Ancient Wisdom Practices in Education - A Conversation with Bade Kucukoglu and Satheesh Namasivayam

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There are practices that are needed for very many challenges of this world, and so we need more innovation, more acceptance, and more harnessing of collective wisdom of humanity to bring to our students these practices in ways that they could make it part of their identity. They could embrace it and bring it in.

Hi everyone. Thanks for being with us this week. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. On today's episode, we're diving deep into a conversation that bridges ancient wisdom and modern learning. Joining me are two incredible thinkers and practitioners, Satish Namasevayam and Bade Kuchukkulu. We explore how ancient wisdom practices from dance to creative arts, ritual, and community performance can inform and inspire us to create different kinds of spaces in our schools and communities and help us address the growing disconnection young people feel in their modern lives. Satish and Bade left their lucrative careers to pursue their passion to work with adolescents, and over the last 15 years, they've co-founded two organizations, Mindvisa and the Center for All Ancient Wisdom Engagement, that build adaptive capacities in adolescents to face the uncommon challenges of the fast-evolving world. Prior to co-founding these organizations, Satish advised corporate boards on leadership and governance across the world, and Bade was a development economist working with MIT faculty, directing a team of researchers, and was also the Secretary General of the Women Entrepreneurship Association of Turkey. You can find lots more links about their work or to contact Bade and Satish in the show notes. Hi Bade. Hi Satish. Thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to chat with you. So yeah, thank you very much for joining.

Thanks, Tim. Lovely to be here. I believe it is almost 2 years since we first spoke about doing this podcast. I'm glad it is happening now.

Absolutely. And me too. Yeah. We've had the pleasure of meeting in New Delhi at Pathways School. Yeah. A couple of years ago, 2023. Lots of lovely conversations there and, and glad to be picking it up again now. So yeah, perhaps maybe if we could just start with a bit of context setting for your own personal journeys into this work, I'd really love to get onto these delicious ideas of awe and ancient wisdom and all of this amazing stuff that you're doing. But yeah, maybe just, I think it's a really interesting thing for listeners just to understand how have you come towards this work? So I don't know, Satish, would you like to start that journey?

Sure. In 2013, Bhade and I, we stepped back from our careers. I was a strategic advisor on corporate boards across the world. Bhade was a development economist But we decided to step back and pursue our passions, which is working with adolescents. So we went into a southern Indian village and started setting up some experiments because this looked like our calling. And we said, let's just pursue that. And it is a time, if you remember, Tim Logan, it was very interesting in the adoption of smartphones in this world. It was a time India was already the second largest user of mobile phones in the world. And smartphones were coming in. And even in a village, even in a village, you could see the effects of it already with the children, with the adolescents. We were primarily working with high school students. And so as we started setting out, it became apparent to us we really need to do two things. One, first of all, taking a step back, there were already experiments to acknowledge that, experiments to connect children with nature. That many experiments had already started. But we found that experiments to help children connect with their own selves, integrate themselves within themselves, and to help them integrate with the rest of the society, with fellow humans, were the two areas that we found there weren't enough experiments yet. So we started setting out and saying, okay, let's create some experiments in these areas, especially because we are in a rural Indian village and we have a lot of practices that come from the region to help with self and social engagement. But it was quite obvious that children were socially disengaged, digitally connected, but quite disengaged in many other ways. So the other part of the experiment, what we did was we started bringing in urban Indian students, like you mentioned, Pathways in New Delhi, And we went out to foreign schools and we asked them, "Can you please join us in this experiment?" And so it started kind of a mix of high school students, rural, urban, rich, poor, foreign, local, all students into one mix. And started again the journey of experimenting with integrating with cells and integrating with fellow humans. And there again, it was pretty acutely pronounced a problem that we had about social disengagement is one, but also attention and awareness. It was pretty apparent right there that these were going to be the main issues for us in the coming years of work that we are going to do. Now, think about it, Tim, for a minute. This is in a South Indian village where the region I come from. And as a child, I had received amazing set of practices to expand my capacities and attention and awareness. And here I am watching this unfold. And let's just take a minute to think about this. Steve Jobs, the man who propelled adoption of smartphones, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. What do they all have in common apart from the fact that all their names start with S? Let's just go through a thought exercise.

