How EdTech Forgot Teaching | The 111th Essay

At 2 a.m., an MBA aspirant sits beneath the pale glow of a laptop screen watching a video called “Complete CAT Strategy in 30 Days.” A countdown timer flashes in red. The comment section moves faster than thought itself. Students beg for shortcuts. Mentors promise certainty. Another crash course launches before the previous one is even finished. Nobody pauses long enough to ask the simplest question of all. Has any real learning actually happened?

Modern EdTech began with an almost utopian promise. Technology would democratize education. A student from a small town could now access the same teachers as students in Delhi, Mumbai, or Bangalore. Recorded lectures dissolved geographical barriers. Test series became cheaper. High quality preparation no longer belonged exclusively to expensive coaching institutes. For millions of families, online education genuinely transformed opportunity.

Yet somewhere along the way, the industry began forgetting what teaching actually was.

The dashboard replaces the blackboard.

The old classroom revolved around human attention. A teacher watched faces carefully. Confusion could be sensed before it was spoken aloud. Good teachers slowed down when students hesitated. They explained the same concept differently for different minds. Teaching was intimate, repetitive, and often painfully slow. Learning was not treated as content consumption. It was treated as intellectual formation.

But slowness does not scale elegantly.

Most large EdTech companies operate under the logic of aggressive growth. They must acquire more students, reduce delivery costs, increase engagement, and dominate visibility. Over time, this economic pressure quietly transforms education into performance. The student slowly stops becoming a learner and becomes data instead. A click. A lead. A conversion percentage. A retention graph.

This environment rewards performative pedagogy. Across the internet, amateur teachers increasingly manufacture attractive but intellectually hollow frameworks designed less for understanding and more for popularity. Acronyms, color coded systems, productivity maps, “secret methods,” and exaggerated strategy blueprints flood student feeds every day. Many of these frameworks look sophisticated because they are packaged beautifully. But packaging is not pedagogy.

The problem becomes especially dangerous in mathematics where genuine understanding demands precision and depth. Half knowledgeable teachers often take ordinary observations or familiar shortcuts and market them as revolutionary systems. A simple approximation trick suddenly becomes a “proprietary framework.” A standard pattern recognition method becomes a “secret calculation engine.” Common sense is polished until it resembles innovation.

Students are taught to worship tricks before they understand the logic beneath them.

The loud mentor defeats the careful teacher. Confidence defeats depth. Algorithms reward certainty while genuine education requires patience, doubt, repetition, and intellectual humility.

For a while this creates the illusion of intelligence. Aspirants feel fast. They feel ahead of others. Yet the foundation underneath remains fragile. The moment a problem changes shape slightly, the framework collapses because memorized shortcuts cannot substitute for mathematical reasoning. Real mathematics trains the mind to think structurally. Much of online teaching trains the mind to search for templates.

The arrival of ChatGPT accelerated this tendency even further. Long and difficult essays from publications like Aeon can now be compressed into neat summaries within seconds. MBA aspirants proudly consume “five minute breakdowns” of ideas that originally demanded an hour of slow reading and reflection. On the surface this appears efficient. In reality something invisible disappears.

Intellectual struggle vanishes.

An Aeon essay is not valuable merely because of its conclusion. Its value lies in the movement of thought itself. The reader wrestles with ambiguity, contradiction, and uncertainty. Compression removes this friction. Students increasingly consume conclusions without experiencing the thinking that produced them. Familiarity quietly begins masquerading as understanding.

The same culture now shapes modern mentorship. Many online mentors no longer sell only education. They sell themselves. Their routines, emotional monologues, productivity rituals, luxury purchases, and personal struggles become part of the educational product. Impressionable aspirants slowly begin admiring personalities instead of ideas. Influence quietly replaces teaching.

This damages young minds in ways that often remain invisible. Students begin believing that appearing intelligent matters more than becoming thoughtful. Spectacle overshadows substance.

Defenders of EdTech are not entirely wrong. Online platforms have undeniably expanded access to learning. A recorded lecture can now reach lakhs of aspirants where one classroom once reached fifty. For many students, digital education remains economically transformative.

But access is not the same as education.

Information can spread infinitely across screens. Attention cannot. Real teaching changes how a student confronts uncertainty itself. It builds intellectual temperament rather than temporary motivation.

Perhaps that is the quiet crisis of modern education. We live in a civilization overflowing with explanations yet starving for wisdom. Everything now looks educational. Dashboards, AI summaries, frameworks, productivity systems, and strategy videos create the appearance of learning everywhere. Yet many students emerge unable to think independently without constant guidance.

The ancient image of a teacher was someone who slowly made themselves unnecessary. Much of modern EdTech survives by ensuring the student always needs one more course.