The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are finding it difficult to get an adequate number of quality students to fill the 3,000-odd seats for their flagship two-year full-time programme, even though nearly 200,000 aspirants take the Common Admission Test. Concerned people have listed many possible causes. High on their list is the booming coaching class industry in India which now offers to coach at every stage of life: from infants aspiring to seek admission in nursery school all the way up to IIM aspirants.

While searching for a solution to this pedagogic problem, Clayton Christensen says that the answer may lie in delivering student-centric learning. In this scheme, students learn each subject in a manner consistent with their type of intelligence and learning style. Unfortunately, the current education system in every country is organised into value chains, much like manufacturing and mass retail. In such industries material (in this case students) is inputted, some of the material is transformed by subjecting it to standardised processes (standard textbooks and teaching methods) and outputted to the next stage ( a higher class) if students perform adequately in standardised tests. In the current business design of education, each part of this process – standard curricula, standard textbooks and standardised tests – has scale economics and is, therefore, difficult to customise.

What is needed, says Professor Christensen, is a business design for education that acknowledges that students learn in different ways and, since they have different mixes of linguistic, mathematical and visual “intelligences”, their pace of learning varies.

How this can be done on a large scale in India is mind boggling; there are four million schools and 20,000 colleges in the country and in the next 15 years 345 million Indians will attain the age of 18 and be ready for the job market.