Nash Equilibrium & Education - Lessons from the Road

A few weeks back, I was on my way from Sonipat to Delhi with my professor who taught me at the Young India Fellowship. He was a professor of Statistical Thinking and Problem Solving. One of the most charming things about this professor was that at any given opportunity, he would launch into a captivating story to illustrate a statistics concept.?

When one is on a road anywhere in the NCR, you’ll pray for your life, regardless of whether you’re religious. After swerving quickly from an accident that could’ve been, I jokingly said Indian drivers were masters of jugaad, and were just driving recklessly to get to a certain place faster. And he immediately caught onto that, launching into a story about game theory and the Nash Equilibrium.?

Now I’m not as good a storyteller as he is, but this is the gist – if all drivers on a road drive with basic civic sense and regard for the rules, all cars will get to a certain point faster. And if even one person drives while trying to maximise their own interest at the expense of others, all cars as a whole will be worse off. On an individual level, it may seem like skipping a red light, driving 20 kmph faster than the speed limit or driving between two lanes might be useful… And it might. But on a systemic level, that deviance has more costs that significantly outweigh one person getting somewhere faster.?

And the fundamental lesson is this – leaders should be aspiring to get to that state of Nash Equilibrium. A state where people play their part without deviating, knowing that doing so means the optimal payoff for everyone, including and most importantly, themselves.

I started visualising this concept playing out in schools. As people, we often prioritise our needs / interests, and that is only understandable. You wouldn’t blame a student bending the rules to have a laugh or get some street cred, or a teacher who worries about the tradeoff between an engaging class vs completing their syllabus. In fact, as educators and former students yourselves, you’d probably empathise. You often hear school leaders asking what the need for continuous professional development is, especially since teachers receive training before they join schools, or in some cases, at the beginning of academic years at school. And this is understandable too – taking the responsibility of continuous learning at a school is significantly harder than maintaining lane discipline, to say the least!?

And that is what the AQS Collaborative School Review steps in to solve. The school review is an evaluation of school performance to understand where the school currently stands. However, it is not just a mere external audit. We believe the collaborative nature of the review is one of its greatest strengths. At an AQS Collaborative School Review, representatives from school leadership, teachers, non-teaching staff, students, parents, and even alumni work alongside external assessors (education professionals with experience of reviewing schools) to review the school kindly, yet critically. Another key part of this review is understanding What Good Looks Like; by benchmarking the school against research-based international best practices, school stakeholders begin to understand what to aspire towards, plan for school improvement, and more importantly, the role they have to play to get there. This enables the school to take ownership of its growth

Borrowing from the words of Manit Jain, founder of the Heritage Xperiental Schools, through the review, Adhyayan aims to support schools to develop a common vocabulary, a framework to look at things consistently, and a framework to evaluate progress.?

Our review is designed to support all school leaders to get to that state of Nash Equilibrium so that every student benefits. Imagine a country powered by its next gen armed with a high-quality education. Does it fire your imagination too?!?