The Hindu warns AI may reinforce rote
- The Hindu’s Smita Deorah argued on May 4 that putting AI into classrooms without changing curricula will mostly speed up India’s existing rote-learning habits. - Her core point was blunt: AI can generate quizzes, summaries, and worksheets fast, but it cannot decide what knowledge is worth teaching. - That matters because India is rolling AI into schools from 2026-27, raising the risk of automating outdated pedagogy.
Classroom AI sounds modern. That is exactly why this warning matters. The easy version of the story is that schools are getting new tools. The harder version is that those tools may just turbocharge the oldest habit in Indian education — rote learning. In a May 4 piece in *The Hindu*, Smita Deorah makes the case that if schools keep rewarding recall, summaries, and predictable answers, AI will mostly make that system faster, not better. ### What is the actual warning? The warning is not “keep AI out.” It is narrower and sharper. If the curriculum still asks students to memorize, reproduce, and fill worksheets, then AI will become the perfect machine for doing exactly that at scale — generating practice questions, notes, answer keys, a thing learning is for. ### Why does rote fit AI so well? Because rote tasks are structured, predictable, and easy to imitate. Give a model a chapter, and it can spit out a summary. Give it a topic, and it can draft ten quiz questions in seconds. That looks efficient — and sometimes it is. But if the student’s job is just to do that, you get a strange kind of progress: more output, less thinking. ### So what should schools change first? The target should be the “what,” not just the tool. Deorah argues that as information gets easier to access, education should shift toward questioning, connecting ideas, applying knowledge, and judging what matters. Basically, if facts are cheap, judgment becomes future-ready because a chatbot got added to it. ### Why is this landing now? Because India is not debating AI in the abstract anymore. The Union education ministry said in late 2025 that AI would become part of the school curriculum from Class 3 onward starting in the 2026-27 academic session. That turns a philosophical argument into an implementation problem. Once a system starts rolling out training, software, and classroom materials, bad assumptions harden fast. ### Isn’t some AI use still helpful? Yes — and that is part of the catch. AI can save teachers time on drafting materials, adapting reading levels, and generating examples. Another recent *The Hindu* piece on teacher use made a similar point: the best classroom use cases are teacher-led pedagogy. ### Why does teacher preparation matter so much? Because a weak rollout turns AI into a checkbox. If teachers are handed new software but not new goals, they will use it for the tasks schools already
