Unconditioning our minds so we can think differently about "school" - A Conversation with Manish Jain

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You know, the real purpose of education should make you understand that you are beautiful as you are and you are capable of doing many different things in your life. And we all have this born capacity to learn what we can contribute in many beautiful ways to the world. So if people walk away and they don't understand this, then I think it's really sad.

Hi everyone, welcome back to this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. So often in conversations about education, there is a bias towards the things that we've known and the ways of thinking and learning that we've experienced ourselves in formal schooling. So it's worth asking, is it possible to unlearn the conditioning we've such that we can really think differently about what an education can be. This week's guest has seen both sides of this experience. After going to Harvard and becoming an investment banker on Wall Street, Manish Jain gave up this life to weave incredible communities and new institutions all over India and the world to try and answer this question. Manish is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems and cultural imaginations and is one of the strongest planetary voices for deschooling our lives. He served for the past 20 years as coordinator and co-founder of Shikshanta, the People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India, and he's the co-founder of the Swaraj University, Creativity Adda, Learning Societies Unconference, Walkouts Walkon Network, Udaipur as a Learning City, and Families Learning Together Network in India. He has also helped to launch the Global Ecovocities Network and the Global Giftival Network. He's edited several books on themes such as learning societies, unlearning, gift culture, community media, and tools for deep dialogue. You can find the links to the many initiatives that Manish has led and been involved in, in the show notes. Amazing. Thanks, Manish. Really lovely to be able to meet you and have this conversation. I've been a real admirer of your work for a long time and I'm super happy that you managed to finally get you on the podcast. So thank you firstly for joining us.

Tim, really happy to be here. I'm glad you were persistent, made it work.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I didn't give up. Now we're here. That's great. So I mean, maybe just to start with a nice opener that maybe will get some people's backs up, let's say that. Let's give a little trigger warning that one of the things you've said about the, the schooling system is that it's one of the greatest crimes against humanity. And I— that was a few years ago when you said that. I'd be curious, firstly, is that still your position? Have you obtained any nuance on that position in the last kind of 10 years? But also, yeah, maybe you could say a bit about what you mean by that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think it's still my position. Probably I wouldn't say it is one of, I would probably say it is the greatest crime of humanity now, seeing more and more. The reason I continue to say that is, I mean, obviously to provoke conversation with people, but also I think really in there, if we go deeply into what we know about learning, about the human brain, about diverse cultures, We can start to really see how schooling was designed actually to destroy all of those things. And if you think about, you know, one of the things I usually read is the number of children who are labeled as failures, who are thrown out of the system, who are told they're not intelligent, they're not good for anything, they're not worth anything. You know, and all over India, Global South, many places, there's no even second chance opportunities for kids like that. And seen people walking around their whole lives thinking, you know, I was a failure. Their description of themselves is, I'm a failure because school never acknowledged me. So I think that itself, if you're, you know, the real purpose of education should make you understand that you are beautiful as you are and you are capable of doing many different things in your life. And we all have this born capacity to learn and we have our intelligences, you know, and when we can contribute in many beautiful ways to the world. So So if people walk away and they don't understand this, then I think it's really sad. And then the other side of it is, I think, you know, one of the things when I speak to people, I ask them, you know, most people will— I've found are kind of willing to agree that a lot of what we learn in school is irrelevant to life. I don't really see it. But what I ask them is, how do you think school has damaged you? And that is really shocking for a lot of people because they've never thought about, you know, what's the damage that school does to us. And I think that's a question that if we go through, whether it's actually building a certain kind of mindset, which is grounded in scarcity and monoculture and fear, then as we've been also talking a lot about metacrisis, that mindset is very much part of the metacrisis that's being created. So I see, I've had the fortune to interact with a lot of people who've never gone to school, including my grandmothers and many rural people in India. And in Africa, and I find that their way of being in the world is very, very different. The core is actually built around a sense of abundance, whereas modernity creates a sense of scarcity in people. They're always like, we don't have enough, we're not good enough. And so I think, you know, there are many, many reasons why I would say that, but I think I still stand by that statement, and I would invite people to really go deep into that analysis around it.

Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful. I think it makes people uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable. I remember hearing Daniel Christian Wahl asking a similar question and there is a, yeah, it's a discomfort when you've been steeped in that system in various ways. And so, yeah, to ask the question, how has it damaged you? I think is incredibly powerful. And what, you know, definitely that's been something I've been exploring on the podcast. People like Mary Baptiste, the indigenous scholar talking about cognitive imperialism and, you know, marinating in Eurocentrism, all of those same kinds of things are just trying to understand, yeah, it really does operate on a particular level and a particular definition of what a successful life is. And, you know, all these particular narratives, particular biases, and it could have been different, right? It didn't have to be that way. But I'm curious, being based in India and with recent years, a lot of the media around the exam system and suicides and Kota and all of the things in India, how do you see it? How do you see those things happening or changing in that context?

Yeah, it's good you brought up— so I live 5 hours away of what is called the suicide capital of the world, city of Kota, where there are Many, many what they call coaching classes, tuition classes for preparing people for these high-stake exams and the pressure on the kids. I mean, I, you know, a lot of parents come to me and say, we don't put any pressure on our kids. But I said, yeah, but you put them in the pressure cooker. So that's what else do you have to do? You know, so I think those places and the suicide rates going, you know, it was recently there was a, in one month, a stream of 5 kids who hung themselves out of the pressure, academic pressure and And you know what? They hung themselves from fans, ceiling fans. So you know what the response to this was? Let's put springs in the fans. This is the institutional response to like kids who are— a massive amount of more kids in depression, going in depression because of this. And they usually— let's put some springs in the fans.

