Years ago, Dr Cyriac Mathews, formerly additional director of Collegiate Education, Kerala, shared with me a story that has remained with me ever since. A teacher was dictating notes to his students with enormous confidence. Halfway through the lecture, one of the brighter students interrupted him politely.“Sir, the last sentence you dictated is structurally incorrect. There is a grammatical problem.”The teacher did not pause for even a second. “There is no possibility of that,” he declared. “These are the notes given to me in my student days by Father Peter, who had studied in Rome.” (Name changed)The joke is not really about Rome. It is about a civilisation’s relationship with authority – and about the remarkable durability of its notes. The world may change. Knowledge may change. Society may change. Yet the notes remain untouched, sanatan, because they were once authorised by someone who supposedly knew better.The teacher does not examine the sentence. He does not ask whether it is correct. For him, its authority lies in its provenance: Fr Peter studied in Rome; therefore, the note must be right.That is learning for many: The world changes, but the notes do not.Knowledge ceases to be knowledge when its truth derives not from argument but from pedigree. A sentence does not become grammatically correct because it travelled from Rome. Nor does an educational policy become intellectually sound merely because Delhi has stamped it.But sadly, we have increasingly constructed a system in which authority, rather than inquiry, determines what counts as knowledge; and in which conformity to a prescribed standard is mistaken for learning.Perhaps we should therefore begin with the Constitution.The constitutional questionThe word concurrent is not an obscure constitutional technicality. It implies acting together, occurring together, sharing authority. A Concurrent List presupposes a relationship between the Union and the States in which neither is simply expected to dictate to the other.Education was not originally placed there.When the constitution came into force, education was in the State List. This reflected an important understanding of its nature in a country as extraordinarily diverse as India. Education is inseparable from language, culture, local history and social experience. The educational needs of Kerala cannot simply be assumed to be identical to those of Punjab, Assam or Tamil Nadu.Then came the 42nd Constitutional Amendment in 1976, during the Emergency. Among its many centralising provisions, it moved education from the State List to the Concurrent List.This did not create NEET, NET, NAAC or NIRF. Nor did it automatically transform education into a centrally administered subject. But it altered the constitutional location of educational authority. The Union was no longer confined to the limited role it had previously occupied.Also read: ‘Secularism Was Always Part of the Basic Structure of Constitution’: SCTo understand what that earlier limitation meant, we have to return to the Constituent Assembly.The debate of August 31, 1949 (p 789) concerned the Union’s legislative power over certain institutions of higher education, scientific and technical education and research. Ambedkar’s proposal concerned “Co-ordination and maintenance of standards.” V. S. Sarwate objected that even this might become an unnecessary interference in the provincial sphere, defending “diversity and variety” and freedom for educational experimentation.Dr P. S. Deshmukh raised a related question: if university education remained with the Provinces, what exactly would the Union’s power to coordinate and determine standards authorise Parliament to do? (p 792)Then Basanta Kumar Das proposed something much closer to what we would today call a National Education Policy: coordination of the educational activities of the States “for the purpose of maintaining a uniform national educational policy”, together with financial assistance to maintain a uniform standard of education throughout the Union. (p 793)The possibility of a centrally coordinated national educational policy was therefore not something the Constituent Assembly had failed to imagine.They imagined it – and did not incorporate it. Das withdrew the proposal. (p 797)Ambedkar’s own concern was considerably narrower. He was worried about universities lowering standards or manipulating results in ways that would make qualifications meaningless. His example was almost comically mundane: if one university treated 15% as a pass mark for a B.A. degree and another treated 20% as the standard, what would the word “graduate” actually mean? (p 796)His concern was with protecting the credibility of qualifications, not with designing a uniform national educational philosophy.The framers were concerned with protecting standards, not standardising education. They could distinguish between the credibility of a qualification and the diversity of the institutions that produced it.Sarwate’s insistence on diversity was not an argument against standards. It was an argument against confusing standards with uniformity. That is the constitutional imagination from which we have travelled so far.When the state changedBut something