Twenty-two billion dollars.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the market decided BYJU\u2019S was worth.<\/p>\n
Today?<\/p>\n
Zero.<\/p>\n
By their own founder\u2019s admission.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not here to spit on the grave.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m here because we\u2019ve made a deal.<\/p>\n
Silent. Complicit.<\/p>\n
We builders. The EdTech crowd in India.<\/p>\n
We stopped asking the only question that counts.<\/p>\n
We raised the money. Bought the billboards. Signed the cricketers. Filled the funnels until they burst.<\/p>\n
But measure it? Really measure it?<\/p>\n
Did the child understand more<\/em>?<\/p>\n Did the kid with the least actually get ahead?<\/p>\n If you use that ruler… most of what we built is trash.<\/p>\n BYJU\u2019S isn\u2019t an anomaly. It\u2019s just the loudest mirror.<\/p>\n I run a learning-tech company in Chennai.<\/p>\n Take this as confession. Not a lecture.<\/p>\n I have three daughters. Eldest in Class 11. Twins in Class 6.<\/p>\n I tell them every day: understand the concept. Don\u2019t memorise.<\/p>\n They memorise anyway.<\/p>\n Why? Because none of them\u2014not the girls, not the teachers, not the schools\u2014has a tool that turns abstract ideas into lived experience.<\/p>\n I watch their attention span shrivel between my eldest and youngest. It\u2019s visceral.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the sting that kills any excuse I might have had.<\/p>\n I spent twenty years making TV shows and films.<\/p>\n My job was holding eyeballs. Keeping you glued. Increasing watch time.<\/p>\n I thought I could export that trick. Use AR. VR. 360-degree cameras. Make education sticky.<\/p>\n I talked to hundreds of students. Teachers. Principals across every board.<\/p>\n The field humbled me.<\/p>\n The tool? Not the answer.<\/p>\n There are two problems in Indian education.<\/p>\n The industry picked number one. Called it progress on number two.<\/p>\n We confused moving data with teaching brains.<\/p>\n Watch-time is not understanding.<\/p>\n A streak is not a skill<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n An app can hypnotize a kid for forty minutes and leave their head empty. We built business models that relied on keeping that mouth shut.<\/p>\n BYJU\u2019S? It was a monument to this delusion. ASCI flagged their ads. Repeatedly. Misleading claims about outcomes. Sales teams scared parents: \u201cYour child will fail without this.\u201d<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t pedagogy. That\u2019s fear. Sold by the lakh.<\/p>\n Parents flipped. FOMO (fear of missing out) died. FOGS rose up.<\/p>\n Fear of Getting Scammed.<\/p>\n We earned that. The whole category did.<\/p>\n Now? New wave. Same trick. New noun.<\/p>\n \u201cAI Tutor.\u201d<\/p>\n Same pitch: Personalised! Scalable! Available to all!<\/p>\n Some will be useful. Most are just distributing content cheaper. Automating the wrong thing at scale.<\/p>\n Throw the pitch decks away. Read the papers.<\/p>\n There is a hierarchy. It\u2019s been there since 1985.<\/p>\n In 1984. Benjamin Bloom published the big finding. Still the kingpin of our field.<\/p>\n One-to-one tutoring with feedback. Two standard deviations better than a regular class.<\/p>\n Two sigma.<\/p>\n Mean? The average tutored kid beats 98% of kids taught the old way.<\/p>\n Bloom didn\u2019t call it a triumph. He called it a problem. A challenge. How do you scale this? Give every child mastery. At system scale.<\/p>\n Forty years later? Still the brief.<\/p>\n Everything else? Footnote.<\/p>\n John Hattie meta-analyzed 300 million students. Pattern held.<\/p>\n Real levers are human. Feedback. Teaching quality. Seeing where the kid is<\/em>.<\/p>\n Hardware? Barely moves the needle.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the device. It\u2019s what the device makes the child do<\/em>. And if a skilled adult is in the room.<\/p>\n Biology underneath it all. Ebbinghaus. Forgetting curve. 1885.<\/p>\n We lose 70% of passive input within a day.<\/p>\n Memory is built by doing. Generating. Retrieving.<\/p>\n Acting on a concept sticks. Watching someone else act? It fades.<\/p>\n Science says: Participation. Feedback. A teacher.<\/p>\n Industry sold: Passive video. On a screen. At scale.<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t misunderstand the research. We ignored the research.<\/p>\n Because it didn\u2019t fit the spreadsheet.<\/p>\n The fantasy repeats every few years. Technology routes around the teacher.<\/p>\n Seductive? Yes. India is short on good teachers.<\/p>\n Selling point? Empowerment.<\/p>\n Look at the Indian experiment. Real. Remarkable. 1999. Sugata Mitra. Hole in the wall in Delhi slum. PC embedded. Walked away. Kids taught themselves.<\/p>\n Curiosity + peer learning = power. Especially where schools don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n The lesson? Wrong.<\/p>\n We heard \u201cteachers unnecessary.