Oh my goodness.

Like, wow, how far away the people who are running these systems are from reality of what's going on with kids.

Yeah.

And, you know, and this is what, you know, all over the world, it's, you know, if somebody has mental health issues, it's the problem of the person. There's no institutional reflection of like, why are there's an epidemic on mental health going on? You know, why are kids getting into high anxiety and depression or even ADHD? It's like, well, maybe, maybe the system we've designed is part of that. Yeah. Problem of the kid. That kid is the problem, which is another reason when we, we should be, you know, reflecting more about what's going on.

Exactly. That, I mean, that's an incredibly powerful thing. If the unit of analysis is the individual, either successful or not, then— and you know, that's definitely something I talk about a lot on the podcast— is that the context that holds that individual is so fundamentally important, and we've ignored— if we're not reflecting on the kind of context we're creating around young people, of course they're all unique and marvelous and incredible individuals, but You know, they are in a context that is either life-affirming or maybe not, and life-destroying as you're describing there. I mean, it's phenomenal how unreflective of the context we can belligerently be, you know?

Yeah, that's reminding me of another little story. So I was in the UK last year and I was giving a talk there, and we have a project, an unschooling project in the central jail. Called the Jail University. It's an ecoversity. And in the talk, this woman, she gets up in the middle and she starts yelling at me, screaming at the top of her lungs. She's like, "How can you help those jail inmates? Why are you wasting your time? You're doing such good work. Those people should all be fried and you shouldn't be wasting time on them." And so my reflection was that, you know, look, the problem is not them individually only. Sure, they made a mistake, they did something bad, But we have a societal context which is also creating this. If you hear their stories, you'll start to say these are, this is a reflection of a breakdown of our systems and of our social context, you know? So I think the same thing is this larger reflection is missing. And so the extreme case is with jail inmates, but you know, if you start to listen, you'll see that this is actually so many things broke down along the way, which put them in this position, you know?

Yeah, for sure. I think we struggle with the idea of personal responsibility and that kind of story and accountability. And therefore we can't let these people get away with— so there's, and, and very real, right? A sense of injustice or whatever, you know, can't reward people who have done wrong, so to say, but also, as you say, how do we not look at the context in which people are coming up and being so influenced? So that, I mean, that seems to be a huge part of your work. And that's, as you've said already, but the way that we think is part of the crisis, something you said, and I know Bayo says, and other people, Gregory Bateson before, you know, this is a really important idea that the way that we're thinking is part of the polycrisis, the metacrisis that we're, you know, inhabiting now. And it's linear, fragmented, separated, disconnected, etc. But again, quite often we can spend a lot of time in the analysis of what's wrong rather than— and I think this is where I find your work just so generative and amazing— is what you're doing then to undo a lot of that or redo a lot of that or change, shift context. So I'd love to, if we can talk a bit about that, you know, I mean, this is what you're weaving every day. So if you could perhaps just give a little bit of a sense of the different, with the Swaraj and the ecoverties and different things, and then we'll get into some of the—

Slight amount of context on it. And then a lot of it will make sense. Cause then, well, let me start with this. Gandhi had talked about education should have 4 H's: head, heart, hands, and home. And so a lot of it, his critique was that, and this is 100 years ago, he's already registering the things we're talking about as critiques, right? Which is the head, it's all focused on the head and a very, very narrow notion of the head, right? And things like the hand and the heart and our connection to home or the more than human intelligences are being lost. So I think that part of the work is that the saying that there's all of these other, you can call them intelligences, ways of knowing, ways of perceiving capacities that we have, which are not being developed or nurtured. And I think that's by design that these are not being done. And the other thing is that we're talking about the crisis being the way we're being trained to think. So what I've been talking a lot about is the idea of unlearning. Probably for educators, the most important thing right now in the world is for us to think about how to unlearn. So it's on a very micro level, our fears, our limitations that we impose on ourselves. And on more macro levels, our sense of who's holding the definitions about success and progress, development and good life. All of those things would take, you know, usually talk about is under the iceberg, under the waters of the iceberg. That is not being engaged with in any way, our mental, our emotional models that we are holding. And so a lot of the focus of whatever we've been trying to do is to support this unlearning process. So I find people get excited, very people, people understand it or know what to do with it in a way. And that has different elements. It's not the same as forgetting things, but it's a kind of unraveling. And sometimes that unlearning we talk about as being kind of the essential step to uplearning, to shifting the consciousness in different ways, or the ways we're able to see things. So we've done a lot of experiments on unlearning as part of our pedagogy, which I think in a lot of these initiatives we're doing. And then the last thing I would just say is that, you know, the approach. I mean, we, some people call it unschooling, natural learning, free learning, self-designed learning. So that's the approach is like really try to find that each person has a beautiful seed, a deeper purpose. I would even say a special mission, why you've come into this earth. And so real education should help people really connect to that, to that deeper purpose. So that, and once they find that, then they're on fire, you know, and we have a story. The first unschooler, we call them as eklovya. 5,000 years ago from the Mahabharata. It's the first documented story of an unschooler who learned on his own or in relationship with his natural ecosystem, and he became the best archer in the world. I say he won the Olympics. He's sitting in the jungle and he won the equivalent of the gold medal in the Olympics. Wow. And I ask people, imagine what was this kid doing in that jungle? Because everyone in India knows that story. I'm like, how do you think he developed this? What was he doing all day? So that's a beautiful journey I take people on. It's like, think about what this guy was doing. How do you become that? And the beauty thing of the story is at the end, his own intrinsic motivation drives him, but he doesn't care about winning anything. You know, he's doing it for the joy of it, for the meaning of it. It doesn't matter if like he's number one or number two or whatever. He doesn't really care. And the— but the system is threatened by that, by a kid who's learning on his own.