else changed alongside the constitutional shift: the old language with which we had construed the world.The Friedmanite turn supplied capitalism with a new language. In his celebrated 1970 essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, Milton Friedman argued that the corporate executive’s responsibility was to conduct business in the interests of its owners – generally, to make as much money as possible – while conforming to the basic rules of society.The shift was subtle but profound. The question of an institution’s ethical purpose could increasingly be displaced by a question of its permitted conduct: not what ought an institution to do but what it is permitted to do.The state no longer had to stand simply outside the market as its regulator, as an ethical principle. It could become the maker of the rules through which markets were created, measured and monetised. Standards, examinations, accreditation, rankings and certification could themselves become markets.The state entrusted with protecting standards could increasingly become the architect of a market in standards. The regulator and the regulated could begin to benefit from the same machinery. The result is a peculiar inversion of the constitutional project.Ambedkar wanted the state to prevent universities from lowering standards and inflating results. Now we have built a vastly more powerful apparatus of central regulation – and that very apparatus is now capable of generating markets around examinations, rankings, credentials and coaching.The machinery became more powerful while the disease grew worse. Friedman gave a language to exploit this crisis.When education became a crisisThe unrest was already visible before the celebrated May ’68. In the United States, the escalation of the Vietnam War had turned university campuses into sites of political rebellion. In 1968, student protests in France erupted into a much larger revolt against established authority. The same year in Mexico, student mobilisation became a mass movement challenging an authoritarian political order, culminating in the Tlatelolco massacre.Universities had become sites of a worldwide crisis of authority. The old educational order was losing legitimacy.Demonstrators hold placards during a protest against the police crackdown on students and youth over the NEET paper leak issue, at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, Wednesday, July 29, 2026. Photo: PTI /Salman AliIndia, too, experienced its own reverberation. In 1977, students at JNU marched to Indira Gandhi’s residence and demanded that she resign as the university’s Chancellor. She did.So first came the crisis of authority. Then came the new language of capital with which the crisis could be managed. Friedman may have supplied the vocabulary of control, management and marketisation. But there was something familiar in this transformation: history returning in new costume, an old piece of ruthless market wisdom acquiring a new relevance in new terminology: “When there is blood on the street, buy.” This was tragedy repeating itself not as farce, but as greater tragedy.Education was sold. Thoroughly.Instead of asking why education and authority have lost their legitimacy, the emerging logic asked: How can education be controlled, managed and made marketable to maximise profit.After the 42nd Amendment, the constitutional ground had been prepared. The language of the market supplied another layer. And gradually another policy document appeared, followed by another acronym: NAAC, NEET, NET, NATA, NEST, NEP.Also read: Beauty is in the Street: Echoes of May 1968 France Student Movement in CJP’s March to ParliamentDifferent instruments, different bureaucracies, but increasingly orbiting the same logic: standardise, measure, rank, certify, compete, monetise.The acronyms multiplied and the paperwork accumulated. Standardised tests also increased. They are all nothing but satellites orbiting around the new language-planet Friedman created. What had once been called education was gradually converted into an ecosystem of control, measurement and profit. And what did this new educational order give students and parents?More work. More competition. Sleepless nights. Poor eating habits. Anxiety. Depression. Suicidal tendencies, and, tragically, death by suicide.Coaching centres create one market; the crisis they produce creates another, more blood spilt on the street, more business opportunity – motivation experts, counselling services, wellness programmes and stress-management courses. The system first manufactures the anxiety and then sells us the expertise required to survive it.The wrong thalappuHere the wisdom of an ordinary Malayalam proverb becomes unexpectedly profound: You cannot climb a coconut tree and an areca-nut tree with the same thalappu.The thalappu is a simple loop of coir that holds the climber’s two feet together. But its size has to correspond to the circumference of the tree. The climber has to know the tree before deciding the thalappu.A device made for the broad trunk of a coconut palm cannot simply be transferred to the slender trunk of an areca-nut palm.Before designing the apparatus, you have to know the tree.Each educational