What's Love Got to Do with Education? A Conversation with Dr. Laura Penn, Khadija Shahper Bakthiar, Jamie Bristow and Andrea Hiott

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's almost like you've transgressed because you have dared to mention words of love or ways of being. I just feel like there is such an infinite power in daring to transgress in this way where we put it out there. We say this is the conversation to have, and it's a starting point for many, many incredibly beautiful things.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As we think about transformative systems change, it's all too easy to get caught up in the technical design of new institutions and system architecture. But if we are to consider a qualitatively different way of governing, convening, educating, distributing resources, all of the fundamentals of society, then perhaps we could start by asking, what has love got to do with any of it? As I share at the start of this episode, it's been really clear to me that it's difficult to bring in this concept of love into such discussions. So I really wanted to explore it with a few courageous and amazing individuals who I knew would be up for it. In this episode, you'll hear from 4 wonderful people working in quite different sectors, from existential risk, climate resilience, to cognitive science, and leadership and communications, to teacher training and education. But they're united by their willingness to talk about love as central to their work. Dr. Laura Pentz is a speaking arts and leadership communication expert and founder of the Leadership Speaking School. Jamie Bristow is a writer and policy advisor at the intersection of inner and outer transformation, resilience, and sustainability. Khadija Shafer-Bakhtiar is CEO and founder of Teach for Pakistan. And lastly, Andrea Hyatt, who you will have heard previously on the podcast in episode 209, is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and writer, and host of the Love and Philosophy community. And channel. You can find more details about each of the guests and their incredible work in the show notes.

Firstly, just, I can't tell you how grateful I am that you are all willing to join me and dive into this topic. It's, it's been brewing for a while, as Laura knows, which we'll come to in a moment, but there's something very important for me about this topic and one particular place that came up where Khadijah and I, we were in Singapore. Earlier on in the year at a Teach For All gathering. And I remember very particularly sitting at a table with some colleagues from Zimbabwe, South Africa. There was a lady from the Ministry of Education, Indonesia, an Ashoka Fellow, an amazing group of people. And we were talking about leadership in relation to education. And the question was, you know, what kinds of characteristics or dispositions or whatever would be relevant to education leadership. And I, at a certain point in the conversation, brought in this word love. And I, it was like the proverbial tumbleweed where everybody just looked at me and just thought, what, what are you talking about? Like you, and they actively then said to me, you, you actually can't talk about that here. Like love is not an appropriate thing to be talking about in this space of organizations, institutions, professionalism, leadership, education. And it was, it was quite, I mean, in a way, quite surprising to me, but it really stuck with me. So, and it was in relation to that, what I was thinking, you know, actually it'd be really interesting to open up this question as what, partly why is it difficult to talk about this subject in these kinds of spaces? And then Laura, you and I sat and hung out in Cardiff Airport at one point, and you said to me this amazing phrase that you thought we needed a revolution of the heart. So maybe we can start there. Could you, um, yeah, just open that up a bit. What did you mean by that and where might that take us?

Yeah, and those words I borrowed. It was the mother of one of the students at UWC Atlantic College who's an artist. And it was a profound, first of all, talk that she gave to a room full of students at this extraordinary school in Wales. And her movie was about art installations that she had created all over the world that took pieces of the area. So she was in rainforest, she was in the Arctic, she was on an oil rig. She took elements and she had one element that was constant in each of her exhibits, and it was this human skull. And it was a beautiful piece of work. And she said, you know, art is bringing people closer to what is missing. We need a revolution of the heart. And the moment she said those words, I felt like an electric charge in my whole body. And I thought, those are the words that I wanna put on my flag because they resonated so deeply with number one, the state of the world that we are in and what is missing. And number two, what I teach as a premise, the river that runs underneath the work I do and the method that I've created is love. And to your points and thoughts earlier about this is a topic that we don't we're not allowed to talk about, or this isn't something that's in the context that we should be talking about. I think a lot about that, and I think about what is it that people are so hung up about where they can't freely express and talk about love. One thought is I feel like too many people think about love as relationships, physical relationship with other people. So that might be taboo to talk about, or that love is something that is so raw and basic and, you know, animalistic and creature-like that it is not something that we entertain or talk about. Well, therein lies the problem. This topic of love is what we are made of, that we are head, heart, gut, hips, knees, feet, and toenails. We are this instrument that has evolved over all of these millions of years to be the beings that we are on this planet today. And one of the main things that I do to begin all of my lessons in front of my students of what I call young changemakers and leaders and teams around the world is I draw a very big picture, you know, on a flip chart of a floating head and then a tiny little disconnected detached body in stick figure form. And I say, "This is a problem that we are facing in the world of communication." And I have that as a starting point for the discussion. What is the problem? And at the core of that is A, the head is bigger than the body. So there's an overfocus on the mind. What is in the mind? What am I thinking? What are the knowledge bits? What are the facts, the figures, those knowledge details? And there is an underdelivery. There's an underrepresentation of the body. So we are effectively disconnecting ourselves from our body. There's a disembodiment, a fragmentation happening. And at the level of communication, this is extremely plain to see. And the digital world has made this worse, where we're literally, with all due respect, floating heads here. And that is the template for how we've chosen to communicate. And what is the cost of that when we communicate? How do we feel? Well, we don't feel much because we're not involving the instrument the way it's designed. So, yeah, there are pieces here. You see there are fragments of this thought. But again, the root of it, this revolution of the heart, let's return to the body and have them connected at equal proportions. So the head is the same proportion as, you know, it should be to the body. Let's feel things. Let's talk about feeling things. And let's expand the vast and unlimited potential of what love can do in an educational setting.