The high priests of the attention economy.

Attention economy, yes. The additional aspect is when Steve Jobs died, I don't know if you recall this, He had, as he would, planned his memorial service in detail. Who would play music there? Bono and Yo-Yo Ma came. Who would speak there? Who will be the attendees of the memorial service? And about 500 attendees, when they left the memorial service, they all received a nice brown box as a parting gift from Steve Jobs. Oh, yeah. So people came out and opened it eagerly to see. A lot of them thought maybe there is the latest gadget that Steve Jobs wanted to give them, right? Because that's the expectation you would have. But you know what they found inside the box?

I don't.

They found a book. The book was An Autobiography of a Yogi. This is the book's title, An Autobiography of a Yogi. This is what the 500 people who attended his memorial service received as his parting gift.

Wow.

This is the message he wanted to give to the world because he— this was the book he had downloaded for the last month to read, as Walter Isaacson writes in the biography. And this was the book he was reading every year, it seems. And this had an impact on him. Now you look at Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, they didn't grow too far apart from where I grew up in southern India. I mean, geographically speaking, they are not too far apart from the region they come from. And they also received similar set of practices that Steve Jobs later on in his life learned by traveling to this part of the world. As young people, a set of wisdom practices in their lives. Now, we are willing to adopt the technologies that come out of the brilliant minds, the creative minds of this world, but we are unwilling to adopt the same practices that are propelling them to the top. And this is what Steve Jobs was trying to tell us, maybe, that there is something in it. Something in it. So we are there in the village, and someone who has received these practices in my life early on, I said, hey, what are we doing here with these children if not for the fact that we should be bringing these practices on self, on interconnecting with others? And how do we go about doing it? So we said we need a compendium of practices, not just one or two. And it's not just India, I'm sure there are practices out in the rest of the world. And, and, and what we need to do is work on expanding the adaptive capacities of these children. And Bade and I decided, because we were not teachers— that might have been an advantage— and because we were not really following the scholarly debates or academic approaches, we said the best way to do this would be to go on the ground, move around from country to country, receiving, learning, you know, from the villagers and from the, from the rest of the world on how people are relating to themselves, how they are getting to know themselves, how they are finding a role for themselves in this world, how are they experiencing and expressing their emotions, what practices do they use? We just set out on a journey.

Yes, so Satish and I decided to travel for a year by land in about 40 countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe using public transportation, traveling together with local people. We had two goals in our minds. One, we wanted to learn about practices tools that people use in their daily lives to get to know themselves, to connect with other people, and to express their emotions. Two, we wanted to visit experiments that help young people to adapt to the emerging world. We began our journey in India, then traveled quite a bit in Southeast Asia, then we crossed the border to China. Traveled all the way to west using the Trans-Siberian train. Wow. We visited some of the Eastern European countries, many of the Western European and Nordic countries. Then from Spain, we took a ferry to Morocco. In Africa, we traveled to Mauritania, then all the way to Nigeria. On the east side, we traveled from Ethiopia to Kenya to Uganda, then all the way to South Africa.

What an amazing journey.

Wow. Yes, it was an amazing journey. Maybe let me give you two examples from two different parts. Yeah, please. So my first example is from the north edge of Asia. It is about an experiment on interconnectedness at this small island with shamanic roots called Olhon in Lake Baikal. We met a former table tennis champion. He was doing amazing work with the local kids. He was organizing opportunities for them to interact with the world beyond their village, beyond their island. And then in Africa, this time I have a second example about a practice for expressing emotions from Uganda. In Kampala, we ended up joining a ritual. Rural women from different parts of Uganda were gathered to sell beads that they produce. Before doing any financial transactions, they celebrated their joy by singing and by dancing and drumming. It was very beautiful. We learned that they do this to create positive energy, to welcome forces to have a day full of abundance.

