A commentator recently asked me a question in the comments section of my article — one in which I lamented that the National Education Plan 2026–2035 appears to be preparing us for the past rather than the future.
The question was simple enough: If the plan fails to inspire confidence, what should a future-ready education blueprint actually look like?
Ordinarily, I would say that this is not my job. As a content creator, I see my role as creating food for thought, not charting the nation’s direction. That responsibility belongs to ministers, policymakers, and bureaucrats. Society generally functions better when people do their own jobs, instead of attempting to do everyone else’s.
But the question did not sound entirely innocent. Read less generously, it carried the familiar insinuation: You complain a lot, Nehru — but do you have anything constructive to say?
So I took it as a challenge and gave the question five minutes of thought.
At its most basic level, a future-ready education blueprint must begin by imagining the future, not reliving the past. On this count alone, I find the current blueprint wanting. Although it claims to prepare students for the years 2026 to 2035, it reads as if it was designed while nostalgically recalling the years 1986 to 1995.
Once I framed the question properly, it became immediately clear what I would have liked to see — and what would have inspired confidence that we are genuinely preparing the next generation for the world to come.
Education for an Age of Excess Information
We already know that the future will be defined by information overload. Yet our education system remains obsessed with information accumulation — as if success will belong to those who manage to stuff the most facts into their heads.
In the future, information will not be scarce. It will be abundant, overwhelming, and often harmful.
Instead of teaching students how to accumulate information, we should be preparing them to manage, filter, categorise, and evaluate it. Students should be trained to distinguish between official reporting, commentary, creative expression, speculation, half-truths, and outright lies — and, more importantly, to know how to treat each category appropriately.
Just as crucially, we must cultivate the skill of ignoring information.
In the past, the challenge was gaining access to knowledge. In the future, the challenge will be avoiding drowning in it. The ability to ignore irrelevant or corrosive information will be more valuable than the ability to memorise yet another syllabus.
Our students must be trained like miners — capable of sifting through mountains of dirt to extract small but meaningful grains of gold. These information-mining skills will be essential not only for success, but for preserving mental health and personal meaning in a hyper-stimulated world.
Self-Worth Beyond Work in an AI Age
We also know that AI will replace a significant portion of human labour. Yet our education system continues to tie a student’s self-worth almost entirely to employment.
This is dangerously outdated.
In an AI-driven future, many people may enjoy unprecedented leisure — not unlike how the children of the wealthy live today, with servants (or technology) performing most tasks for them. If we fail to equip young people with the psychological tools to handle leisure, meaning, and self-direction, that leisure will not liberate them — it will crush them.
Without preparation, excessive leisure may erode self-esteem or pull people toward decadence, nihilism, or despair. Education must therefore prepare students to derive worth from purpose, curiosity, creativity, and self-mastery, not merely from productivity.
Autodidactism and the End of Knowledge Monopolies
As AI advances, schools, teachers, and even universities will steadily lose their monopoly over knowledge. Learning will increasingly become self-directed.
Autodidactism — the ability to learn independently — must therefore be cultivated from an early age. This means teaching students not just what to learn, but how to learn, how to structure inquiry, sustain discipline, and pursue mastery without external coercion.
Technological Sovereignty and Basic Survival
Students should also possess basic competence in assembling, repairing, or at least understanding the devices they depend on — phones, computers, and future interfaces. Dependence without understanding is not progress; it is submission.
At the other end of the spectrum, basic survival skills remain essential. Even in a world where AI provides food, shelter, and medicine, people must retain the psychological assurance that they remain agents of their own lives — not helpless dependents of technology.
War Preparedness Is Not Warmongering
Military preparedness should also be discussed honestly. This is not warmongering; it is realism. No serious geopolitical analyst dismisses the possibility of a major war within the next decade.
Students should at least understand how to protect themselves, their families, and their communities — when to advance, when to retreat, and when to sue for peace, if it ever comes to pass that a global war erupts are reaches our shores. Education that assumes eternal stability is education built on fantasy.
Knowing AI as a Bull Tamer, Not a Victim
The education plan does include AI education, but the manner of that education matters immensely.
Students must be taught to know AI the way a bull tamer knows a bull — not the way someone being trampled knows it.
Those who only know AI as victims see only its horns, muscles, and hooves — and live in terror that it will gore their future by stealing jobs, relationships, and self-worth. Those who know it as bull tamers learn to harness, direct, and discipline its power.
A Final, Troubling Question
If ideas like these can be articulated in five minutes, it is difficult to understand why the Ministry of Education — staffed by thousands of professionals — has produced a blueprint that inspires so little confidence.
Which leads to a more troubling question.
Where is our Education Minister?
It is deeply unsettling that the Prime Minister — who is also the Finance Minister — is the one announcing, defending, and managing the National Education Plan. Why is someone already holding two portfolios effectively doing the Education Minister’s job as well?
If the education minister is not up to the task, to the point that the Prime Minister also has to moonlight as a the education minister to compensate for her inability, maybe her critics are right — maybe she should have been dropped in the last cabinet reshuffle.
A minister should aid the prime minister, not add to his burden.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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