Education 2047 #Blog 59 (21 MAR 2026)
A reflection on Outcome-Based Education and what we must build for Education 2047
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There is a particular kind of institutional tragedy that unfolds not through failure, but through success. A good idea gets adopted, scaled, codified — and somewhere in that journey, the spirit departs and only the skeleton remains. What was once alive becomes a ritual. What was once honest becomes performative.
Outcome-Based Education is one such tragedy.
I say this not as a critic standing outside the system, but as someone who has lived inside it — who has seen the promise of OBE and also watched, year after year, as that promise quietly hollowed out into compliance theatre.
And I say it now with particular urgency — because India has a date with destiny in 2047. A centenary. A civilisational aspiration. And the question of whether our education system will produce the minds that Viksit Bharat demands cannot wait for another accreditation cycle.
The Promise Was Real
When OBE entered Indian higher education through the gateway of NBA accreditation and the Washington Accord, it carried genuine moral force. For decades before it, we had measured educational quality by inputs — how many books in the library, how many square feet of classrooms, how many PhDs on the faculty. Nobody asked the obvious question: but what can the student do?
OBE asked that question. And that was revolutionary.
The shift from inputs to outcomes — from what we provide to what students become — was philosophically correct. It placed the learner at the centre. It demanded that institutions justify their existence not by their infrastructure but by their impact.
I believed in that shift. I still do, in principle.
What Happened Next
But principle and practice diverge, especially at scale.
What happened next was entirely predictable. The outcomes got specified. The specifications became templates. The templates became checklists. The checklists became the point.
Today, across institutions, enormous energy flows into defining Course Outcomes, mapping them to Program Outcomes, calculating attainment levels, designing rubrics, populating matrices — and ultimately, into demonstrating to an accreditation body that the system is functioning. Not that students are learning. That the system is functioning.
The map became the territory.
And the students? They moved through it, largely unmoved. Receiving pre-defined knowledge, demonstrating pre-specified competencies, and graduating into a world that needed none of what had been so carefully measured.
This is not a failure of individuals. Dedicated faculty work hard within this system. The failure is structural — a framework designed for a stable, predictable world, applied to a world that has become neither.
The AI Rupture
Then came November 30, 2022.
The arrival of generative AI did not create this problem — it simply made it impossible to ignore. Because the question OBE never seriously confronted is now unavoidable: if the outcomes we specify can be achieved by a machine, why are we spending four years specifying them in human beings?
Most Course Outcomes, as written, sit comfortably in the lower and middle registers of Bloom's Taxonomy. Remember. Understand. Apply. These are the verbs that populate our CO statements. These are also, precisely, the verbs that describe what AI now does better, faster, and more reliably than any classroom can produce.
We are, in effect, running an elaborate system to develop capabilities that have already been automated.
The Real Question
This forces a question that education systems are reluctant to ask: what is the irreducibly human cognitive act that higher education should cultivate?
I believe the answer is singular: Creation. Not creation in the narrow artistic sense, but in the deep cognitive sense — the ability to see what does not yet exist, to formulate a question no one has asked, to synthesise across the jagged edges of disciplines and produce something genuinely new. This is the uppermost rung of Bloom's ladder. And it is the one rung that AI, for all its power, cannot climb.
Higher education, if it is to mean anything in the age of AI, must plant its flag here. Not at Remember. Not at Apply. At Create.
OBE, as currently practised, cannot get us there — because creation cannot be pre-specified. It emerges. It surprises. It resists rubrics. The moment you define in advance what a student will create, you have already diminished the act of creation.
The Education 2047 Imperative
India's aspiration for 2047 is not merely economic. It is civilisational. Viksit Bharat imagines an India that leads in technology, governs with wisdom, innovates with confidence, and contributes to the world — not as a recipient of global knowledge, but as its co-creator.
That India cannot be built by a generation trained to attain pre-specified outcomes.
Consider what the 2047 vision actually demands: researchers who push the frontier of quantum and AI; entrepreneurs who create industries that do not yet exist; policymakers who navigate complexity without precedent; teachers who inspire the generation after them. None of these roles can be reduced to a CO matrix. All of them require exactly what OBE, in its present form, does not cultivate — the capacity to create, to lead, to imagine.
Education 2047 is not a distant aspiration. The students who will build that India are in our classrooms today. The faculty who will shape them are preparing lesson plans today. The accreditation frameworks that will incentivise or inhibit that shaping are being revised today.
If we wait until 2040 to reform our educational philosophy, we will have already missed the window.
What Should Follow
I am not arguing for the abolition of outcomes. I am arguing for a different relationship with them.
Instead of pre-specified, narrow, measurable COs, we need something more honest: an orientation toward generative capacity. Can the student frame a problem that matters? Can they work across what they do not know? Can they produce something — an idea, a solution, an artefact — that has value beyond the classroom?
These capacities cannot be expressed in a CO mapping matrix. But they can be witnessed — in challenge-based learning, in portfolio assessment, in trail-based evaluation that tracks not what a student scored but how a student's thinking evolved. The evidence of education, in the AI age, is not a rubric score. It is a body of work.
For Education 2047 to be more than a slogan, our institutions must begin this transition now — from attainment to aspiration, from compliance to creation, from demonstrating pre-defined outcomes to producing genuinely unpredictable ones.
A Note on Accreditation
NBA and NAAC gave OBE its institutional home in India. I do not fault them for that — they needed a measurable framework, and OBE provided one. But measurement systems shape what institutions optimise for. And if our accreditation bodies continue to reward CO attainment documentation over genuine cognitive transformation, they will produce institutions that are very good at one thing: describing, in precise detail, learning that never quite happened.
The second derivative matters more now. Not what outcomes you claim — but how rapidly your graduates are growing in their capacity to think, question, and create. That is harder to measure. It is also the only thing worth measuring — and the only measure that will mean anything when India stands at the threshold of its centenary.
Closing Thought
OBE was not wrong. It was incomplete. It served a purpose — to move us from counting books to counting competencies. But competencies, in the age of AI, are not enough. We need to move from competencies to capacities. From attainment to aspiration. From pre-specified destinations to genuinely open journeys.
The student who walks out of a university today does not need to have achieved a set of outcomes. They need to have become someone capable of creating outcomes that do not yet exist.
That is the student India needs in 2047. Building that student requires us to honestly acknowledge what OBE, for all its virtues, cannot deliver — and to have the courage to build what comes next.
The old map no longer serves the territory we now inhabit. And the territory we are headed towards demands a map we have not yet drawn.
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About the author
Dr. Neeraj Saxena is Pro-Chancellor, JIS University, Kolkata, and a former Scientist at TIFAC and Adviser at AICTE, Government of India. He writes on higher education transformation, AI, and India's cognitive future.