In ‘Parting Ways’ With Teacher Over ‘Educated Leaders’ Video, Unacademy Scores a Self-Goal
Manish Chhibber | 18 August 2023 | The Wire
The Unacademy teacher who was fired by the company for asking students to vote for a literate person. Credit: Twitter/@kapsology
In its action in “parting ways” with – for those of us who didn’t have the honour of studying at Unacademy, in plain English this means sacking – educator Karan Sangwan for the action of telling his students to vote for educated leaders and its subsequent explanation as to why it did so, Unacademy, an education platform, is both right and wrong. But, from purely a commercial perspective, the company has possibly scored a huge self-goal – one that could cost it future enrolments as well as funding.
Right, because trying to “wrongly influence” students by urging them to use the power of vote effectively by voting for the best candidate – read literate – in an election is not the job of a teacher. Unacademy can always buttress its assertion by pointing out that even our Constitution drafters didn’t make it mandatory for a candidate to hold a college of university degree in order to contest an election.