Amazing. There's so much there that I would love to explore with you. I mean, this is like before the real sense of the global impacts of this attention economy that is really coming to the fore now. People are really, you know, with Jonathan Haidt and all of the discussions around the impact that this kind of global experiment has had on our young people, it feels like what you were exploring was prior to that, as you said, in a way. And feels incredibly important. And there's, I mean, just so much richness in what you've already described. But the other thing that I found striking about your story, Satish, about Steve Jobs is it makes me think of Daniel Schmachtenberger and his idea of narrow boundary goal orientation, right? And it feels like the technologies take us down into very specific goal-directed, narrow boundary tasks. Like, you know, I want to optimize this process, or I want to 'You know, make my calendar more efficient for my daily routine,' or, you know, all these very narrow boundary ideas. Whereas what he contrasts that with is these wide boundary practices or wide boundary goal orientations, which are much more akin to a word you did use, and I know you use really importantly as part of your work, wisdom. So this idea that the narrow boundary is more like the kind of goal-directed intelligence as he describes it. And then the wide boundary is just opening up to emergence and things that might come that some people would describe as wisdom. And then to put that in the context of all these incredible practices that are growing up from the ground in all these countries all around the world is just, I mean, just so amazing. So could you say a little bit more about this idea of, 'cause I know you've recently launched the Center for Ancient Wisdom Engagement. So maybe, yeah, if I could ask you just to explore the, this idea of bringing these ancient wisdom practices with some of the things we've already discussed?

Sure.

Vanessa Andreatti talks about this quite a bit, you know, wisdom in everyday lives, that experiential wisdom that you see in places around the world, especially in rural areas, in moving, in dancing, going about with everyday lives. You know, when we— you mentioned the phrase we use, ancient wisdom engagement.

AWE.

Now, let's just take that phrase for a moment here. Now, AWE should not be confused the way we use it. We use it as an acronym. We are not talking about the feeling of awe that is talked about quite a bit. And when we say ancient wisdom engagement, there are two obvious questions that people ask us. What is ancient? How do you go about talking about what is ancient? And then what is this wisdom practice, as you just asked right now? What are those wisdom practices? Now, this is a very important question. So let me just deal with those two separately. We are aware of the scholarly debate on ancient versus indigenous, whether to use a particular word in a particular context. Now, we are not scholars, we are practitioners. As I told you, we just go around and look at things very practically on what is it that we can help young people with. So setting that scholarly debate aside, the way I would look at it is, I don't know if you're aware, about a month or two ago in Indonesian islands, in Maluku archipelago, they caught on camera for the first time a 65 million to 70 million year old species fish called Coelacanth. This has not been ever known to be alive. This is supposed to be a fossilized dead fish. We had never thought that we can capture it alive. Now, would you call this ancient or would you call this indigenous because it's indigenous to Indonesian waters? Now, this is where the challenge comes from. For us, it's both. For us, the common thing is it's a precious find, irrespective of how you call it, you know, it's precious. The other thing that comes out when we use the word ancient is it's unscientific. Is it spirituality? Or superstitious? Is it unscientific? This is another common question we receive. And there too, I mean, let me give an example. I don't know if you're aware, a couple of years ago, NASA put out an audio which it said is the sounds of the black hole. These are waves, pressure waves of the black hole that have been sonified. And for the first time in human history, we are hearing black hole sounds. Okay. Now this is, I mean, in musical terms, we are clearly talking about B-flat above 57 octaves under middle C. Or something. But if you come to India and say this, we have known this all along, is what we would say. We would say, oh, oh is a primordial sound, it's a universal sound. That's what you would have heard, is what Indians would tell.

Amazing.

The reason why I'm bringing it is, it's not only is it ancient, it is also continuous. So it's a continuously precious thing that is out there. NASA is adding, NASA is expanding the wisdom. And obviously ancient societies, cultures, civilizations have known things in a certain way. They may not have had the techniques or scientific methods for sonification, but the recognition that there might be sounds out there that we have not yet listened to, or humans are unable to listen to, because B-flat 57 octave is not something humans can hear. So, so there is not only preciousness, but there is also continuously precious aspect of the ancient wisdom. Now I'm saying this just to make sure that we don't get hung up on words like ancient or something else. So we use it in the context of something that is continuously Precious. Now let's just take another example so that it's clear. Let's take Tim Logan at this moment.

