Are we educating students or just certifying them?

Degrees have become central to how we understand educational progress. Colleges are expanding, enrolments are growing, and more youngsters enter the workforce every year with certificates in hand. By that measure, we should be more educated than we have ever been.

Yet most of us would have met someone whose qualifications gave them real authority, but who used it to intimidate rather than to help. Someone who knew more than the person in front of them and made sure that person felt small for not knowing it.

We recognise this the moment we see it. We rarely stop to ask what it means. It means the qualification arrived, but something else did not.

Distinctions

That something else is education. It is not the same thing as literacy or certification. Literacy gives us access to knowledge. Certification records that we have completed a prescribed course of study. Education is different. It is supposed to change what we do with what we know. A person may be literate, highly qualified and professionally successful but use knowledge to set themselves apart from others or above them. An educated person uses the same knowledge with greater responsibility, humility and awareness of others. This is not a small distinction. It decides what kind of society we are actually building.

I see this shift happen quietly, every year, in my own classroom. I once asked a class to discuss a case without telling them whether it would be assessed. The first question was not about the dilemma in the case. It was, “Ma’am, will this come for the exam?” It was an honest and revealing question. Somewhere along the way, learning had become valuable only when it could be converted into marks.

This is why, over the years, I have tried to create more space for experience alongside assessment. A mark tells you what a student memorised for three hours. It does not tell you what changed in them. When learning is designed to be lived and not just recalled, students stop asking, “What will be asked?” and start asking, “What does this mean?” That shift captures an important difference between literacy and education within a single classroom.

What is missing

But this is not only a story about individual students or individual professionals who lost their way. It is also a story about a system that has gradually evolved in ways that often produce this outcome.

Schools and colleges under pressure to place students, to show results, to stay relevant in a competitive market, have increasingly prioritised the job at the end over the person being shaped along the way. Students are prepared to be employable. They are not always prepared to be transformed. That is not a small oversight. It shapes an entire generation’s relationship with knowledge itself.

The growing interest in experiential and alternative forms of schooling may also reflect this unease. Many parents appear to be looking for learning environments that develop curiosity, independence, and social awareness alongside academic achievement. Whether or not these alternatives offer a complete answer, their appeal tells us something about what families feel is missing from conventional education.

So, perhaps, the more useful question for all of us is not whether our institutions are failing us. It is whether we know what we are actually asking of them. What are we asking for when we choose a school, a college, or a course? Are we asking to be made employable or to be transformed? Once we know the answer, what does that require of us as students, parents, teachers, and educational institutions?

We cannot place the responsibility for this only on the system or the individual. Both have a role in what gets built and both have a role in fixing it. The first step is simply to stop confusing the certificate with the change it was supposed to represent and to start asking, honestly, which one we have actually been given.

The writer is Junior Faculty Organisation – Behaviour and Human Resource at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.