tree has its own circumference, its branches reaching into language, culture, history, social structure, economic conditions and the lived experience of its students. Kerala does not have the same educational circumference as Punjab, Assam or Tamil Nadu.A federal educational system can therefore do something a centralised system struggles to do: produce teachers capable of understanding the local cultural space in which they teach, and physicians capable of understanding the local pathological space in which they practise.Yet our centralised system manufactures one thalappu and distributes it everywhere. It does not measure the tree. It measures the tree against the thalappu. And when the climber falls, it calls the failure a failure of merit.But perhaps the deeper question is who designs the thalappu?Once the specific nature of the tree is declared irrelevant, a single thalappu can be designed centrally, manufactured and marketed, and prescribed as the universal instrument of climbing. The tree is no longer the starting point. The product is.What my NET did not teach meI was a UGC-NET holder in the 2000s, when the examination was still largely descriptive and very few candidates cleared it.Yet, at the beginning of my teaching career, teaching some of the most marginalised students in Sonamura in Tripura and Munnar in Kerala, I discovered something that neither my postgraduate degree nor my NET had prepared me for. Neither had given me the emotional, cultural or transactional intelligence required to learn from – or teach – the students before me.Most of my generation who entered such institutions carried the naive belief that our qualifications were proof of our merit and that others students’ difficulties were evidence of their deficiencies.The uncomfortable truth was that we had been trained and selected largely for our ability to negotiate a particular educational world: an urban, middle-class world in which command of English and familiarity with its cultural codes already counted heavily. We were, in a sense, programmed machines, trained to perform a specific task within a specific environment – and then taught to mistake our ability to perform that task for intelligence.We mistook the distance between ourselves and our students for proof of our merit. And we mistook the students’ inability to cross that distance for their lack of merit.Looking back, I realise that the gap was often not between intelligence and ignorance. It was a gap in precisely those forms of cultural, emotional and transactional intelligence that a centrally standardised examination cannot measure.If the government had given me adequate training in Kokborok, Bengali or Tamil before sending me to teach in those regions, I would have been a far better teacher.We are constantly told that education must produce “employable” graduates. But why should education bear the entire burden of making a person ready for every particular workplace? If parliament were to stipulate that the specific skills required for a particular job, company or workplace must be provided by the employer, much of the present hysteria about employability would disappear. That simple Act of parliament could drain this entire whirlpool of confusion.A person joining a hospital, a factory, a software company or a publishing house will necessarily have to learn the particular systems, technologies and practices of that workplace. That is what training is for.Education has a different task: to give people the intellectual, cultural and human capacities with which they can encounter a world that they cannot yet know.Once we separate education from job-specific training, education can return to its proper function. It need not keep guessing what the market will want five years from now. It can teach people how to think, inquire, communicate, understand others and inhabit a world larger than the particular workplace into which they may eventually enter.Parliament should make the market serve the people. Instead, it increasingly asks education to make people serve the market. The citizen becomes a worker. The student becomes a future employee. Education becomes a factory for producing market-ready human beings.The student becomes the thalappu – looped around the feet of corporate climbers so that others can reach the tops of their ambitious trees.The new EklavyaAll this discourse about competitive examinations, marks and grades is a chillingly modern version of the old Dronacharya trick: make Arjuna appear supreme by cutting off Eklavya’s thumb. The system does not necessarily have to declare that Eklavya is incapable. It only has to ensure that they do not possess the bows and arrows with which he might compete.The brilliant child in a remote village may have curiosity, intelligence and determination, but not the language, coaching, cultural capital or technological access that the examination rewards. The thumb is no longer cut off by Dronacharya’s hand. It is cut off by the architecture of the examination itself.And when the privileged Arjunas clear the examination while the Eklavyas do not, we call the outcome merit.It is worth risking a hypothetical conjecture here: How many of those celebrated “best