Who's he?

Well, Tim Logan at this very second has replaced 3.8 million cells in his body at this very second. In a day, you are replacing about 330 billion cells. We have about 30 trillion cells. Okay, now, now, in, in a moment, in this second, I have replaced 3.8 million cells. Bade has replaced 3.8 million, and I'm breathing this beautiful air that's coming out from— out of my window from these lovely trees we have here, and it goes in and out, in and out. And now what is ancient in me, what is indigenous to me, right? What is not, I have no idea. But what I do know, that I exist is a continuously precious process, right? So that is what we gravitate to. So when we moved to these countries, we didn't really question about these terminologies. We said, what are those practices What are the practices out there that people are using to make sense of this world, to know themselves, to know their place in the world, to express their emotions? What are those practices that people use on an everyday basis in these places? Now, when I say practices, now that is another word because you asked about wisdom practices. Now, we look at it, Tim, in 2 or 3 dimensions. One is body, mind, heart, spirit. You know, what practices are helping with what kind of embodiment, extended cognition, and how is it that people are using these? Or you could also look at these practices in terms of visual, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive sensemaking. How do they use these different senses that we have as people? And how do we really make sense of the world using these senses? So the practices could be also looked at through this dimension. And there's a third one that we could look at, which is like, you look at all the emotions that we share in common with animals— fear, rage, seeking, panic, play, you know, those— the basic 7 emotions, love, care. Now, all these emotions get expressed or are explored in certain practices in different parts of the world in different ways. Like Bade was talking about joy area. So to go through these practices and say which one is helping people in what way, this is what we do. So let's just go to the second part of your question, the challenges, Rick. Let's just take a concrete example, attention and awareness. Let's just go through some practices, right? Okay, again a question. At this moment, are you aware in a second how many bits of data your senses are receiving? This is scientific that we know at this moment we are receiving through our senses about 11 million bits of data per second. About 10 million just comes through visual, through eyes. The rest all come through other senses. Okay? 11 million bits of data. Now, of the 11 million bits of data, we are able to process only 50. Only 50 bits. Like tributaries of many rivers flowing into an ocean, and we are quietly, as an ocean, absorbing the 11 million bits of data, while only 50 bits of data are being processed. So it's the fact that you don't have control over the ocean of awareness that you have inside you. So there's a conscious mind which is only dealing with 50 bits. There is a whole ocean. So now scientifically, we are moving to recognition of that. So when we talk about attention, we talk about the issues Jonathan Haidt has raised as you are talking about the issues of smartphones. We are worried about the attention aspect of the 50 bits, right, at this moment. But we also have to look at the awareness aspect. So you can't just look at one and not look at the other, which which is the ocean, which is the subconscious and the larger unconscious. So ancient practices have recognized this. They may not have had the data. They may not have looked at it this way. But they recognized that attention— you may know this— comes from the root word etendere, which is stretching towards. And what are you stretching towards? Your awareness is being stretched towards something from the large ocean of awareness. So there were practices from ancient times to recognize these and build capacities to advance the ability to keep looking both at the awareness aspect and attention aspect. Now, these are just two challenges we are talking about. Maybe what we should do is we should go through some examples of these practices, because when we talk about attention awareness, people immediately go into, is it— are we talking about meditation, mindfulness? Need not be that. So maybe, sure, you can walk through some of the practices that could edify this more. Yeah.

Okay, so I will give some examples of practices that we use in our work with young people. I believe it will help to make things more clear. I'm going to use two dimensions to explain these practices. So my first dimension is the challenges young people face. Then my second dimension is the cultures these practices are from. As Satish mentioned earlier, both India and Thailand has practices practices in meditation and mindfulness that help to improve attention and awareness. Yet it is not easy for everyone to sit in meditation. There are other practices that could be more attractive, especially for young people. For example, let's look at a dance practice. In India, we work with a world-renowned Odissi dancer called Rekha Tandon. She's the author of a book called Dance as Yoga. Our students dancing with her have a lot of fun. They go through many attention and awareness practices without even being aware of it. Then in Ethiopia, there is a dance called eskishta. Tim, I don't know if you know this dance. It is also known as shoulder dance.