Absolutely.

And you know, so, so this idea of intrinsic motivation is very, very deep and powerful for us to try to understand. I think it's missing in a lot of the education conversations to say, because the entire system is designed on carrot and stick.

Yeah, very much. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obsessed, outcome obsessed, right? But one of the things that comes up for me as you're saying that is I've heard you talk about trust before as an important concept. And it, it feels like that's relevant here because I, there's multiple layers of it, but you know, in that sense of trusting yourself in terms of that inner drive or, you know, to explore and question, et cetera. But there's also this kind of question of trust that parents need to have in order to lean into these kinds of approaches as they're coming, perhaps pulling away from, for whatever reason, the mainstream system, which basically teaches us that you shouldn't trust yourself. You should only trust the people with the credentials and that's sustains the kind of system. But so I don't, yeah, it just, it feels like that's an important concept.

Yes. Yes. And I think that connected there is the fear, right? So what schooling is teaching us all the time is fear. Don't trust any, you don't know what's gonna happen. Somebody will mix some stuff in your, whatever you're, you know, you can't even trust the, you know, in India, people used to, one of the most beautiful experiences is like riding in the trains and you're sitting in train and all of a sudden the people in the next compartment bring out all this food and they're starting eating and they're sharing the food. And nowadays I find that people less and less are trusting to eat anybody else's. If somebody's offering you some food, they're like, oh, maybe they mix something in it. Oh, they're going to do something. And the whole, you know, my whole life I grew up with that. My daughter has grown up seeing that. She would even go over to— when she was a kid, she'd go over to the other compartment and start asking them for food and then bring it back to us. And it's like, these parents are not feeding their kid or something. But it was So I think, you know, a lot of my work is also talks about what does it mean to be rebuilding radical trust as a way forward, as a way, you know, to work in the prison system or to work with parents or trust is what keeps coming up as a theme. So how do we weave that? There's an alchemy of how you weave that field of trust again. And that's important. And when we talk about unschooling, even the primary person who needs to be unschooled are the parents. The kids, kids don't want to learn. It's like the parents have to be unschooled. So those fears and anxieties they're holding is part of that process.

Very much. And maybe just practically, could you speak to a little bit about Swaraj or a bit about what the concept of an ecoversity? Because I'd love to ask you about the localization piece. I think that's critical, but just before we get there, maybe just a little bit about how are these things showing up in different communities?

Yes. So if you think about the system, there's like different acupressure points, which keep it in place and nobody is able to touch those. So one is obviously the people go to school because they want to get admission into universities. And so in India, it starts from like kindergarten, that pressure. And I think many countries where people start thinking, okay, what school do I have to, to get into Harvard, whatever. Right. So we noticed that's one of the key points is that entrance into universities. So you can do that. There's 2 or 3 things you can do around that. Right. So you can either change the admissions process to mainstream universities, which is very hard. I actually sat when I was a college student, I sat on the admissions committee of Brown University. So I have a little insight into all of how that works. It's very hard to change that. There's some things you can do with that. Or we change the idea of what is a university. And so we started experimenting with that 15 years ago. We said, what does it mean to build our own university? So my daughter has never gone to school. She's been unschooled. And my mother is a doctor. She was freaking out when this was all happening. So she's like, how is she going to go to you when she's 6 years old? How is she going to go to university? How is she going to get to you? So I said, okay, we'll create our own university, which doesn't require exams and degrees and all of that. We can create something. So we started this 15 years ago. A friend of mine was also— his daughter was, she was like 17, 18. So she was looking for what to do. And then many other people we encountered, people have dropped out of school also, or been pushed out of school. So we created Swaraj 15 years ago. And before we were doing things like that, but we never used the word university. Let's play with the university word. Like, why is it one institution gets to decide what is the definition of university? Let's play with it and have fun with it.. And so we started that in India. It's 100%. We even put it— this is a 100% illegal university. We get t-shirts for people because unless you get approved by the government central body, you're not allowed. But we're saying, okay, if people want to come and question, let us— let's have a conversation. In the Gandhian idea, there's the idea of satyagraha, non-cooperation. So in terms of whatever we're all doing in the world today, that this is one of the politics or ways to think about politics is not cooperating, or how do you create these places like that. So we wanted to create a place that we are openly not cooperating with that, and we want to hopefully have people come into a different imagination, a different dialogue of possible— why are we stuck? And we have precedence to that. Like Tagore had created something called Shanti Niketan, Rabindranath, as part of the freedom struggle and things. Or Gandhi had his own ideas he was creating. Yeah, so at that time under the British, these were all illegal also. So Swaraj is kind of a 2-year program, which started as a 2-year program for people to come and they design their own learning journeys. We support them, they live in community. So community living is a big piece of that. Conflict, obviously when you live in community, conflict is a big piece of it. So we thought about, how can we think of conflict as a gift? Not as some, we're trained to either be in fight or flight mode with conflict, right? So how do you actually seeing conflict as a gift for me to reflect on myself and my relationships and my underlying assumptions. So that becomes part of the setup. Unlearning— we created a lot of unlearning invitations for the learners as part of that. We have a campaign there called Healing Ourselves from the Diploma Disease also. And so that's the next thing, right? Why do you go to university? It's because you want to get a job. So at the end of the day, the entire education system, the real conversation that anyone has is around what's your package, what's your financial package. That's what parents generally care about. They don't care about what you're actually doing. So then what do you do? So I said, we don't want to give degrees because, and if we start giving degrees, then we kind of feed back into the same knowledge hierarchies. So let us help people do two things, help people build their portfolios. And then two is let us build a whole ecosystem of partners who understand what this problem is. Because a lot of CEOs are saying, we're not happy with the kinds of people coming out. Right, exactly. They only know how to do, you know, run Microsoft products. They don't know anything else, right? Spreadsheets and PowerPoints. Beyond that, they have no experience. So we identified more than initially more than 100 organizations, small businesses, NGOs who said, we're willing to give your graduates opportunities. So now that's grown to more than 1,000 across the country of things. So basically you're creating those opportunities. So this is the other piece is that, you know, this link of education and economy Economy. This, I usually draw a triangle around this. These three are where educators have to come in. So if you want to be a player in the game, you need to think about these three things. One of my backgrounds was as an investment banker on Wall Street, so the economy parts, the local building, the local economy is very much part of my thinking. It's not just what's the pedagogy, but what are they going to do afterwards? How do we create opportunities together for the youth and take care of their families, as we were discussing?

