"Focus Nahi Hai" Is Not a Diagnosis
When schools stop being accountable and start writing letters.
Let me take you back to a moment in Indian banking history.
When K V Kamath decided that ICICI was going to own the retail credit market, the strategy was simple and brutal. Sell everywhere. Sell to everyone. There were ICICI representatives in parking lots offering you a credit card whether you wanted one or not. Credit scores were a suggestion. Repayment ability was someone else's problem.
The theory, as best as I understood it from the other side of the fence at Citibank, was this: if losses hit, they would be a percentage of outstanding loans. So you grow the loan book fast enough that even a bad percentage is manageable. You run the machine until the ATM stops working.
More volume as the answer to a quality problem.
I tell you this as a cautionary tale. Because education is running the same playbook.
Enrol more students. Add more subjects. Assign more homework. Send more letters home. The assumption buried inside all of it is that more effort produces more effectiveness. It doesn't. Kamath found that out. Schools haven't yet.
At the end of my daughter's last half-yearly examinations, I received a note from her school principal. Politely worded, carefully disclaimed — the kind of letter that says everything and commits to nothing.
The substance was this: your daughter has not scored well in Mathematics and History. Please do something about it.
Two things struck me about that letter.
The first was the quiet abdication it represented. The school, at some point, stopped being a service provider. This is not unique to one institution — it is the Ghaffar Market problem.
If you have been to Ghaffar Market in Delhi, you know what a true seller's market looks like. The buyer adjusts. The buyer accommodates. The buyer is grateful for the privilege of being served. Indian schools, particularly private ones with more demand than supply, have drifted into exactly that posture.
Your child underperformed. Here is a letter. The ball is in your court.
The second was the word "something."
More tuition? More cajoling? More motivation? More screen time limits? The letter did not say. It could not say. Because it did not know.
So we decided to go past the signatory and speak to the teacher responsible.
The diagnosis we received was this: "Focus nahi hai. Disinterested hain. Disobedient hai."
Three observations. Zero diagnosis.
The teacher described what she saw and called it the cause. Disengaged, certainly — but disengaged from what? Since when? After which topic? In which specific area of Mathematics?
Was it fractions that lost her, or was it already gone by the time they reached algebra? Is the History problem about retention, or about never having understood the chronology in the first place? Nobody knew. Nobody had looked.
Because here is the thing about disengagement — it is not a character flaw. It is a signal.
A student who switches off is not being difficult. She is telling you something about exactly where the learning broke down. The switched-off student is the most informative student in the room, if you have the tools to read what she is saying.
The school did not have those tools. So it described the signal as the problem, and sent the problem home in an envelope.
This is not a failure of one teacher or one principal. It is a diagnostic infrastructure failure.
The system has no mechanism to see where learning actually broke down — only that it did. So it falls back on what it can observe. Attention. Compliance. Marks.
And when those are missing, it reaches for the language of character. Focus. Interest. Obedience.
And then it writes a letter.
More effort is not more effectiveness. That was true for Kamath's credit cards. It is true for tuition classes and motivational conversations and strongly worded notes home.
Until you know where the breakdown actually happened, everything else is just volume.
The ATM is still running. For now.
Next up: "It's Not the Effort. It's the Time." – The dilemma of the academic calendar.