Engineer · Researcher · Education
Curiosity is not
a privilege.
It is how children learn, and it should not depend on what a family can afford.
I’m Pardeep Kumar. After more than a decade in engineering and research, I’m turning towards school education, and towards the kind of learning that ordinary families in India can reach.
Learning how to learn.
The conviction
A good education
should not depend
on an accident of birth.
I went to school in a village and then in a small town, where the work was almost entirely rote. Since moving to the Netherlands in 2019 I have watched children here being taught things my own schooling never covered: how to argue a point, work in a group, hold a room, lose a match, notice where someone else’s boundary is. That is one person’s view of two systems rather than a verdict on either, but it is the comparison I keep coming back to.
I had to assemble most of that late, and in public. Inquiry-led learning and the skills a person actually lives by are not luxury features bolted onto schooling. They are the ordinary everyday work of helping a child learn how to learn, and they belong to every child.
What I believe about learningA foundation in
ideas & execution
I trained in aerospace engineering at IIT Bombay and spent more than a decade working across software, engineering, and research in India and the Netherlands.
My experience includes Shell, ASM International, and doctoral research at CWI Amsterdam and TU Delft. Along the way, I’ve built scientific software and independent digital products, taking ideas through to working systems.
Mathematics, physics, and computation were the subjects that taught me how to learn. What I keep returning to is how much a single good question can change what a child understands.
That experience shapes how I think about education: ask good questions, bring capable people together, and put care into the everyday execution.
If any of this
sounds familiar to you.
I’d like to hear from teachers, school leaders, parents, and anyone who thinks carefully about how children are taught.