Beautiful. 100%.

Well, I love that. I love what Laura just said. And actually, it's a little bit of a computational explosion of how many things I would like to talk about in there. But like, revolution of the heart. I mean, this is great too. Just, it made me, as she was talking, I was thinking about the heart. And of course I'm coming from neuroscience and philosophy of mind, and I could tell you all these things about the brain, you know, relative to what happens with, with love. But we forget that we have like 40,000 neurons in our heart. And we have neurons like through our body. And so it's actually, when we're thinking about education and learning, we've— and what Laura was just saying about, you know, the head being so blown up, it's not only that we're living in our mind, we've actually assumed that cognition is in our head and it's actually in our whole body, you know, that, that stuff that we think of as being in the head, our thoughts and thinking is so the very tip of all this bodily cognition, embodied ecological cognition and, and the heart itself literally as I mean, it's sending signals. Everyone's talking about the vagus nerve a lot now, and that's a kind of like path, you know, from brain to heart. So yeah, it's, it's really important to make it okay to understand that what we're doing in these situations of learning or teaching is already actually using the body, embodied. And that itself, for me, you can't separate from love, from what love means, because From the moment you're born till now, you've been making your way through the world. And if you think of cognition as a bodily act, then every experience of love that you've had has been also an experience of learning and education, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. And it makes me think of a couple of things. I think one, as I was, I was listening to you guys, I was realizing we all have our stories, right? Of when we've, it's almost like you've transgressed because you have dared to mention words of love or you mention ways of being in the context of education or education systems, or enabling people to do more, be more, generate more in terms of their fullest capacities as human beings. And there is always this discomfort. And I, I feel like, in my experience, I think talking about love as at the heart of what we want for our students to grow into, at the heart of how we want teachers to operate, at the heart of of how we want policymakers and system designers and architects to, to really imagine the future. I feel like I've had both of those experiences. One is these experiences where people get really, really uncomfortable and they would want to use anything else, right? So the things that I've been told to replace love with is empathy. And in our work, we think— we constantly talk about, you know, we want to nurture our kids to be loving, thinking, and engaged human beings. And the reason why is because we feel like it's, it's every human being's fundamental right to be able to experience all of those things, being all of those things, right? But every time we say that, people say, well, can't you just say empathetic instead of, you know, can't you just say socially minded instead of saying loving? And then, and then on the other hand, I've had these incredible experiences where I've, you know, sat with the most powerful government official within the education landscape in the country and taken— I'm introducing to the work that we do at T4 Pakistan, and in my introductory presentation, when he, when he reads our vision statement and I move on after saying, you know, loving, thinking, engaged, and he says, wait, go back, go and it kind of got his attention and he said, "Tell me more." So he leaned into it. So I just feel like there is such an infinite power in daring to transgress in this way where we put it out there and we say, "This is the conversation to have," and it's a starting point for many, many incredibly beautiful things.