Yeah, no, I mean, it's amazing. I love it because particularly the fact that in order to kind of avoid the capture, as you say, you know, we could say, well, we'll try and be legitimate by offering degrees. And then suddenly you're like, there's that capture back into the system. You have to think systemically about the whole journey of what does it mean to be a functional, successful, happy community, not just individuals, right? And, and so it, it really invites a whole different set of questions, I think, when you really start thinking about this, which, which makes it a huge challenge for people who are working in particular current systems or institutions, of course. But it is— I think you can't avoid having to ask those much broader systemic questions, right?

Definitely, definitely. And I think, you know, even people working in those institutions, the question is, what's your vision of economy? Yeah. Are you, you know, like IB, or are people coming out, are they going to be corporate slaves? Is that what you're just serving? Or are you actually trying to say that if we're concerned about climate change and poverty and all these other challenges facing humanity, that we need— the economic system is part of the problem also. So we need to start thinking of different kinds of economies. How do we strengthen our local economies? You know, if all our people are graduating— like, you know, the government of India said in the next 20 years there's going to be 180 million educated unemployed youth. Can you imagine? In most countries, and these youth all want to have fancy iPhones. They've been educated to have— to be somebody, you need an iPhone, you need a Mercedes car, you need this and that. So how are they going to get it? You know, you're just setting up a massive systemic breakdown. People are— and They have no skills. They have no, they don't know what to do, no vision of their lives. So people who are working in the system, I think this question of economy is one that I would offer to these, the question of unlearning and the question of economy are the ones if you wanna be relevant, otherwise you're a babysitter, just accept it.

And, and it makes me think also, I dunno if you know Carol Sanford's work.

Yes. Yes. I was at that once with Carol. Yes.

Oh, amazing. So I mean, I love Carol's work, but participating in the value adding process, right? And the concept of value and a value adding process is You know, the economy defines value in such a particular way.

Yes.

And, you know, we have to challenge that, right? We have to— what is really of value now at these, in these times? But the, if I can, the other thing I'd love to ask you about, cuz as you're talking about this kind of ecology, it's the relationships in a way is what you're describing, right? You've got these relationships with these, what, with the parents, with the families, but then also with the local NGOs and companies as you're thinking about a broader ecosystem of value, let's say, that requires, I don't know, does it require a locality, a community in which to do the work? I mean, that's something I've been thinking a lot about is that one of our challenges is we try to have these kind of global decontextualized conversations about what do young people need, you know, to prepare for the future and all these big kind of decontextualized conversations. But actually the thing you are describing is very much place-based, right? It's happening in a place where certain things are needed.

So one of the secret sauces of Swaraj University is what we call Udaipur as a learning city.

Yeah, amazing.

Place-based in that sense. Our learners are coming from all over the country, so opportunities we have also created in other places, but those again come out of deep relationship with people. The everyday experience of the university is grounded into lots of things that are happening in the city, you know, like, and surrounding villages and those relationships. So definitely And this is one of the critiques of the, you know, the ivory tower university. It is disconnected from even its local areas, you know, like some of these elite universities, billion-dollar endowments are surrounded by slums and poverty and all of that stuff that they're not able to figure out how to, how to do anything meaningful for the communities there or the city they're part of, you know? So yeah.