students” would choose to become doctors, engineers, professors and the like purely out of passion, intellectual curiosity or commitment to society, rather than for the monetary and social capital these professions confer?Perhaps we have confused the ability to compete for a scarce credential with the capacity to contribute to society. The successful student has learned to answer questions designed by the market – questions for which the answers are already available in the market, in ready-made forms.But education should also teach us to answer questions that life asks. And those are not the same questions.The question before the answerFor me, true education is not asking students to reproduce, by rote, what Newton said about gravity or how Einstein later reformulated it. It is to place them before the wonder and the question itself:Why does a freely falling object always come down? What do you think is happening? What is your explanation?The answer they give may be wrong. That is precisely the point. The purpose of education is not to make the student reproduce Newton’s answer. It is to create the possibility that one day a student might ask a question that neither Newton nor Einstein asked.Also read: Are National Rankings the Last Word on Choosing a College?Perhaps one of those students may eventually discover something that both of them missed altogether. That possibility is what a genuinely educated mind preserves: not the certainty that the answer is already known, but the freedom to believe that the question is not yet exhausted.Gilles Deleuze gives us a remarkably different way of thinking about this. In Difference and Repetition, he distinguishes knowledge from “infinite learning”: learning evolves through the comprehension of problems, through encounters that transform the learner.You can tell someone what swimming is, explain its mechanics and give them everything that is known about it. But none of that teaches the body to swim. At some point, the learner must enter the water.Members of the NSUI staged a protest outside Shastri Bhawan in Delhi on May 12 against the cancellation of the NEET-UG 2026 examination and allegations of paper leak. Photo: PTI.The same is true of learning a language. One does not simply accumulate vocabulary. One enters another linguistic world and allows it to transform one’s own language and one’s relation to the world.This is why learning and studying are not the same thing.We study for something – an examination, a qualification, a degree, a job. Studying is therefore oriented towards a destination already defined and usually towards an answer already known.Learning begins with an encounter that challenges us and transforms us. Nobody can swim on your behalf. Others may have crossed the water a thousand times, but the water has to be encountered by each body anew.The same should be true of intellectual life. Newton has already explained gravity. Einstein radically reformulated it. But the student should still be allowed to encounter the falling object as a problem. That is the moment at which studying becomes learning.The reward is the learningNobody becomes anxious merely at the thought of learning to swim or learning to ride a bicycle. One may learn slowly, fall, fail, try again and discover one’s balance. And when one finally learns to swim, the reward is not primarily the money one can earn from swimming or the social status it confers. The reward is swimming itself.Learning does not end when one has “passed” a bicycle test. The learning continues because the experience itself is joyful. This is what Deleuze’s idea of infinite learning points towards. Learning is transformative precisely because it does not have to terminate in an external reward.Money, employment and social status may follow, but they are not what makes learning meaningful. This is what our education system has almost completely lost. We have taken an activity whose deepest reward was intrinsic and replaced it with a chain of extrinsic rewards: marks, grades, ranks, certificates, jobs, salaries and status.The student is no longer asked what do you want to learn? The question becomes: What will this learning get us?And once that becomes the organising principle of education, learning becomes studying, curiosity becomes competition, knowledge becomes a credential, and the joy of discovery becomes anxiety about employability. The slow unfolding of learning becomes a suicidal race.Searching under the wrong lampThis is why I find the position of those opposition parties that want NEET to continue, merely conducted by a different agency or under a different arrangement, deeply inadequate.They are treating the symptom as though it were the disease. Who conducts the examination? How fairly is it conducted? How many seats are available? How are students ranked? All these are legitimate questions.They leave the deeper question untouched: Why must education be organised around such an examination in the first place?The politics emerging among students is therefore not necessarily a politics against examinations alone. It may be a politics against the world of which the examination has become a symbol. They are beginning to ask a question that established politics has not yet learnt to hear: What if education is not supposed to be a competition for scarce credentials at all?This reminds me of the old Mulla Nasruddin story. Nasruddin is searching for a lost key under a street lamp. Someone asks him whether he lost it there.