I think there are a number of reasons why some groups in society are squeamish about using the word love. It's not the case for everybody, And actually it might be more the case on the political left than the political right even. I mean, Trump in the United States talked about January 6th and the Madison Square Garden rally as being expressions of love, like days of love. And I think there are a couple of reasons why there is that squeamishness. One is that, as Martin Luther King said, that power without love is reckless and abusive, but love without power is sentimental and anemic. And often that's the version that we, that we see. It's ill-defined, it's wishy-washy, it's sentimental and anemic, and we'll be discredited if we talk about it. I think there's another reason as well that, that people, again, I think maybe particularly on the political left, are squeamish about strong emotions in general and about what they, where they might take us. And so at a societal level, I think we are scared of using like, and channeling, marshaling, encouraging some of the most powerful psychic forces that could lead us to better, more wholesome places because we see so many examples of it going, of those emotions being tethered to bad values or like, you know, degenerative values. But there have been times in history when actually talking about love, or at least, you know, very intentionally using that palette were absolutely vital for state building. And, you know, I'm thinking the United States at the end of the Civil War. I'm thinking the beginning of Indian subcontinent democracy. You know, there are politicians there who are explicitly trying to conjure feelings of deep love and tell stories about what it is to be a member of this nation. And sometimes in a very sort of internationalist way, talking about it as a bridge to feelings of love about the whole of humanity. But we have shrunken our ambition, I think, largely to a more managerial project and abandoned that territory to populist forces that are much happier to be working in that palette of strong emotions.

Thanks, Jamie. That, I mean, that's super interesting to take it in that direction and maybe we can come back to that, but I, I just to reflect that managerial kind of more professional sense. That's what I felt on that table in Singapore was like to talk about love a little bit like you were saying, Khadija, it felt like I was transgressing by bringing in love because we needed to stay in the space of the professional or the managerial or absolutely. And it comes up in education for me a lot, that idea that In a way, we ask teachers and we ask young people to kind of leave their strong emotions or leave their, the kind of deepest part of themselves at the door of the classroom when they come in. And it's all, we're gonna behave in a way that is more professional, let's say, those kinds of scripts in order to maintain some level of order in the space. Or so there's lots of reasons why I think that happened, and that's not the only reason, but it, So back to what you were saying, Laura, that kind of radical disembodying, it's like all of those deeper parts of oneself, or, you know, however we wanna say it, or more emotional parts are just, they're the things that get us into trouble. They're the things that cause disruption in our lessons, et cetera, in a formal education space. So actually we wanna keep those at bay. I don't know, there's something there for me, but yeah, Laura.

I feel very strongly that I wanna jump in with this thought that I feel very few people are talking about, but it is a crisis. In and of itself, I believe, in education. And this is the death of the humanities. The humanities are where we talk about love. The human arts, the expressive arts, the performing arts, the visual arts. This is where it's safe to, you know, read a poem, to have a Shakespearean sonnet, to do a dance, to create music. The creative elements and the creative world have permission to talk about these gooey things. And somehow that is a space in and of itself, but we are now, I believe, recklessly neglecting the humanities in favor of what is happening with the digital age. And you know, what headline doesn't say the jobs of the future, you have to learn tech, you have to be in AI, you have to be an entrepreneur. I feel that we need a reignition of craft in an age of code. And this craft, this humanities, this human arts, we have to hold on to it as if it's becoming extinct because it is. It's under threat. And this is the bastion of the heart. This is the bastion of love. And it's out of balance with this other side of the technical, the logical, the mathematical, the spatial. I just wanted to insert that into our conversation because I urgently feel that we need to put the brakes on this problem that is rolling us into a very dangerous place. Where we lose the humanities.

That's absolutely, I mean, I definitely agree with you, but it's also super interesting, Andrea, in what you see in, for example, in your space of cognitive science and neuroscience and with your Love and Philosophy channel, because in a way, what I see you doing there is bringing in love into a space of science and tech and all of the, you know, that, that kind of more engineering type mentality, I suppose, that often— where, as you're saying, Laura, often isn't the space where it's talked about.

Yeah, that's one reason I do the podcast, because in neuroscience and philosophy, especially certain kinds of philosophy, we didn't talk about these things that I felt like were so much actually creating the things we are talking about in our removed way. So we act as if they're separate, and we talk about them as if they're separate, and at the same time we're there creating them from these, you know, bodily resources. And I, I really understand what everyone I'm saying in my context, it's been very hard to talk about, even say the word love, to put it with philosophy. You can look at, I mean, some of the people who now like the project will say, right, very openly, at first they thought it was a joke or something that I, because I used that word. But that was part of it. And I think this speaks to what Khadija was saying about the tension. I think some of this, we're sort of talking like we need to solve it, but it's okay that it's hard to talk about love. It should be hard. It is tense, actually. And it's more, for me, what I've been trying to do is open the space to let us be in the tension a little bit instead of always trying to solve it or define one side by the other. Because as Laura was saying, the, the head is winning, right? Because it's that safer area for us. We put our attention there and we put our money there and we think in humanities is where you get to be the heart. But the truth of it, really, if you study the brain and the body, the truth truth of it is these aren't different things. Your cognition is your whole bodily movement through as your life. And it's tense, I think, to try to talk about that, especially in all these contexts, like high-power kind of contexts that, you know, the people here are often in. And I think more than trying to solve it and say like one side needs to win, it's like, how do we learn how to hold that tension together and understand how, like you said, Tim, about these are often the problems, like when we're too emotional or whatever. That's kind of true, but maybe not. Like, maybe it's because we're trying to put emotions in a box as if it's something separate from mind. So how do we kind of re-put these things on the same track again and hold that tension? I mean, that to me, that's what comes to mind when I hear what Laura just said too about the crisis. Like, somehow we're gonna have to kind of rethink this space that we're all in together.