And they probably don't even see that as their work, right? I mean, it doesn't even factor in when they're in this kind of ivory tower conceptual landscape of how do we shift the world's ideas. It's not about what's happening on your doorstep. And that's, it's a fundamental disconnect, I think. Yes.

Yes. So that I think has been, you know, that's a big part of Swaraj is this, you know, there's that saying that don't confuse the maps for the terrain. And so there's useful maps. I'm not saying that none of the maps the education system are offering are, they're all totally useless, but the bigger thing to work on the kinds of challenges in a meaningful way that we're facing requires us to understand the terrain, the nuances of the terrain. And there's, there's almost zero attention being given to that. It's even like, you know, I do organic farming and permaculture. So each soil is different. You go to a, you know, a land, the light in your land is different, the soil is different in different parts of the land. Even at that micro level, it's not like all soil is the same and all that is the same, but that's how it's treated by the mainstream agricultural system, right? Or that's how Kids recognize, or, you know, I don't know, like, I have this great example, one of my favorites of the— people say, what's the monoculture of the mind? You know, what do you mean? I said, you know how many varieties of rice we used to have in India? Most people say, I can only identify 3 or 4 varieties of rice. Most educated people can say that. There used to be more than 114,000 documented varieties of rice alone, and probably more than 200,000 undocumented varieties. This is how people were able to understand terrain context and develop things in partnership with their terrain and context. So that, I think, is one of the things that is severely missing, and we can give more attention to.

Yes.

How do you reconnect to that? How do you— I went to a friend of mine set up a museum here, science museum for kids in, in our city recently, and I visited that. That is really nice. You're telling kids about how to go to Mars and missions. I'm like, there's nothing here which is engaging. What is the quality of our water? Our city, you know, water quality is deteriorating. What's happening with our biodiversity here? There's nothing in your museum that's talking about any of this stuff. So our everyday lived conditions are deteriorating all over the planet, and we are thinking about going to Mars, or we're just retreating into some, you know, deeper and deeper into some virtual space or some headspace which is like disconnected from our bodies and our places. So, yeah.

And then wondering why we're not being nourished by that, right?

And then feeling more and more alone and depressed about it, right?

Exactly. No, it's so powerful. And I mean, just your concept of right scale, I think is so powerful as well because then, for example, maybe we could talk just briefly about the Ecoversity concept because I think again, when we think about how do we, you know, shift educational systems, and then we, maybe some people come up with an amazing local, you know, initiative like Swaraj or other things around the world. And then we say, okay, how do we then scale that to affect global education systems? Wouldn't that be amazing? And suddenly we then back in the trap of the pull towards the monocultural standardized decontextualized solution in inverted commas to the global education problem.. And I think that trap is so real for people innovating as well as, you know, obviously the people who are in current systems. So yeah, maybe could you just say a bit about the ecoversity concept?

Sure. So once we, after we started Swaraj, I wanna say one other thing about how Swaraj has been evolving too.

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, great. After that we had a campus, then people approached me in Udaipur saying, oh, can you do something in our prison? So we then started to think about this approach in the context of the prison. So, Similar values and principles, but again, the way it works is everything, it's been adapted to prison. All kinds of beautiful stories of then prisoners finding new purpose. You know, like usually people think of the prison as a place you go for punishment. We're saying, no, you can go there and find your deeper purpose and get those and see a dream. And there's all kinds of beautiful stories happening out of that. Recently we started something about a year ago called the Farmversity concept. So where we live again, surrounded by a lot of rural communities, a lot of indigenous communities and small farmers, and the entire modernization push has destroyed small-scale farming or is attempting to destroy that. In India's case, there's more than probably 400 or 500 million people who are involved in small-scale farming. So if they leave that, they go to cities, like it's game over basically. So no one has thought about— very few people have thought about what does it mean to regenerate the local farm economies? And that's not just farming. That's also then thinking about, okay, what are the other careers? We're using the term livelihoods versus deadlyhoods as part of that. So that's another thing which is part of the frame. If you want to think as a— where another acupuncture point is, is this idea of careers. What do we want to do? And our whole notion of work also says— I saw somebody recently had posted something on LinkedIn. So I said, you're missing all the real questions. Like, first of all, how do you understand work? What is the purpose of work? When we talk a lot here in India about the idea of seva, divine service. So what I learned from a lot of traditional communities, like, everything we do, it's not service you do as a separate activity. Washing the dishes around my family is part of my service, you know, caring for my children or the neighbor's kids or whatever, helping somebody in their wedding. These are all acts which are part of my everyday life, which where my service can show up, you know. How do we put that into even the work I do? Then it's not like one of the dangerous models we set up was— I think it's functioning well— you can do anything in work, you can destroy the planet, but come and do your few hours of charity and volunteer and your soul is absolutely free. So that model is not sustainable. A lot of young people luckily are realizing that that's the bullshit, right? So let's find this integrated models where our work, our life our holistic being, our seva, everything can be integrated. Our spiritual journeys— why is spiritual journey something separate?

Absolutely, yeah, right.

