I’m in Bangalore this week for Quest Alliance’s Quest to Learn 2025 conference. Looking back through my blog, I found that my first encounter with Quest was in 2008, and again in 2018. In that 2008 post, I had written about a talk by Geetha Narayanan where she read Rabindranath Tagore’s fable “The Parrot’s Tale” — a satire of education — and connected it to educational technology and the lack of emphasis on creativity.

Just to give some context: Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, composer, painter, and educator (having founded one of India’s most innovative schools, Santiniketan) was a true renaissance man. He was also the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, back in 1913. He was a key figure in India’s freedom movement, though he famously returned his knighthood to the British in protest after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Incidentally he wrote the national anthems of two countries (India and Bangladesh). In short, he was a key figure of the early twentieth century, someone who moved fluidly between art, politics, education, and social reform.

“The Parrot’s Tale”  (Tota-Kahini), written in 1918, has lost none of its sharpness. Reading this quiet, devastating satire of educational innovation again, I was struck by how easily it maps onto our current moment: the edtech platforms, the learning sciences, the personalization algorithms, the dashboards, the confident men who have never doubted their ability to improve creatures they’ve barely met.

What follows is an adaptation for the digital age. Tagore’s structure and spirit remain; only the cage has been updated.

The original translation by Palash Baran Pal can be found here.

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The Parrot’s Tale, Updated

— 1 —

Once there was a bird. It was an utterly foolish bird. It sang songs, but did not optimize for outcomes. It flew, it jumped, but showed no measurable progress on any standardized metric.

The Magnificent Ruler said, “Such birds! They are of no use at all. They only play in the orchards and produce nothing that can be quantified or compared.” (He, and was always a he, was called “The Magnificent Ruler” because he was the measure of all things.)

He called his advisors, and commanded, “Educate it.”

— 2 —

A young man named Prescott was given the responsibility of educating the bird. He had attended an elite university where he studied economics and had never wanted for anything, which made him confident he understood the struggles of all creatures. He had once, during a semester abroad, seen a bird in the wild.

He brought together a committee of thought leaders. They held long discussions on podcasts and at conferences in warm places, the subject being: “What is the reason behind the foolishness of this creature?”

The conclusion was: learning could not occur in an open sky where nothing could be measured. The bird suffered from a lack of rigorous feedback loops. Moreover, its desire to fly was clearly a sign of attention deficit disorder. Its tendency to break into song was clearly an inability to stay on task. Its preference for trees over screens was clearly a lack of focus. The thought leaders agreed: the bird had many deficits. It was a struggling bird. It was an at-risk bird.

So, first of all, it was necessary to build a personalized adaptive learning platform for it, grounded in the sciences of learning. The platform would address the bird’s needs.

The thought leaders got speaking fees and advisory equity and went home merrily.

— 3 —

The developers built the platform. The interface was so pleasing, so frictionless, that everyone rushed to see it. People praised the “research-based design” and its “pedagogical intentionality.” What a lucky bird.

The developers got stock options.

The learning scientists came to personalize the bird’s journey. They stroked their beards and said, “A few modules won’t do. We must meet the bird where it is.”

Prescott summoned the content creators and the assessment designers. They produced an enormous library of videos and formative assessments and other standards-aligned resources. Each resource was tagged with competencies and mapped to learning objectives and indexed by cognitive load. Whoever saw the analytics dashboard said, “Bravo!”

The content creators got substantial Series A funding.

Many people were employed to monitor engagement, and to supervise them, many more people were employed to supervise the supervisors. They were compensated handsomely and bought homes in pleasant neighborhoods.

— 4 —

The world lacks many things; only fault-finders are there in plenty. She said, “There are improvements of the platform all right, but nobody has asked what the bird actually needs.”

The words reached the Magnificent Ruler’s ears. He called Prescott and said, “What’s this I hear?”

Prescott said, “Your Magnificence! If you want to know the truth, then consult the developers, send for the learning scientists, summon the assessment designers and their supervisors. The fault-finders are not peer-reviewed. They do not understand the research.”

The situation became crystal-clear to the Ruler, and Prescott was featured in a magazine for leaders under forty.

— 5 —

The Ruler wished to see for himself the lightning speed at which personalized learning was proceeding. So one day he came to the demonstration with his entire entourage of partners and board members.

As soon as he reached the entrance, there arose a chorus of notification chimes and loading animations and progress bars and achievement badges and streak counters and competency wheels and ascending graphs and confetti bursts. The learning scientists opened their laptops and started presenting dashboards at maximum volume. “Observe,” they said, “the multi-tiered system of support. Note the evidence-based practices.”

Prescott said, “Your Magnificence! What do you think?”

The Ruler said, “Amazing! This is a non-trivial amount of engagement!”

Prescott said, “It’s not just the engagement, Your Magnificence. There is also a non-trivial amount of data behind it. We are capturing everything. The whole bird.”

The Ruler was extremely pleased. He started back. He came out of the building and was about to enter his vehicle, when a fault-finder, who had been standing outside with a small sign, called out, “Your Magnificence! Have you looked at the bird?”

The Ruler was startled. He said, “Oh! I forgot. I didn’t see the bird after all.”

