– (Anil Srinivasan is Founder of KRUU and Rhapsody Foundations, and Visiting Professor at Krea University, Sri City)

ANIL SRINIVASAN

I have been in a lot of classrooms. Government schools in Tamil Nadu where the benches are crowded and the windows let in more noise than light. International schools where facilities would embarrass most universities. And everything in between — across 14 countries, over two decades of work that started as a music programme and became something harder to name.

One feature has remained constant across all of them. The moment a child stops performing for a teacher and starts working on something real, for someone real, the room changes. You can feel it. The quality of attention shifts. Questions become different. More urgent, more specific. Less “will this be on the exam” and more “but what actually happens when you do that?”

That shift is what project-based learning is really about. Not projects. Something real.

For a long time, we’ve spoken about PBL (project-based learning) as a pedagogical option — a different way of organising curriculum, sequencing activities, assessing what students know.

It is all of those things. But the version that is actually changing outcomes, in measurable and visible ways, is the version where a learner is working on a real problem and has access to someone who has navigated that problem professionally.

A student in Coimbatore designing a water harvesting system. A student in Nairobi calculating the carbon cost of her city’s logistics waste. A student in Manila building a microfinance simulation for a local cooperative. These are real projects, from real study programmes. What they share isn’t a subject or a curriculum framework. They share a structure: a problem that matters, a process that demands thinking, and a mentor who isn’t performing expertise but actually practising it. This last element is the one we keep underinvesting in.

The global mentor is, I believe, the most underutilised resource in contemporary education. Not because people aren’t generous — they are, remarkably so — but because we haven’t built the infrastructure that makes that generosity actionable. A hydrologist in Singapore giving up an afternoon to talk through a water problem with a 14-year-old in India isn’t just a feel-good story. When done with structure and seriousness, it is a fundamentally different type of education.

What the expert provides that a textbook cannot, is judgement. Not merely knowledge, but experience of how knowledge is actually applied: what gets prioritised when you can’t have everything, what gets revisited when the first approach doesn’t hold, what it feels like to be uncertain inside a problem and still have to move forward. This is professional experience that education has never quite managed to incorporate. The mentor makes it possible.

For 800,000 learners in 14 countries, this is an existential reality. Students who work with global mentors don’t just perform differently when assessed. They ask different questions. They are less apprehensive about what they don’t know, because they have learned with experts who are openly uncertain about things, and watched them think their way through. That is a different relationship with knowledge than anything a well-designed syllabus can provide.

The paradigm shift in self-belief is what matters most. Students who once doubted their own competence begin to assess themselves differently — not as recipients of knowledge, but as capable contributors to resolving real problems. That quiet recalibration of what feels possible, more than an assessment score, may be the most lasting outcome of project-based learning with global mentors.

There is something else worth identifying, because it is rarely mentioned in learning outcomes literature. The student-mentor relationship is reciprocal in ways that are difficult to quantify but impossible to miss. I have witnessed senior professionals — lawyers, scientists, architects, musicians — leave a session with a group of students visibly energised. Not in the patronising way of someone who enjoyed explaining things. In the way of someone who was made to think carefully about something they hadn’t examined from first principles in a long time.

This is what education should be: not a one-way transmission of expertise from a credentialed adult to a compliant young person, but a genuine intellectual encounter across differences of age, context, of what each party stands to gain. The young person learns that knowledge is lived, not stored. The expert remembers why the problem was interesting in the first place.

When we say PBL is changing learning outcomes, we mean not the project but the encounter. The world becomes more intelligible to a young person because someone familiar with it agreed to show her around.

That is the pedagogy we are developing. It was available all along. We just hadn’t examined the issue thoroughly.

The global mentor is the most under-utilised resource in contemporary education not because people are not generous — they are remarkably so — but because we haven’t built the infrastructure that makes generosity actionable