So this integration is very important to our approach. And so we call those livelihoods, those kinds of careers we've built up. And so with the Farmversity, the whole livelihood, there's a whole bunch, you know. So if you want to build your local farm economy, okay, what can you do? Maybe you do farming, of course, or you set up some processing units so that you can do value addition at the local level rather than it all going to the big cities. And yeah, or you do, you become chefs and you create beautiful food around us, or you organize festivals with this, or you do things with, you know, soil regeneration or water regeneration work. So there's a whole bunch of careers we've outlined which would be important for, and then can our firm, Swaraj Farmversity, can it support young people to figure out where they can be in these careers of service and make a living in that? And so that becomes part of the whole, whole approach to how we start to think about things. And in a sense, start to challenge the global systems, right? Which are trying to destroy all of our local, local economy. Exactly. Yeah. Regeneration is a big part of— Daniel talks also a lot about bioregional learning. So how do we create practical approaches?

Yeah, no, it's amazing. And I've heard you talk about playful improvisation, and what I hear all the time in what you're saying is this kind of— yeah, it's like local playful improvisation with the context that you're in. How are we responding to what is needed here in this quite playful way? I just— yeah, I love it. I think it's amazing.

And so that playful improvisation has two parts to it, right? It's our own ability to be alive and respond to whatever is happening around us and that mindset. And the other thing is you need a structure for that. So like today I meet Tim, Tim has a great idea, can we start tomorrow or can we even start today? If I have a structure that says no, you have to do a long grant application and it'll take 6 months to do this and we'll get the bureaucratic— it's no fun. So we've created an infrastructure so anybody comes with an idea, anyone wants to explore something, can we get them going in the next 24 hours. That's our kind of mental model.

Amazing.

Right. Well, it's hot and the energy is there and the whole game is to play with energy, right? Everything we're doing is about energy. And if we can start to move with those energies, dance with those energies, very beautiful magic starts to happen. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. That, that's so profound. I think there's somebody I love called Hartmut Rosa. He's a German sociologist talking about social energy recently. And that, yeah, that's, Really powerful. Maybe another conversation in the future, but so interesting because again, those infrastructures, the social technologies that enable the flow of the energy, the movement, rather than closing it down, you know, degrading the energy is like, that's such an important question, I think, about how to play with it.

One thing in that I've been talking to a lot of funders and foundations, I'm like about this idea of flow funding. Yeah, I'm like, you guys are too slow, too big. Most people don't need those huge grants. A lot of people just need small, small grants and they can keep moving energy flows. So let's create mechanisms for that where people can have easier things. And it, you know, you give it to people you trust who are working on the ground and say, give it out, get it moving. Let's— so more and more are becoming receptive to that.

And we've been doing interesting— yeah, I was learning about trust-based philanthropy recently, and I don't know whether that's— it's probably still quite slow, but important. Yeah, no, important questions, really.

Absolutely. I would say there's like— my estimate, at least in India, is 5 to 10% educators really care about what they're doing and they want to do something. What if we have resources available for them? Okay, do your experiments. We got it. Move it, move it, move it. That starts to create a different energy field. And so we've done that with some government schools also. So after we started Swaraj, a lot of people started contacting us all over the world and they were doing similar beautiful experiments, but each one contextualized and each one, you know, some people thinking a lot about food systems or water systems, water-versities we call them, or farm-versities, or people thinking about what is the, you know, forest, what's in their forest and how do we learn from the forest, or people learning, thinking about, okay, in our slum area or favela, How do we start to regenerate the knowledge of our own places again and the leadership, local leadership of our places? And both in the spirit of like, yes, definitely recognizing, honoring, appreciating all the beautiful things they're doing. And to say that, you know, let's poke at the system. Let's start using the word university, ecoversity playfully, that people can create these things. We don't need for the central authorities to decide. So all over the world, we have thousands and thousands of ecoversities existing already. We're meeting them. Encountering them and encouraging. I tell people, even if you don't have one, get 5 of your friends together, we'll tell you how to start your own ecoversity, and you can start building it up. And there's lots of things we've learned along the way. So we have Grandmothers' Universities, which are trying to respect the knowledge of our grandmothers. We have Travelers' Universities, because we all know, again, these are things— when I used to work at UNESCO, one of the things I've done with more than 10,000 people around the world, I asked them What is your most powerful experiences of learning in your life which really transformed? Nobody says anything about the school curriculum, you know, that wasn't like transformative for anybody, right? Somebody's saying, I was with my grandmother, or I traveled, or I spent time in a forest, or I worked on a farm, or all these things. I'm like, why aren't we valuing these experiences? This is the center of who we are. This gives us spirit, this gives us life, this gives us This gives us hope. This gives us freedom. All of these things are important. And, and so the ecovocities are trying to recenter that. And you know, the other thing I was saying, the modern university is what, deadlyhood in the sense of preparing people to be slaves in the corporate game. So what if we want to, our own leaders, so much have been, the brain drain has happened all over the world. You're taking amazing people out and you're putting them in corporate to serve the master, corporate masters to steal from their own communities. So how do we actually support them to become new models of leadership that they can be, you know, leader servants in their communities, really think about the future of their communities? Because the school never asked you, what do you think about the future of your community? Exactly that, right?

Yeah, individual capital accumulation, actually.

Really, that's the value. My daughter has never gone to school. I told you, the most beautiful thing I see is how connected to place she is. It's like I'm almost jealous, the deep-rooted connection. And then you start— well, that love of place is so critical to taking care of the place, to nurturing the place, to being in partnership with the more-than-human in the place. That love has to be there. And that's one of the things that school is taking away from people.