Okay.

You shake your shoulder constantly while dancing. So your attention is on one part of your body, on your shoulder. On the other hand, in Thailand, there is a community dance called Bamboo Dance. This dance is actually practiced in some other parts of Asia as well. It has many moving parts, so the dance requires both attention and awareness. Now imagine the whole school practicing it, the whole school dancing together. Bamboo Dance provides great opportunity for community bonding. Let me explain a bit how it is done. There are two kinds of participants in this dance. There are dancers and bamboo stick players. Pairs of long bamboo sticks are placed on the ground in a way creating a matrix. Bamboo players sit around this matrix on four sides, and then pairs of bamboo players bang a pair of bamboo sticks each, creating the rhythm, the music for the dance. As they bang, small gaps open and close inside the matrix. Dancers move inside the matrix by jumping in and out of these gaps that are constantly opening and closing. So the dancer has to pay attention to his feet not to get hit He also has to pay attention to the rhythm, of course. But this is not enough. He also has to be aware of the other dancers, in a way, the whole moment, to be able to synchronize, to be able to move together smoothly. So the Bamboo Dance not only creates opportunity for social bonding, it also helps to build trust among the members. Let me give you an art example that addresses one another challenge that young people face: humility. Ebru is a Turkish paper marbling art. Even our students who are not into arts marvel at it. They say, even if you don't have talent, even if you lack creativity, something beautiful comes out of it anyway. You put water thickened by a plant extract in a tray. Then you drop different colors of paint on the water and mix it. Once your design is ready, you place a thick and absorbent paper on the surface of the water and let the design get transmitted. What is special about Ebru is that it is unique. No matter what you do, you cannot recreate the same design. You can use the same materials, you can use the same tools, same techniques, but what comes out is never exactly the same. The Ebru artist's intention as well as the environment change the structure of the water, and the water structure changes the final outcome. So the Ebru artist has to do his work and then and leave it to the universe. In a way, a co-creation happens together with the universe. Knowing that we are not always in control, learning to leave it to the universe, to trust the universe, is an important lesson of humility for all of us. One other example, this is a practice that helps young people to express their emotions. Özmari, Azmari is a traditional music from North Ethiopia. Usually a female singer is accompanied by a male Mazinko player. Mazinko is a string instrument. It has just one string but a beautiful sound. Azmaris are poet musicians. They sing spontaneous songs and while singing they make jokes about people around them. Though Azmari bring people together to entertain them, they also help them to release tension by laughing at issues in their minds or on the social agenda. After watching an Azmari show, we ask our students to write lyrics for an Azmari song, and they come up with very creative, hilarious words expressing their emotions, their frustration. So one time I remember we took a group of students to a beautiful hike which took around 7 hours. We reached the top of the mountain just before a gorgeous sunset. We spent the night camping under millions of stars, and in the morning students had a surprise gift for us. They together sang an Azmari song that refers to us as Sabah. Sa for Satish, ba for bade.

Nice.

The song complained how Saba made them walk for hours, even climb a mountain just to watch the sunset.

