Published Sep 07, 2026 | 9:20 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 07, 2026 | 9:20 AM
Synopsis: The education system promises salvation but delivers only anxiety, trapping a generation in endless competition, debt and disappointment. Ivan Illich had seen this coming. Half a century ago, he warned that schooling could confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, and a diploma with competence.
In July 2026, India witnessed something remarkable. Millions of students took to the streets—not over fees or reservations, but over a leaked exam paper. The NEET-UG paper leak sparked nationwide protests, gave birth to the self-mocking “Cockroach Janata Party,” and forced the Union Education Minister to resign. The protests spread across the country, with students marching in Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Kozhikode and beyond. At Jantar Mantar, the 36-day protest ended only after the government accepted key demands.
What fueled this fury? It was not just one leak. It was the cumulative despair of a generation trapped in a system that promises salvation but delivers only anxiety. As one commentator observed, while the leak was the trigger, “rising unemployment is the real fuel angering Gen Z“.
Ivan Illich saw this coming half a century ago.
In his 1971 book Deschooling Society, Illich made a radical claim: institutional schooling had become counterproductive. “The pupil,” he wrote, “is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new”.
Illich argued that most learning is not the result of instruction but “rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting”. Yet schools have become “the world religion of a modernised proletariat,” making “futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age”. They are designed on the assumption “that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets”.
The result is a system that manufactures dependence. “An individual with a schooled mind,” Illich warned, “conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags”. Schooling does not liberate; it conditions people to accept service in place of value.
India has built one of the largest education systems in the world. Nearly 247 million students are enrolled in schools and colleges. We have expanded access, built institutions, and increased enrolment dramatically.
Yet the results are deeply troubling. According to the India Skills Report 2025, prepared by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), only about 55% of graduates are considered employable. Some estimates place this figure as low as 45.9%.
We are producing millions of degree-holders who cannot find meaningful work. As one analysis noted, “Indian universities are failing to equip graduates with needed skills,” and private firms now offer expensive courses to fill the gap, “creating a barrier for many”.
The coaching factory has become the emblem of Indian education—an institution that does not cultivate curiosity but produces exam-takers. Students spend years memorising, cramming, and competing for a handful of seats. The system is designed, as Illich would say, to “confuse process and substance”. The more treatment there is—more coaching, more tests, more years of schooling—the better the results are assumed to be. “Escalation leads to success”.
But success remains elusive. Millions of young Indians wait for government exams that never come, while private sector jobs go unfilled for lack of skilled candidates. The system is failing both those it traps and those it excludes.
The NEET protests of 2026 were not an aberration; they were an eruption. The “Cockroach Janata Party”—a name chosen in sardonic self-deprecation—was a movement of young people who had lost faith in the system. They had done everything right: studied, appeared for exams, chased the certificates. And yet, the system betrayed them.
Illich would not have been surprised. He saw that schools “pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction”. They appropriate “the money, men, and goodwill available for education” and in addition “discourage other institutions from assuming educational tasks”. Work, community, and even family life come to depend on schools “for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education”.
Gen Z in India has discovered this truth the hard way. Their education has not empowered them; it has trapped them in a cycle of endless competition, debt, and disappointment.
Illich was not merely a critic; he offered a vision. He called for “educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring”. He imagined a world where learning happens in communities, not classrooms—where people pursue meaning, not certificates.
During his time in Kerala, Illich was impressed by the state’s grandhasala (library) movement as it came close to this ideal. Labourers pooled rupees to buy books and discussed them after work. It was learning rooted in curiosity and community, not compulsion and certification.
That model has been overshadowed by the coaching factory. But it is not lost. The question is whether we can recover it—whether we can build educational webs that serve genuine learning rather than institutional certification.
The question Illich leaves us
Are we educating citizens capable of thinking and acting autonomously, or are we manufacturing standardised, indebted graduates who cannot function without institutional direction?
The NEET protests of 2026 have given us an answer. The question is whether we will listen.
Also Read:
Ivan Illich and India’s unfinished questions
Withdrawing consent: Gene Sharp and the Cockroach uprising
Jantar Mantar Protests: Weight of words and the Butterfly Effect
The timeless satire of C Northcote Parkinson and what it teaches about our work life today