Yeah, absolutely. But one of the things I also think about some of that is often there's a slightly romanticized view that this is happening in rural areas, on farms, in forests, in rainforests. And actually, one of the things I think is really— given that, you know, a significant amount of people around the world live in cities and megacities, what do these kinds of phrases like place-based learning or, you know, connection with the more-than-human world mean when you live in a favela or you live in a challenging, quite rough area of a big city? It has a different—

Definitely different thing. But, you know, in the favelas, you'll see people are growing things. You'll always find some houses where people are growing, they're creating beauty. And I'm saying that, you know, I met— it's a great story because there's a favela university in Brazil, several now that exist, right?

I think, yeah.

And these guys were like— one of the guys I met who was doing stuff there, he had been in prison for 10 years and he came out and then he was— he found art while he was in prison and then he came out, he was teaching art to young people. Then he saw there's a lot of garbage and being dumped in his favela, so he started organizing how to clean up the neighborhood and stuff. And so when I met him, he had already set up a little thing there. And I'm like, you're running your own favela university. And he's like, what? I was in prison. I'm like, no, you're leading this. You can— he's like, how can I run a university? I'm like, you're running it. It's already happening. And I'm like, you know more about how to deal with the gang problems, the drug problems, the pollution, the dumping. He's created beautiful gardens. Like, the grandmothers are running beautiful food gardens in his favela.. So all this thing is possible, how to build radical trust again with your neighbors. I'm like, you guys know how to do this. Nobody sitting in a university knows how to do it actually on the ground.

Absolutely. And, and almost the myth previously has been you have to leave that place to go to a city, to go to the university, to learn the expertise, to then come back, if you come back, to do the work.

And most of the time people don't come back.

Exactly. Precisely. Right.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, amazing, amazing.

And you know, the exciting thing is, I think the one of the things in Ecovocities is though, so I say there is a value of traveling, you know, spending some time outside of your community also, so you see other realities, other cultures. So I don't want to say that we want a very parochial, narrow approach, because even for me, you know, if I spend time outside, I see so many other beautiful things that I neglected in my own community as soon as I get back. So the Ecovillages, that's another great— there's a network all over the planet where you can go. We offer even residencies to leaders of different projects that you can go to another community, spend a month or two there, share your knowledge, learn from them, bring that back to your community, you know, and that kind of flow of relationships. So the idea is not to become, you know, when sometimes when people hear localization, they're like, oh, what about all the diversity? No, we want, we want that, but It starts from being connected to place so that you also be able to, you know, like in our place, the biggest, highest value, you know what it is where I live? Hospitality is the highest value. That's what I learned from my grandmother. And we love, you see that, that's missing.

It is, it is really. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? Cuz that, like you were saying about the, often the things we value happen in the gaps in between the current system, right? I mean, I, I had Abby Falik on the podcast. She's working on something called Flight School, which which is how do you take that concept of the gap year and actually make that the learning, make that the thing, you know? And I actually think we're in a quite a unique opportunity now with the affordances of the technology to support the kind of, as you've got with the Alliance, the Ecoverties Alliance, you know, you've got the cross-fertilization of different contexts using the technology and then also going in person. I think it, I mean, yeah, it feels like a really important combination of the two.

Yeah, for gap year, we say it's not a year off, it's a year on. Exactly.

Well, exactly.

I think that's one thing that, you know, every educator who's concerned should be promoting gap year.

I 100% agree. Exactly.

After 10th grade, take a gap year. After 12th, take a gap year. So the more we can normalize it and encourage people— because it's interesting, I had done a, like, an informal study of a lot of amazing leaders, and it turns out almost all of them took some kind of gap year. I'm like, when did you shift? Where did you get this idea? It was when they were exploring in a gap year. And so we can offer— one of the things we try to do is really offer a whole range of— because nowadays, you know, gap years have become businesses and some— like, you pay $20,000 for a gap year, which is crazy. It's again putting you in the same, you know, debt trap that, you know, modern education puts a lot of young people in. But how can you do it with no money or very little money? How do you do beautiful gap year? You know, there's so many opportunities that are available. So we've tried to make a lot of those explicit for people to see that, okay, these are things even if you don't have money. A lot of the things is even, you know, we did one of our most exciting unlearning pedagogies is called the Bicycle Yatra. So you travel on a bicycle. Yatra means pilgrimage, basically. Nobody has any money, no technology, no food, no plan. And you go and you just tell people, I'm on a pilgrimage, and can you take me, host me for a night or two nights? And it— all of the fear that we have, the money system is— this is, I think, critical. It's that any educator today, the money system is putting a ton of fear in people, right? Almost everything we do or not do is because our fear around money. So if we're doing anything meaningful in education, we have to almost exorcise what I call the god of money, or take it— it's sitting on our head, it has to go back to our feet. And be at our service, not dictating to us what is a good life or meaningful life, right? Unless you do that, I would say whatever you're doing is useless because everyone has been carrying that fear their whole lives, right? And so this is one thing, without a week without any money and not being seeing the whole world through transactions but actually through gifts is a radical shift in how you are in the world, you know? And so that we, we take people, it changes so many. And then you're with villagers in India who usually don't look like they have very much financial wealth, right? And they are so caring, so hospitable, so giving. And you're like, dude, this doesn't happen in the big elite cities where I live. Like, people are not doing that. What's going on? The people who— exactly, you know, afford to give things are so tight with it. And people are so giving, and they'll feed you, and they'll— they don't have fear. So what has happened to our mental models of it?

