When service replaces sewa

Framing education entirely through measurable outcomes devalues mentorship and intellectual rigour

Indian and Western perspectives on education share a common idea: that education serves a higher, almost metaphysical, purpose for individuals and communities, a purpose higher than the immediate utilitarian goal of landing a job. In the Indian ethos, education was sewa, a selfless relational practice where the value of service lies in collective welfare rather than individual gain. Embedded in indigenous traditions, sewa ties ethical action to humility, reciprocity, and an awareness of interdependence, rather than to market exchange or measurable “deliverables.” The teacher was a mentor and a character-builder responsible for constructing an individual’s cognition and moral compass. This was service in its purest form: a commitment to the future of the person and the community.

However, this moral grammar of service in education has been dislodged by a neoliberal service economy, replaced with the jargon of consumerism and the semantics of efficiency, consumer satisfaction, and return on investment. Service no longer signifies an aspirational ethic but a contractual obligation governed by metrics, reviews, and performance audits.

The 1990s expansion of banking, IT, BPOs, hospitality, and other “service” industries in India not only absorbed labour, but also catalysed a fundamental reimagination of what it meant for education to be “useful”. As service-sector-led growth became the emblem of national progress, educational systems changed to align with “employability”. The promise of education now is articulated in the idiom of placement, soft skills, and industry-readiness rather than intellectual formation, critical thinking, or ethical citizenship. Education has begun to appear less as a slow, dialogic cultivation of judgment and more as a training module calibrated to produce flexible, compliant, and expendable service providers.

When everything is a service, everyone becomes a customer. This consumerist model of education recasts the student from “learner” to “customer” and knowledge to a measurable commodity, privileging outcome attainments and CGPAs over inquiry, argumentation, and curiosity. Classrooms become service environments governed by satisfaction metrics, where teachers are evaluated through feedback scores and marketable outcomes.

Teaching is reduced to information delivery, and intellectual rigour or critical challenge risk being seen as service failures. The customer-is-always-right model reduces the teacher’s ability to truly mentor and compromises their authority to demand excellence, growth, or instil discipline.

Framing education as a service erodes its transformative element. While the “service” aspect might be delivered through palatable curriculum design, content delivery, and passable assessments, the sewa aspect, the building of a human being through an interpersonal process, is lost.

Beyond industrial logic

This has led to impoverishment. As the service language seeps through education policies, accreditations, and institutional and parental expectations, it promotes a transactional system that struggles to justify why deep, critical, and often unsettling learning should matter. Education is being treated like a software patch or a dine-in experience. However, unlike them, education is a complex collaborative process of growth, of both students and teachers. Reducing it to a service not just devalues a profession, but also undermines the intellectual and moral foundations of the next generation.

The rise of artificial intelligence and Large Language Models continues to expose the shortsightedness of higher education systems modelled on the service sectors. Since the 1990s, universities have evolved as high-volume assembly lines producing a service-ready white-collar workforce for the IT industry. Unfortunately, the sector has now outpaced the demand for the skilled workforce it once created. Now that AI and LLM are taking over coding and information management, humans must master what machines cannot – empathy, accountability, complex moral reasoning, the ability to process another’s perspective, and to act with integrity under conditions of uncertainty.

These are not just buzzwords. They are the core values of any society that hopes to remain humane in the age of artificial efficiency. They cannot be acquired through short-term and fast-paced skill modules, but only through a prolonged process of dialogue and disagreement, ambiguity, intellectual difficulty, and ethical dialectics.

We are stepping into an era where being a well-rounded, reflective human being is becoming more important to both industry and the wider community. The present existential crisis of education is an opportunity to think ahead of the industrial logic of input-output and audits, and to re-invent the classic vocation of mentoring, forming individuals who can make sense of the unpredictable world with courage and care. If we fail to make this change to our education system, we will have hollowed it out ourselves, long before the machines arrive.

(Navneet reaches education at Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala; Sushant teaches English at VIT, Vellore)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.