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not what it said. It said: Kids learn when curiosity switches on. Self-organization beats nothing<\/em>.<\/p>\n Nothing.<\/p>\n \u201cBetter than nothing\u201d isn\u2019t national policy.<\/p>\n Hattie says the teacher is the biggest lever we have.<\/p>\n Tech\u2019s role? Hand the teacher a sharper hammer. Step back. Don\u2019t replace the human.<\/p>\n I saw this.<\/p>\n Pilot session. Expected four active kids. Rest watching.<\/p>\n Didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n Teacher ran it. Pulled the class in. Using our tech in her hand.<\/p>\n Not the tech pulling them. She<\/em> pulled them.<\/p>\n Walked out sure. Teachers aren\u2019t the bug. They\u2019re the feature. They just need the right instrument.<\/p>\n A school isn\u2019t a content pipe.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a place a kid is known.<\/p>\n The teacher notices the quiet kid. Classmates argue wrong answers into right ones.<\/p>\n Strip that out. Call it \u201cpersonalised.\u201d You didn\u2019t modernize. You hollowed the walls. Slapped a logo on the void.<\/p>\n Listen. Founders. Investors. Sit with this line.<\/p>\n If a solution only works for kids who already have enough? It\u2019s not a solution.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a privilege with a checkout button.<\/p>\n Look at reach.<\/p>\n Rural households with internet: 24%. Cities: 66%.<\/p>\n Rural schools with working net: 18%.<\/p>\n Rural homes with smartphones? Under half. The phone usually belongs to a dad who works. Not the kid needing help at night.<\/p>\n Phone use for 11-17 year olds shot up. Yeah. But surveys show over half of rural 14-18 year olds can\u2019t divide like a Class 3 student.<\/p>\n Glowing rectangle isn\u2019t learning.<\/p>\n App-first, one-device-per-kid models miss her.<\/p>\n Built for Metro wifi. Spare iPad. Paying parent.<\/p>\n Field research in govt schools changed me.<\/p>\n Found this: Rich talent lives there. Kids wringing max from min infra. Teachers making magic from mud.<\/p>\n I know it from inside. 1997. College drop-out student. Ran internet center to eat.<\/p>\n Didn\u2019t know computers. Learned by doing. That experience built my brain. It let me adopt every new tool since. Steenbeck editor? Sure. Non-linear editing? Fine. Film. Digital. Optical. VFX. AI.<\/p>\n I used them all. Didn\u2019t flinch.<\/p>\n But I hate tech that dresses up distribution as teaching.<\/p>\n Three commitments. The industry owes them.<\/p>\n I hold myself to them.<\/p>\n Measure understanding. Not attention.<\/p>\n Check learning before\/after. Someone independent. Publish results even if ugly.<\/p>\n Early session in Chennai? Honest summary: \u201c13 kids. Signal, not study.\u201d<\/p>\n Engagement metrics proving fun should embarrass you. Not satisfy.<\/p>\n Post-pilot feedback was brutal. Teachers tore our product apart.<\/p>\n And yet the data proved their criticism missed a point.<\/p>\n Subject engagement up. Understanding up. Both true.<\/p>\n Honest measurement lets you be flawed. And effective. Tells you exactly what to fix.<\/p>\n Keep teacher at centre.<\/p>\n Product that needs the human removed isn\u2019t helping ed. It\u2019s abandoning it.<\/p>\n Build for last child.<\/p>\n Not premium tier. Not headset. Not metro photo-op.<\/p>\n Reach the village girl. Intermittent power. One shared phone. Bad road.<\/p>\n Reach her. Cheap. Social. Device-agnostic. Empowered teacher.<\/p>\n Design for her? Product gets better. Cheaper. Better.<\/p>\n Design for metro kid? Beautiful thing. She will never see it.<\/p>\n That is the test.<\/p>\n Most EdTech fails. Including stuff I\u2019ve built.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll say that plainly. Rather than lie in a deck.<\/p>\n Worth $22 billion. Then zero.<\/p>\n Taught a generation nothing durable? Maybe.<\/p>\n Verdict on the industry? Answering questions you could bill for.<\/p>\n Not the question the classroom asks.<\/p>\n We know which one matters. Always did.<\/p>\n Only left: Do we finally build it?<\/p>\n Avvaiyar has a line…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twenty-two billion dollars. That\u2019s what the market decided BYJU\u2019S was worth. Today? Zero. By their own founder\u2019s admission. I\u2019m not here to spit on the grave. I\u2019m here because we\u2019ve made a deal. Silent. Complicit. We builders. The EdTech crowd in India. We stopped asking the only question that counts. We raised the money. Bought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7882"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.schooler.org.ua\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Implicating Myself<\/h3>\n
The Two Problems (One Is Fake)<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
What the Science Actually Says<\/h3>\n
Deleting the Teacher (Don’t)<\/h3>\n
The Test: Last Child, Last Village<\/h3>\n
How To Be Honest<\/h3>\n