Every year in India, lakhs of children line up at the gates of competitive exams. For some, it’s IIT-JEE, for others NEET, for still others the civil services. Parents enroll them in coaching centers as early as Class 6, where timetables stretch from dawn till night. Math, in these places, is often reduced to speed, tricks, and shortcuts. Children learn to crack problems in thirty seconds because time is marks, and marks are everything. But in this obsession with efficiency, we are losing sight of the real essence of mathematics: the ability to think critically.
Critical thinking in math is not about solving the maximum number of problems in the shortest time. It is about pausing to ask: Why does this work? Can there be another way? What pattern am I missing? Without this, students may clear exams, but they rarely carry the kind of understanding that shapes innovators, scientists, or even independent thinkers.
“India produces the largest number of engineers in the world, but according to a 2019 survey by Aspiring Minds, 80% of them are unemployable because they lack problem-solving and analytical skills.”
This isn’t just an employment crisis. It is a thinking crisis.
I remember a boy who joined my class in Grade 9. He had been attending a famous Kota-based coaching institute for two years. His notebooks were filled with formulas, his memory was sharp, but he froze when a problem was phrased differently. One day I asked him to explain why the formula for the area of a triangle worked. He looked blank. “We are never asked this,” he said. And therein lay the problem. Our system was training him to answer, not to understand.
The obsession with marks has turned many Indian homes into mini coaching centers. Parents, even those who are not from technical backgrounds, often repeat the same refrain: “Do more practice papers. Memorize the shortcuts. Speed up.” But in this rush, children are rarely encouraged to play with math, to ask their own questions, to imagine.
Yet mathematics is at its most beautiful when it becomes exploration. Take a group of Class 5 children and ask, “How many ways can we divide 12?” At first, you will hear 6 + 6, 10 + 2, 3 × 4. But as you prod them, their eyes begin to shine. Someone will say, “What about fractions?” Another will suggest negative numbers. A curious child might even say, “Can we use exponents?” Suddenly, the classroom transforms from quiet anxiety to buzzing creativity. This is math as it should be—alive, playful, critical.
“Every year, over 1.2 million students appear for JEE Mains, but only a small fraction make it to IITs. The tragedy is that while many leave with crushed dreams, almost all leave without having discovered the joy of mathematical thinking.”
The truth is, exams are not going anywhere. IIT and NEET will continue to be gates to opportunity. But what we can change is how we prepare children. Critical thinking does not slow them down—it strengthens them. A student who understands the “why” behind a formula can adapt to any new situation. A student who only memorizes shortcuts panics the moment the question changes its shape.
I once asked a group of senior students to solve a simple puzzle: “You cut a rope into three equal parts. You make different shapes with each part. What do you notice about the areas?” At first, silence. Then hesitant attempts. And then, slowly, ideas began to flow. They drew, they calculated, they argued. At the end, one boy looked up and said, “This is the first time in years I felt like math was… fun.” That word—fun—is so rare in our math classrooms, yet it should be the foundation.
Coaching centers and schools in India often work like factories. Uniform notes, uniform methods, uniform answers. Children are trained like exam soldiers. But true education is not about producing soldiers. It is about producing thinkers who can face a world full of unscripted problems.
We cannot ignore this any longer. If India wants to nurture scientists, entrepreneurs, and leaders, we must begin with critical thinking in classrooms.
So how do we make the shift? Parents and teachers can start small. Resist the temptation to provide immediate answers. Encourage children to think aloud. Ask them, “What patterns do you see? Could there be another way?” Bring math into daily life—fractions in cooking, geometry in rangoli designs, probability in cricket. Show them that math is not a separate subject locked in a textbook, but a way of seeing the world.
Most importantly, we must change how we treat mistakes. Right now, mistakes are punished with red marks and shame. But mistakes are the very soil where critical thinking grows. Every wrong answer is an invitation to dig deeper, to question assumptions, to try again. If a child feels safe to fail, they will also feel free to think.
Critical thinking in math is not just academic—it is cultural. It changes how a child approaches life. A student who learns to break a tough problem into smaller parts can later break down life’s complex challenges. A student who learns to question assumptions in math can later question biases in society. This is why math, taught with critical thinking, is not just about numbers. It is about shaping independent minds.
When I look back on my decades of teaching, the moments that stand out are not when students topped exams, but when they surprised me with their ideas. A boy who realized symmetry by folding paper. A girl who explained probability using dice at a wedding game. A teenager who challenged me with a new way to solve a problem I had taught for years. These are the flashes of brilliance that exams cannot measure, but life rewards endlessly.
If we continue to measure our children only by their exam ranks, we may fill our colleges, but we will empty our future of thinkers. Critical thinking must become the holy grail of math education in India—not because it helps in exams, but because it prepares our children to face a world far bigger than any exam.