The Last Thing AI Cannot Take: Saurav Sinha on Humanity, Boarding Schools, and the Generation We Are Getting Wrong

When Saurav Sinha, Principal of Mayo College Ajmer, walked onto the stage at Masters Union’s annual event Intersect, he did not begin with data or policy. He began with a question that has nothing to do with academics.

“Are we happier? For all this intelligence, are we a better society? Do we take care of each other?”

It was the kind of question that makes a room go quiet. And in the forty minutes that followed, Sinha made a case that India’s schools and particularly its boarding schools are the last line of defence between a generation of children and a world that is failing them in ways we are only beginning to understand.

The Progress Paradox

Sinha opened with a sweep of human progress. A hundred years ago, most people were born and died within a hundred kilometres of where they started. Hot showers were a luxury. Child mortality was ordinary. Today, India produces some of the most accomplished minds on the planet, running organisations across the globe.

“Being Indian is now associated with a certain intellectual acumen,” he said. “But I want to pose a rhetorical question. Are we happier? Do we have consideration for the people we meet on a daily basis?”

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The question is not about physics or algebra, he argued. It is about something that Indian education has quietly deprioritised — the formation of a human being, not just an examination candidate.

The question is not about physics or algebra, he argued. It is about something that Indian education has quietly deprioritised. The formation of a human being. Not just an examination candidate.

The Gurukul We Forgot

Drawing a line from ancient tradition to modern boarding schools, Sinha reminded the audience that the gurukul was never primarily about academics. If you were going to rule a kingdom, you were sent away at the age of eight or nine, far from comfort and privilege. What the guru taught was values, responsibility, respect, and how to care for people. Academics was only a small part of it.

“Boarding schools,” he said, “are the modern version of the gurukul.” But with an important caveat. He was quick to distinguish between genuine residential institutions and schools that offer hostel accommodation as an additional revenue stream. The former structures every hour of a student’s day around holistic development. The latter simply adds beds.

Sinha leads Mayo College Ajmer, one of India’s largest pure boarding schools with 850 boys, not a single day scholar, on a two hundred acre campus that recently celebrated 150 years. He has students whose great great grandfathers received academic prizes in 1895, whose names are still on the school’s walls. Legacy, he acknowledged, can be a burden. It is also an obligation.

What Boarding Schools Actually Teach

Sinha was unsentimentally specific about the kind of learning that happens outside the classroom in a residential school. He described a scenario that any twelve year old boarder would recognise immediately.

“You have a group of five close friends. You had a fight with one of them. He is not talking to you, and he holds social clout in the group. The other four have also said they are not going to talk to you. The next morning at breakfast, you have to sit at the same assigned table with the same five boys. How do you maneuver that?”

The option of calling a parent does not exist. What the child learns at eleven or twelve is how to negotiate conflict, manage relationships, and read the dynamics of a group. By the time they are eighteen, they have already navigated a hundred such situations. The emotional intelligence that other people spend decades acquiring has been built quietly, through the ordinary friction of residential life.

He was careful to add: “This is not a day school versus boarding school conversation. It is entirely a personal decision based on family circumstances. I am not saying everyone should be a boarder.”

The Last Vestige of Humanity

When Sinha turned to artificial intelligence, he was neither alarmist nor dismissive. His position was straightforward. Resistance to AI is futile, and it is the same conservatism that accountants would have shown thirty years ago when Excel replaced paper ledgers.

“We have to master technology and not be mastered by it.”

But as AI becomes more capable, he argued, it will systematically absorb the quantitative and technical sides of work. What it cannot absorb is what humans do best. Person to person contact. Empathy. Presence.

“The last vestige of humanity is going to be humanness,” he said. “And being human is not wearing a t shirt of Salman Khan. It means providing to society what a machine cannot.”

He pointed to the three years of the pandemic as a data point that is not yet being taken seriously enough. The children who lost social contact for those years are still dealing with the consequences. In learning ability, in confidence, in social skills, in rising rates of depression. The conclusion, he said, is becoming difficult to dispute. Machines can do a great many things, but humans need humans.

The Loaded Gun

The most candid part of Sinha’s address was about smartphones and social media. He banned smartphones at Mayo College last year. He received a standing ovation from parents.

“I was looking at the parents and thinking you hypocrites. You are very happy that I am being the villain. But the moment your child steps out of the campus, you will hand it straight back.”

He was not moralistic about technology itself. He was specific about what social media does to developing minds.

“The lack of depth in this generation is purely because of social media. It came suddenly in 2007. There was not enough time, not enough reason, for anyone to do fundamental research on what it does in the long run.”

He described the effect on his own attention span. A man who once watched slow European films now cannot sit through a car chase. Then he asked the audience to extrapolate that to a child who has been scrolling since the age of two.

He referenced Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, recommending it directly to the audience. The statistics he cited were arresting. From 2007 to the present, rates of teen depression, suicide, and mental health disorders are up not by fifteen or twenty percent but by close to fifteen hundred percent.

“We can look at that data and say it is not convenient. But I want my daily dose of Instagram so I am going to ignore it. You are welcome to do that as an adult. But it has to be controlled for younger people.”

He spoke about the puberty workshops his school runs from the age of eleven. Regular, frank conversations with boys about what they are experiencing, what is normal, and where the line is. A team from Grades 11 and 12 goes down to speak to boys in Grades 7 and 8 about what they went through.

“Once an adult tells a child that what they are feeling is normal, the first thought in their head is that I am not the only one. Once you achieve that, there is scope for progress.”

The Thing Teachers Never Know They Did

Sinha closed with a story about a former student who found him at a social gathering, embarrassed to say what he needed to say in public. The young man was finishing a law degree. He had won prizes in moot court. And he wanted Sinha to know that none of it would have happened if a teacher had not once told him in a corridor, in a throwaway moment, to start reading if he wanted to be a lawyer.

“You realise what a huge impact a statement you do not even remember making can have on a person.”

The converse, he added, is equally true. He has zero tolerance for any teacher who tells a child they will never amount to anything.

“You are not God. The child’s destiny is not in your hands. If you cannot be positive, at least do not put self fulfilling prophecies of a negative nature into a child’s mind.”

His closing line was quietly definitive.

“The best place for a child is with their parents. But only if the parents can be parents in the true sense. If not, a good boarding school provides, to whatever extent possible in the world we live in, protection from the excesses of a society that children are being exposed to far too early.”

He thanked the audience for coming on a Sunday morning. And then he sat down.

This story is inspired by Saurav Sinha’s address at Intersect, the annual flagship event of Masters Union. Saurav Sinha is Principal of Mayo College Ajmer, one of India’s oldest and largest pure boarding schools.

To watch the full speech on YouTube