Walk into most Indian art schools and you step into a time warp. The studios may have fluorescent lighting and plastic chairs, but the curriculum belongs to a different era — one where art was taught as a skill to master, not as an evolving conversation with the world.

The problem starts with the syllabus. Large portions are still modelled on colonial-era frameworks designed to produce draughtsmen for administrative needs. Students are drilled in academic realism, fed a diet of European art history, and pushed to mimic past styles. Contemporary practice — installation, performance, digital work, socially engaged art — is treated as an afterthought, if at all.

History is taught as memorisation. Dates, names, and definitions are recited for exams. Context, debate, and the messy interplay of art with politics, technology, and culture are missing. Without this depth, history becomes a museum display under glass, instead of a set of tools an artist can adapt to the present.

This isn’t about abandoning foundational skills. Learning how to draw, mix colour, or handle material is essential. But these skills must be taught alongside ways to think, question, and experiment. The current structure rewards obedience and punishes deviation. A student who wants to integrate AI-generated imagery into their painting will be told to “first learn proper technique,” as though the two are mutually exclusive.

Elsewhere in the world, art schools revise their curriculum every few years, pulling in practising artists, curators, and critics to shape it. In India, many syllabi remain untouched for decades. The result is a graduate who knows how to execute but struggles to innovate — a trained hand without a trained mind.

If art schools continue teaching as if the 21st century never happened, they will keep producing artists unprepared for its realities. It’s time to tear up the old syllabus and start again, with working practitioners in the room when the new one is written. If the aim is to prepare students for a global art ecosystem, the curriculum must reflect the world as it is, not as it was.