Yeah. And fundamentally, I think you can't unlearn that fear or you can't learn that trust by being told it. Right. I mean, you have to experience that in whatever way. Amazing. Thank you, Manish.

Yeah. I don't think that, you know, the thing with where Ecoversity is also, so the other thing is it, you know, it's a response to parents because they have this fear. So if you tell a parent, I'm going on a gap year, they get really nervous, you know, like, what are you gonna be doing? And nowadays there is, you know, there's so much crazy unsafe stuff also happening. People feel very nervous around it. So then you can say, okay, I'm going— tell your parents I'm going on a program with Ecoversity, which gives you that little bit of comfort to your parents that you're with people who are going to be there to support you. You're part of something. So I think— and then those— a lot of those programs have that flexibility to explore things locally and more meaningful ways.

Yeah, no, it's good. I mean, yeah, like you say, you need those enabling structures to keep it flowing. Otherwise, you know, things shut down for often for good reason, right?

Protecting children. So I, you know, I think— I don't have any faith in the university shifting, but I think there's a lot of professors, faculty of schools and years who are questioning. So I think this bridge is important. So the other thing is that like unschooling, most people cannot really handle that. It's too, too much for them to talk about, right? So I think an ecoversity, alternative university thing is a kind of thing to help them start to understand what are these other worlds. It's an easy way to connect. And it's also, yeah, so as a teacher you could say, hey, there's this beautiful project in India, why don't you go and spend a year there? I know about, or There's a beautiful project in South Africa, or, you know, I can give you 40, 50 countries. I can give you projects which you can go and suggest people which are not going to cost them an arm and a leg to participate in, right? And then what I've seen is, you know, like if you say this to a, let's say, a vice chancellor of a university and say unschooling, they just go, they're like, oh, that's interesting. And they'll walk away or they'll say, that's like a cute project you're doing. But as soon as I start talking about Swaraj University, those same people have listened, sat and engaged for 2, 3 hours. So if we are trying to build bridges and dialogues, then we have to have these other spaces. Otherwise there's no imagination in the dialogues.

100%. Exactly. And another thing I've heard you speak about is like, and just maybe to finish on, what's the invitation? It feels like, it feels like finding the right invitation for the people at wherever they are. Because as you say, some of the things are too radical for some parents. Some of the things are too radical for some university lecturers or vice-chancellors. You know, there needs to be an invitation that bridges from where they are without compromising the integrity of the thing you're doing. But, you know, you want to, you want to invite them, right? Otherwise they're just gonna, they're just gonna say, oh, that's cute, but I'm not coming. Right.

Exactly. And so I don't know, you know, also Auroville, it was a friend of mine. He got a World Bank project for training government civil servants and he built it into this project that the civil servants would spend and as part of that, one month in Auroville. So we need to create these sanctuaries, spaces where we can, which look, you know, like beautiful and things, but have very deep spaces for people to unravel, disrupt, question fundamentally, and create, create something different, start to put your hands in the soil, build something. And so I think in Udaipur, we've done that, the same thing with Swaraj University and the ecosystem here, Udaipur as a learning city and Auroville. There are many ecoversities where people can— you can actually go, because the thing is that a lot of this is the problems cannot be solved in the mind alone.

Exactly. Yeah, right.

Until you physically, emotionally, spiritually experience something different, you're not going to have the confidence to actually take the risks that we need to raise. And then you feel that trust again. Why will you take a risk? Everything is— you're— we're being told the whole world is against you. So until you feel like there's a space where I can trust, then you might be willing to take a risk. Maybe I'll take a year gap year from my job, or maybe I'll start to think about giving my kids some space to do something differently. Or, you know, that's how things start to shift. Maybe I'll, I'll, I'll take a PDCA in permaculture and take those days and do that. But that comes out of some sense of trust and care and connection. I think that people start to feel they can do those things again.— in different ways, the thing. And I think the last thing I was saying is that, so people today talk a lot about scale. This is like everything, scale is being weaponized to dismantle or humiliate lots of meaningful things that are happening. And so our idea is that the scale question will be met. There'll be thousands of diverse— scale is only relevant if you can, and it's needed because of the kind of huge nature of the challenges. But it's only relevant if you can have that diversity built in, right?

Yeah.

And so thousands of Ecovocities around the world supporting learners. Like right now I'd say we have more than 50,000 learners in our ecosystem of Ecovocities around the world, you know. So there is, and there's many more that I don't even know about, but they're functioning already, right? And so that's the way, is that let us think about scale question in tune with diversity. If that's missing, then it will be a weapon and will be very destructive to everybody.

Yeah, yeah. Well, as your website says, from mainstream to many streaming, right?

Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.

I love it. So thank you, Manish. I mean, this is, yeah, so beautiful, this idea of sanctuary spaces. I'm going to take with me. That's amazing. So yeah, no, thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for talking about it with me today.

Enjoyed being with you, Tim. I hope we get to meet soon somewhere.

Absolutely. No, I'd love We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog, or on social media, or within your own networks.