Ah, beautiful. No, thank you for that. There's so many amazing examples there, and the thing that it makes me just marvel at is how amazing human beings are at creating these kinds of practices and rituals and, you know, cultural doings that contain so many different aspects of the things responding to the things that we might need as humans. So they help us to process all the things, you know, all the things you've described. It's just rolled up inside of that is this incredibly complex ecology of things going on in response to the place that we might be as a community or the things that we might need in relationship with each other. And it's just, it, you know, as a process of cultural evolution, it's just a phenomenal technology. I hesitate to use the word. I know we've discussed it before, but it's a, in a way it's a phenomenal technology that emerges from that. And again, with that idea of humility, just this awe and humility at the process of cultural evolution that has given rise to that and taking that deeply seriously, which you are, you're creating spaces for young people to interact with those practices, I think feels incredibly rich, incredibly important. And I guess one of the questions that comes to me is how do you hold the idea of bringing young people whose culture is not the culture, the local culture in which that practice has developed? You know, because lots of discussions around cultural appropriation, et cetera, particularly in a kind of Western capitalist, consumerist kind of, you know, you can just have anything you want at any moment based on the consumer economy. This idea that it almost doesn't matter where things have come from. We can just, if I feel like eating Thai food, I can eat Thai food. If I feel like doing a yogic practice, I can do that or whatever it is. How do you guard against some of that in terms of this, something about how significant the places that these practices have evolved from and helping the young people you're bringing into it who may be from other cultures aware of that. Process?

It's a very important question. In cultures where you grow up with these practices, Tim, let's say attention and awareness practices in India, we don't even look at these as attention and awareness practices.

No, right.

Right. We look at it as practices that are embedded in our culture. So it is the case for the examples that Bade walked you through in Ethiopia and Thailand or Turkey. The important thing is when you go to these cultures, people are more than willing to help you learn and share. Now, the problem comes in when there is a capitalistic approach of making money out of it. But when, as humanity, we face common challenges, especially we all agree that we are going into a world of unknown with emerging technologies, and we do know that our young people are being significantly impacted. Then draw this parallel for artificial intelligence. We are not raising a hue and cry that we are harvesting all the intelligence of humanity from this place and that place. That's— the language model is harvesting it. Yes, some people could raise some objections, but that is the language model. It harvests the intelligence of humanity. Now, what we are talking about is harnessing the collective wisdom of humanity to alleviate, to surmount some of the challenges we face. And what would emerge is not necessarily an Eastern thought or an Indian thought or a Thai practice or Ethiopian, it will become embedded in our own cultures, in our own ways. So I'll give you an example. You may be aware of the hikikomori crisis in Japan in about early 2000s, where about a million children to 2 million children were impacted by the psychological condition where they would not come out of their homes during daytime at all. Teenagers, they will only come out during nighttime. And, and even food had to be sent through the doors. That was the early 2000s. Now, hikikomori children found release in a ritual. You use the word ritual, and so I'm going to a ritual. Adolescents themselves created a ritual in Tokyo streets. It still continues. You can see it in Tokyo streets called cosplay, where they will be bold, courageous, dressed in ways the society wouldn't allow them to dress, and come and express themselves, because otherwise they were not able to express themselves. Now rituals, performances, enactments, all of these, these art forms, these practices, in many ways, you know, it could have been in any form in the past, had a role of releasing the unconscious. And the ritual comes in between and makes it conscious. Now if we don't help our children, the children will go out and figure out their own ways, like in Japan, okay? But that may not be sustainable because there are practices that are needed for very many challenges of this world. And so we need more innovation, more acceptance, and more harnessing of collective wisdom of humanity to bring to our students these practices in ways that they could make it part of their identity. They could embrace it and bring it in. So to answer your question, when we bring our students from foreign countries into, let's say, these mixes, it's actually the peers, the local children, who are more than willing to share and show how they would go about this. Okay, it's adults like we have a lot of these questions because of the capitalistic approach. I'll just add an example to the number of examples that Bhade talked about. You know the concept of making figurines. You know, you would have seen figures of deities or idols in India and elsewhere in your travels. Now we use one of India's foremost experts in terracotta, and he is the record holder for the world's largest terracotta horse. Okay, he works with our children and gives them this amazing terracotta and makes the local children for sure to the foreign kids and urban kids to make some terracotta figurines. And local children immediately would make a Ganesha, the deities they know, the horses or elephants. But a foreign child in the mix takes the same terracotta, unleashes creativity, and creates things. Sometimes they create a beast, sometimes they create something else, and whatever that their unconscious wants to express. So the ritual in between helps manifest what was unmanifested. It's an expression. So how you use the medium is entirely up to us at that time. So it is not like you are appropriating something. You used the word technology. Yes, it's the equivalent of what the technical world is doing. You're going out and collecting, you know, these amazing wisdom practices and helping our children grow to be better and healthy and knowing their own selves and be interconnected with the rest of the world. Now I'll just say this. The practices themselves, and I know that people talk about community of practitioners, that is when it will be authentic. No, we are not really talking about here a community, we are talking about a compendium of practices that can help alleviate, surmount the challenges that we have. Okay, a compendium of practices that people can internalize in ways that make sense for them. Like Bade was talking about, a croton in a river may be so alien to a child coming from Europe into our program. But when they understand that, hey, this is going to help me release my emotion right now, the grudges I hold or my anger, they gravitate towards it because it gives a form of expression. So we are creating a compendium of practices that would help our young people surmount those challenges.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. And I mean, it makes me think of John Viveki and his ecology of practices, right? The idea that The different kinds of practices will complement and offset each other. So one might be better for talking practices, might, one might be better for embodied practices like the dance that you were describing. So I think absolutely a compendium or an ecology of practices. And just also there's something there for me about helping young people become more aware that this is a critically important aspect of human development and cultural evolution. That there are these spaces, whether it's in a, the frame of a religion or in the frame of different cultural community practices that, for example, ritual take a really important role that I think has, I think has been lost to some degree in the kind of homogenizing Western global consumerist culture that has spread around the world, you know, for good and a lot of bad, that some of those spaces of ritual or spaces of gathering together for a purpose that is not instrumental, like all going to the shopping mall together. It has a different kind of purpose, a reason why we gather together. My sense is that young people don't experience those spaces as much as they would've done maybe 50, 100 years ago. Would you agree with that?