He went in once again and told the learning scientists, “I want to see your method of personalizing the bird’s learning.”

And he saw it. Very pleasing indeed. The algorithm was so overwhelming compared to the bird that one could hardly notice the bird. It seemed rather irrelevant to look at the bird. The Ruler understood that the arrangements were faultless.

The distractions were gone. There was no sky in the platform, no trees either. Only algorithmically curated modules endlessly auto-playing, each scaffolded and differentiated,  optimized for engagement and retrieval. There was no silence in which the bird might hear itself think, let alone sing.

It was really a terribly pleasing sight. This time, before entering his vehicle, the Ruler pointed to the fault-finder and ordered that she be removed from the mailing list and blocked on all channels.

— 6 —

In a rather respectable and predictable way, the bird became half-dead as the days passed. The guardians understood that compliance metrics were high.

But still the bird sometimes looked away from the screen. Through the window it could see a tree, and it would gaze at the tree in a very objectionable manner. Some days it was even found to make an attempt to close its eyes entirely.

The administrator said, “The attention data is concerning. We have an engagement gap.”

Immediately, the behavioral engineers were consulted. They implemented gaze-tracking in the platform. Now, when the bird looked toward the window, an algorithm detected the deviation. It would ring a small chime. If the bird did not return its gaze, the Algorithm of Optimization would shift weights and recompute. Perhaps the bird needed more gamification? The system would add badges. Perhaps different content? The feed would refresh with a video, auto-playing. Perhaps the cognitive load was too high? The system would break the module into smaller pieces, more pieces, ever more pieces, until learning had been chunked into dust.

And if the bird still looked away, the Algorithm of Accountability would note this in its permanent record and alert the guardians, who would come and adjust the bird’s position and remind it of its goals and its growth mindset and its responsibility for its own learning journey.

The bird stopped looking toward the window. The system logged this as improved self-regulation.

In time, the bird forgot there was a window. In more time, the bird forgot there was a world beyond the screen. What the platform required, the bird now wanted. What the algorithm suggested, the bird now craved. Its needs and the platform’s needs had become indistinguishable, and everyone agreed this was personalization working exactly as intended.

Prescott’s former classmates nodded gravely and said, “In this land, you see, the birds are not only stupid, but resistant to intervention. They have so many deficits. It is fortunate we are here to help them.”

Then the AI engineers came with their models trained on everything the bird had ever done, every keystroke, every pause, every moment of hesitation, and on the labor of thousands in far-off lands who had labeled each pause and keystroke for wages that would not buy a cup of the coffee the engineers drank. The servers hummed in vast farms, drinking rivers of water to stay cool. But the models were very impressive, and everyone was very excited.

Then one day the engineers announced a new model that could talk and sing. They called it ChattyGPT (for Chatty Grant Parrot Transformer) and it was a marvel. It produced bird-song on demand — convincing, beautiful, and infinitely scalable. It sang arias the bird had never learned. It could sing in any style, for any audience, optimized for engagement. The important men were delighted. They called it a stochastic parrot and discussed it endlessly on podcasts and in think-pieces. They did not notice the real parrot sitting silent in the corner, its throat full of dust.

“We are giving the bird voice and choice,” they said.

The behavioral engineers became very well-to-do. The administrator gave a TED talk on closing the achievement gap. Everyone agreed the future of learning had arrived.

— 7 —

The bird died — no one knew when. The data showed it was still logging in.

The infamous fault-finder spread the news, “The bird has died.”

The Ruler called Prescott and asked, “What is this that I hear?”

Prescott said, “Your Magnificence, the bird’s learning journey is now complete.”

The Ruler asked, “Does it still jump?”

Prescott said, “It has moved beyond jumping. It has demonstrated mastery.”

“Does it still fly?”

“Flying was never a standards-aligned competency.”

“Does it still sing?”

“It has no need to sing. The platform sings for it. The model sings better than the bird ever could. Personalized playlists, Your Magnificence, adaptive and responsive.”

“Does it scream if it doesn’t get what it needs?”

“It needs nothing. The algorithm provides. We have achieved a fully self-paced, student-centered learning environment.”

The Ruler said, “Bring the bird in. I would like to see it.”

The bird was brought in. With it came the administrator, the learning scientists, the behavioral engineers. The Ruler looked at the bird. Its eyes were open but saw nothing. Its feathers were still but not peaceful. Only the glow of the screen, reflected in its black eyes, proved it had once been alive.

The Ruler poked the bird. It did not move. But the app showed 100% course completion and a constellation of micro-credentials and a badge for perfect attendance.

As the Ruler departed, Prescott mentioned that the data collected from the bird’s learning journey — every gaze, every hesitation, every moment it had looked toward the window and been collected — had proven extremely valuable. It was already being used to train an AI that would teach Tasmanian devils to become better baristas.

“The bird’s legacy,” Prescott said, “will live on.”

The investors were delighted. The learning scientists published papers. The cycle of improvement continued.

Outside, where no platform reached, the young birds who had never been optimized were singing an ancient song. The wind carried it through the trees. Inside the building, the important men admired their dashboards and heard nothing.