< img src="https://thepienews.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Sagar_Bahadur_PIE_Hero_16x9_FULL.jpg-1.jpeg"alt= ""> I have actually spent near to 20 years developing and leading organisations in global education. Our task, in many ways, has been to make other countries’ schools feel worth desiring.
We tell families in Mumbai, Chennai and Gurugram why the British system constructs independent thinkers, why an American degree lets a 17-year-old modification her mind two times before graduating. We are the bridge to all of that.
Last month, students and teachers took to the streets across India, including in New Delhi, where I had the possibility to hang around amongst a few of them, listening to the concerns they were asking.
It began over dripped exam documents and turned into something larger, a conversation about accountability, evaluation, trainee pressure, rely on organizations and what a fairer education system might look like.
However it struck me how familiar the questions were. They were the very same concerns I have constructed a profession answering, simply usually about elsewhere.
Most of us in this profession built our entire careers in this manner. We studied what works in other places so we might discuss it well, and somewhere along the line, discussing it became an income. Whole lives were constructed promoting the very best of overseas education systems to Indian households.
So, when a minute came that was actually about bringing much better practice to education in the house, utilizing the very same understanding we invest our professions sharing about other systems, it seemed like something more than a news story. It seemed like an opportunity to give something back, to show up, listen, and stand alongside the same trainees, instructors and households we invest our working lives serving, simply this time a little closer to home.
And yet, I saw a particular quiet. Not silence exactly, more an absence of the fluency we usually bring to these conversations. I still discover that curious. Perhaps it says something about how we see our own function, perhaps absolutely nothing at all. I don’t know the response. But it’s the kind of quiet that makes you sit with a concern instead of rush past it.
Our sector is proficient at showing up for each other. Numerous conferences, the receptions, the familiar faces at every occasion. I discovered myself wondering if this might have been another one of those gatherings, just for a different factor: a location to show up, ask questions, and listen.
I am not stating that everybody must have shown up. That takes its own sort of conviction, and it isn’t mine to ask of others. What I keep returning to is smaller than that.
< blockquote class=" wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow "> I found myself wondering if this might have been another among those events, simply for a different reason: a location to show up, ask questions, and listen
We spend our days discussing what works elsewhere. This was a minute when that very same knowledge could have gone somewhere better to home, in a discussion, an article, a couple of sincere recommendations or maybe simply appearing. Not always to back every demand or take a political position, however merely to contribute something useful.
Home was simply as deserving of that attention. A great deal of what we really do is judge whether an institution is reliable, not just well marketed, and look past a records to understand who a student actually is.
We also spend years learning what assists a young person settle into a system that isn’t familiar to them yet. None of that required a position on evaluation policy in India.
It just needed us to observe that the exact same care we bring abroad could have appeared here too: sitting with the students and instructors asking these concerns, hearing them out, and assisting them form what they were feeling into something clearer, a way to call the problem and start considering what may repair it.
I don’t have a cool ending for this. Some 20 years in, I still think deeply in what this work does. But I keep thinking about what it may look like to periodically point all that proficiency homeward, not as a position, simply as a method of appearing.
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