Yes.

Yes. The Japanese example that I just gave, young people found a way of congregating, And that they saw as a need. And they saw it, and they come in thousands, let's say, on a given day in the street, all in different costumes. Okay, now they found the need for the congregation. I mean, this is also in a way a question for the schools. See, in schools we have congregation of— because it's a community of students and teachers. Now our congregations may be, well, for example, cheerleading, or equivalent of that, right? So when we have joy We have ceremonies, we have ways of coming together. But when we talk about these challenges that individuals face, we leave it to the individuals. Now, what is a— where is the community gathering inside the school? Because that's what ancient civilizations and cultures have done. The kind of gathering that would allow for expression as a collective and help each other in the expression of their emotions. You see, that is a missing space. So although we have newer spaces emerging that young people are themselves creating, we have to be creating these kind of gatherings as you're talking about inside the schools as well, beyond the joy component, beyond the ceremony component. That's where the ritual— so I will ask the school what, what kind of rituals they have inside, you know, in the school. And not in ritual, it's not spirituality and science kind of a question. We're talking about practicality and common sense. And, you know, how do we help our people express their emotions? And those gatherings have a role for that community community-wide, helping each other, holding each other, express fears, express other kinds of emotions like rage or panic and love and care as well. And I think you and I have talked about it in the past, the forms that we have today will change. The force dictates the form. The force of evolution today will dictate the kind of forms of spaces that we are going to have and the gatherings we are going to have. I think the schools will have to emerge and evolve on that front. I mean, no matter what kind of curricula you follow. You will have to be, even if schools don't exist the way they do, or even if they do the way they do, the gathering aspect, the spaces aspect will change significantly because the force of evolution is moving us towards a different direction where our farms will have to help our adolescents express their emotions in ways they have not been challenged to express in the past.

