I discovered Punya Mishra’s blog after hearing him share his expertise with educators in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in July 2025. Punya shares a story that goes back to 1918 in a short fable that Tagore wrote called “The Parrot’s Tale”.
This is “a satire about education in which a bird is deemed foolish because it sings and flies but produces nothing measurable. A king orders it educated. Experts build elaborate systems, golden cages, committees upon committees. The bird eventually dies, but the infrastructure has become so impressive that nobody notices. When asked if the bird still sings, the educators explain it has no need to sing."
What if Tagore wrote about the current use of AI in education. What would he make of the adaptive learning platforms, the engagement dashboards, the AI models with the stochastic parrots?