New Delhi, April 2 -- When big changes happen slowly, we don't notice them. Climate change is a glaring example. Slow is anything that happens over a human lifetime or more. There have been massive changes in education over the past 25-30 years, for example, but that's such a large part of our life-span that we are mostly unaware of them. We tend to take the current state as natural and given.

One of the most important of these changes has been the development of a cross-party consensus on school education, much like the political consensus on the direction of India's economic management that emerged in the early 1990s. Since education is a matter in which everyone has a direct stake, most individuals have a view on it. And so, this cons...