Absolutely. I mean, I absolutely, and I, in a way, what you've just articulated, the reason why I do this podcast, honestly, I mean, that really is, right? At the core of why I feel really passionately about this is because I, I think exactly what you've said. There is a need for an awareness around the kinds of spaces we are creating as educational spaces in inverted commas, but you know, which often are organized by the adults and as ritual spaces, practice-based spaces, whatever you might call them, that can be co-created by young people. And honestly, also to make a link where we first met in New Delhi at the Festival of Hope. That is what Festival of Hope is about, inviting people into different kinds of spaces which are not a lesson, you know, a formal curriculum-based lesson to teach a thing. It's a different kind of space. And as you said, to address some of the questions around emotion or around social bonding, Bade, that you talked about, or trust or humility, or, you know, just coming together around the complex issues that we face together. How do we do that? Well, we, it's very difficult to accomplish that as atomized individuals off in our own separate spaces on our own separate treadmills. You know, there need to be those spaces. And I think helping educators and young people to understand that culture has always provided those spaces in different ways, practices and spaces, and maybe we can reconnect with that idea. And that might also help, as you said, the concept of school to evolve. So yeah, I mean, all of it is just exactly why I was excited to have this conversation with you. So yeah, this is amazing. So, I mean, maybe that's the nice link into just wrapping up around something more of an invitation to people who do work in mainstream curricula or in schools. What are the kinds of things you might do, or how might a classroom teacher or a school leader respond to some of these invitations?

Yeah, let's deal with two thoughts quickly. Maybe I'll go with one because we discussed this a lot, and Madhav can explain one more. If you really look at where and when the mainstream curricula changed big time last was about 60 years ago when the IB was emerging in 1960s, late '60s, after the Second World War. And you had Kurt Hahn kind of people coming in, and there was, you know, United World College was founded at that time. There was a paradigm shift in the way the mainstream curricula was approaching the education space. Now, still, what you see is there is a move towards destination education, as we call it, as this, you know, the destination, and you are helping the student move towards the destination. Now, when we are dealing with the unknown and we don't know the destination. We don't know where the student could go and there has to be no destination education. Now we have to move towards no destination. This has to be a paradigm shift. So it's not about tinkering with one part of the curriculum or adding something to the curriculum. We have to have a paradigm shift in the way we think about it. So when you don't know the world, it's an unknown, we are really working at adaptive capacities to move towards the unknown. There is no destination and we have to to help students build adaptive capacity. So similar to ways of knowing, we have to work on ways of seeing. How do you see that known? There is no visibility. And I'm using the word seeing in the largest sense of experiencing, seeing, hearing, and in all other senses. So sensemaking, ways of seeing. And so practices that help embody ways of seeing are the things that we should start working towards, ways of knowing It was needed and it will be needed. But when you don't know the destinations and you're going to be constantly adapting, that particular area of ways of seeing and especially using arts as a medium to get there and using these practices. And that's one of those things that mainstream curricula will have to start looking at seriously. Then the other question was about particularly inside the school, a teacher.

Yes, so we believe first the teachers should have the opportunity to learn about ways of seeing or engaging in practices that could help them in their daily lives. Especially young teachers who grew up during the smartphone era might be having some challenges themselves. So learning ancient wisdom practices, ways of seeing would help them to ease these challenges and to be able to handhold their students much better.

Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of continued education conferences that happen around the world for teachers, but all of them happen in hotel rooms or big conference spaces. Why not in real world, in the village? We live in a village, and so we, we connect with the real world and let the teachers not have the gadgets for one week themselves go through the real-world experience of seeing the world without any of these devices for a week, and go through some practices of ways of seeing. And the experiential wisdom around will obviously rub off. And then, then whatever practices you want to carry on to the classrooms. This is something we need to start thinking about in continued education for teachers who might themselves be in need of some of these practices for their own lives.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's inherently experiential, I mean, it has to be. You can't just be talking about all of these things that we've been discussing. Ironically, we're doing it on a podcast, talking about them. One day I'll experience them with you, but you know, you take my point. This is a deeply experiential thing that we're inviting people into, and we are embodied beings and we have to be. The only way we truly learn, I think, is to really experience. As you say, it kind of rubs off, to use that metaphor, right? There's something that that you absorb by experiencing. And even that itself is a radical shift. And if in some ways that brings you back to Kurt Hahn and some of those insights of the 1960s that we just haven't been very good at really embedding in significant ways across a very industrial system. But no, I, I love everything you're doing and I so appreciate you describing it today. And no, thank you very much for sharing and continuing the work. And yeah, one day I'll come and join you in those practices.

Well, we look forward to having you to co-experience some of these practices on the ground together. That would be lovely. Thank you, Tim.

Thanks much, Tim.

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