“No.”“Then why are you looking here?”“Because,” he replies, “there is light here.”The key was lost somewhere else, but the search continues where visibility is convenient. That is precisely what our politicians are doing with education.The key has been lost somewhere else.It was lost when learning was separated from wonder, when education was separated from life, and when knowledge was turned into a credential for the market.Yet we continue searching under the familiar lamp:Who should conduct NEET? How should NEET be conducted? How should marks be standardised? How should admissions be regulated? How can examinations be made more transparent?Also read: The Cost of One Nation, One ExaminationThese may all be questions worth asking. But they are questions under the lamp. But the key was lost somewhere else. It was lost at the moment when we stopped asking what education itself was for.Perhaps this explains something more significant about the present student mobilisation. What is striking is not simply that students are protesting against NEET, but that they are organising spontaneously outside the established political structures that have traditionally claimed to represent them.This need not be a rejection of politics. It may be a rejection of a political language that has become incapable of articulating what they are experiencing. Established politics continues to ask: Who should conduct the examination? How should it be administered? How can it be made fairer? These are legitimate questions, but they remain within the existing architecture.The students’ refusal to remain entirely within that architecture may therefore be significant. They are not necessarily apolitical; they may be searching for a politics capable of asking questions that established politics has stopped asking.The spontaneous character of their mobilisation may thus be less a sign of political immaturity than of a new generation discovering that an older political language no longer contains its experience.Perhaps they are looking elsewhere for the lost key because, at some unconscious level (the spontaneity suggests that much), they seem to know better than the politicians – who helped put this rotten system in place in the first place – that the key was lost somewhere else.In their struggle, the students are learning (not studying) so many things because they have encountered a generative problem. That process of learning has made them extraordinarily creative and joyous, despite the atrocities surrounding them. In their courage, and in the ways they are inventing to sustain it, they are restoring something to my generation that we seem to have lost: courage itself, and the possibility of joy in struggle.That is the true beauty of learning. They do not seem to want power. Perhaps they have already learned the trick that our generation forgot: power is not the power to rule; it is the power to serve.They want something more joyous than the petty satisfactions and the inflated ego that power offers. And that makes their struggle far more dangerous than any power struggle.They do not want to topple the government. They want those who have wrecked the system to be responsible and to fix it. Fail in your duty, and their reels will remind you how inconsequential you are to them.That is what makes them dangerous. They brutally remind the so-called rulers what they really are, without any distortion whatsoever: they are the servants of the people.And suddenly, the rulers vanished from parliament!Perhaps that is the destiny they have forced upon them: to cease imagining themselves as rulers and return to what the Constitution makes them – responsible citizens, bound by it, and servants of the people, not beings standing above it in a non-biological sphere.Hence, the task before the lawmakers is not to design a better thalappu for the imagined same tree, but first to ask: What tree are we trying to climb?And then: Is climbing it what education was ever meant to be?Perhaps the students already know, somewhere deep within them, what the rest of us have forgotten: the key was lost somewhere else – and we were complicit in losing it.Hence, the pressing questions remain, as questions ought to: What is education for? Why did the framers of our constitution think it should belong to the states?Let the questions remain open. Perhaps that is where learning begins.Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan, who writes under the name a/nil, is a Professor of English at Government Arts and Science College, Pathirippala, Kerala. He is the author of the poetry collection The Absent Color, which Slavoj Žižek described as “an authentic miracle” and “a true thinking in the form of poems.” His writings have appeared in The Wire, Round Table India, Caste: A Global Journal, Contemporary Voice of Dalit (Sage), Journal of Religion and Film, and other platforms that engage with caste, culture, and justice.