter Act of 1813 had set aside government money for Indian education without saying what kind: classical Sanskrit and Persian learning, or English and Western science. The resulting deadlock paralysed policy until a committee split five votes to five and the decision landed on Macaulay’s desk.

Macaulay’s 1835 Minute broke that stalemate in favour of English: “It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.” It didn't erase the gurukul or the pathshala overnight, both kept running for decades after. What it decided was which model the colonial state’s own money and prestige would build on going forward.

It was a deliberate design, and a successful one, built to do precisely what it did.

What independent India inherited and chose to keep

Independent India inherited this machine and chose to scale it rather than rebuild it. The country in 1947 had around 19 universities, roughly 400 schools of any kind, and a literacy rate under 20%. Maulana Azad, the first education minister, pushed for schooling that was uniform and centrally run, because a country trying to educate hundreds of millions of people fast had no real alternative. It worked, by the measure it was built for: literacy climbed from 18% in 1951 to 74% by 2011, on the back of exactly this design.

What it was never built to do is notice one child early enough, or closely enough, to develop whatever is actually special about them. Scale and individual attention pull in different directions, and for most of its history, India's school system chose scale.

Everyone adapts to the signal

Once a system rewards one thing, the people inside it respond sensibly.

Teachers learn that a finished syllabus is safer than a deep one. A class that covers every chapter works. A class that spends a week on one good question does not.

Students learn that the right answer is the one in the textbook. Curiosity is welcome, but it isn't marked. It is inevitable then that over time they stop spending effort on what doesn’t count.

Parents learn to read the marksheet as the whole story. Family calendars, holidays and conversations bend around the dates and years of board exams.

The pattern survives without anyone believing in it. It only notices what gets rewarded. This is what the teachers and Bagalkot and Afzalpur noticed. And this is what their district needed. They delivered it—with the cameras off.

The building teaches too

A system also speaks through its spaces. Rows of desks facing one board tell a child where knowledge sits. The teacher speaks. The class listens. Movement means disorder. Silence means the room is working.

Long corridors of identical rooms tell a school how to grow: add a section, add a room; add a grade, add a floor.

When India set out to put a school within reach of every child, it replicated this shape at enormous scale. Even the national scheme that set minimum standards for primary schools, launched in 1987 following the National Policy on Education, was named after the one object every classroom shared: Operation Blackboard. Buildings last for decades. So the behaviour they encourage lasts with them, often long after the ideas behind them have moved on.

Pressure always finds an outlet

A system under strain generally grows a workaround.

When the school covers the syllabus and the exam decides the future, families look for an edge. This is why tuitions appear. It is inevitable then that coaching classes appear. A report published by the NSSO has it that Indian households spend a little over ₹13,000 on school education. Add coaching and it goes up to over ₹22,000. This is why coaching has gotten organised into a sector. Entire towns started to grow over time, built to cater to students looking to gain an edge around entrance tests.

This survey adds that more than a quarter of Indian school students now take private coaching. It’s closer to a third in urban areas, climbing to nearly half of urban students by the final two years of school.

Seen from a distance, coaching is an extension of the school, doing exactly what the exam rewards, only harder and for a fee. “It is unheard of in China, Japan, Indonesia, the US and in European countries, which I visited. It is a matter of shame that private tuition exists in India at the primary level of education,” Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had noted almost a decade ago.

Change is absorbed before it is adopted

India has never lacked reform. Commissions, frameworks and policies have repeatedly asked schools to value understanding over memory. The National Education Policy of 2020 says so plainly. But large systems tend to absorb change before they adopt it. A new idea arrives, gets translated into old habits, and the form shifts while the behaviour underneath settles back into place. A project becomes another submission. A new assessment becomes another score. Call it inertia rather than resistance, the ordinary weight of millions of people continuing to do what has reliably worked for them.

The reforms that have actually held are the ones that smuggled individual attention back in without asking the system to stop scaling.

If the system was built for scale, the reforms that have actually held are the ones that smuggled individual attention back in without asking the system to stop scaling. Pratham’s Teaching at the Right Level groups children by what they can actually do rather than by age or grade, and it has produced some of the largest effect sizes recorded in education research, across six randomised evaluations in seven states. Rishi Valley's rural schools and the Building as Learning Aid movement, which turns classroom doors into protractors and window grilles into alphabets, did something similar in their own settings. None of them argued with the system’s need to scale. They found room for a single child inside it anyway.

What the system will keep doing

Systems don’t disappear. They layer. The newest ideas in Indian education now sit inside a structure built to reward a different thing entirely, and the two will coexist for a long time yet.

The four questions this series keeps returning to, get a clearer answer here than the articles so far. The system was optimised to produce a large, uniform, certifiable population fast, and for most of the eighty years since independence, that was genuinely the more urgent problem to solve. It serves scale brilliantly. It was never built to notice what's different about one particular child, and it still doesn’t. Whether scale is still the more urgent problem, eighty years and several hundred million students later, is a question we need to think about.

The next time you walk past a school at nine in the morning, listen for the bell. Somewhere underneath the timekeeping, it’s telling everyone inside what this system was built to do well, and what it was never asked to notice.

This is the third piece in the By Design series, which looks at the everyday systems around us, asking who built them, for whom, and who got left out.

About the illustrator

Purvi Ramtilak is a design student at BITS Design School, Mumbai, with an interest in telling stories through visual media. She is drawn to the way images can bring people together and make complex ideas feel more immediate.