No, absolutely. And actually yesterday I was listening to Iain McGilchrist again on your channel, Andrea, cuz it's just a beautiful conversation with him, but, and reading some of his work again. And you know, he really does emphasize a lot music and arts and all the things you were talking about, Laura, in such a profound way because exactly as you were saying, cuz it's that kind of rebalancing. Those are the spaces where we can move with the tension that you're talking about, Andrea, somehow, like we, it's okay to do that there. It's sometimes more difficult to do it in the more propositional spaces. But could I just ask you, Andrea, just to dwell a little bit on that point about cognition, because we talked about this on the podcast previously, but I really think it's not a widely used word in education generally, but it comes in and when it does come in, it very much nothing to do with love. It's nowhere near love, right?

Yeah.

It's nowhere near the body actually, because where it does come in, in certain spaces is things like cognitive load theory. And so there's a familiarity with the language of cognition in a way that is about memory and memorizing. And that's fine. There are, that's an important piece of the way we inhabit the world. We remember stuff and, you know, it's important to look at some of the science behind that. One of the things I just so appreciate about the work you are doing is just opening up that space of what cognition is to taking in the full kind of kaleidoscopic aspect of what it means to be a human in the world, exploring the world. And so, yeah, why is that an issue when you actually look at the science of what cognition is?

It's a very hard word. I mean, it, even neuroscientists, neuroscientists and philosophers also ask me why I use cognition, you know, because Everyone, yeah, it does. You get— you feel like it's stuck in your head. But for me, that's exactly the point that we do that, and that, that's why I don't mind being embarrassed or, you know, whatever, having people argue, because I really think it's that important that we understand that word as a bodily beginning. You know, everything from the moment you're born until now, you've been making your way through something, and that is an intelligent act. I mean, that's a cognitive action. And yeah, you get to the point where you are aware of that and you can talk about it, and you have these things, you know, that are attached to language that you think are your thoughts. But that's not separate from everything you've been going through as a body making your way. I mean, it's cognitive. You, you have to survive this world. And I think that's where care and love are so important, because we're born so vulnerable and we need help. I mean, literally, that's how the human body has been made, right? To be born needing care. So that love is from the beginning the tension that's holding us. We absolutely have to be cared for, and that is integral to that whole development that I'm calling cognition. You don't separate these things, they're all tangled together. Love is this like cognitive orchestration, you know, of brain and heart and toenails or whatever Laura said at the beginning. It's literally all that movement, you know. And I really think that's why the heart is important. And when you think about the neurons in the heart, it's called the little brain, but actually it, you know, your whole body is the brain in a way. So I do feel like that's important, and it's very hard to understand, and it's very hard— I can't imagine Jamie trying to bring something like that up in a political context, or Khadijah, you know, these— you would sound crazy, right? Which is why I'm trying to find a way— how can I talk to Jamie or Khadijah about this and find the links? Because I just feel it's so crucial, and it connects all of us. And, um, thinking of love and care as that tension of development, of absolutely it's impossible to get away from it, which is why I also think it's so hard to talk about and why we are so afraid to talk about it, because it is so integral to who we are that it's easier to kind of make it into a joke or ignore it. So I don't know if that speaks to what you're saying, but one other thing that comes to mind out of all this is that also a lot of these people that all of us are talking to in different ways are responsible for other people, and that is itself that tension and that care. So a lot of even the reaction of not wanting to go to the silly place is because you're holding that tension of care. Like, you, you know, you're responsible for other people and you have this weight. So I know I'm getting a little fractal here with how all this is entangled, but I think that speaks to what I think is a more kind of accurate understanding of what cognition is and how it's absolutely inseparable from love and care.

You know, this, this problem that we're having with disembodiment and literally sitting more than standing and not using the bodies the way that they're designed. What's your take on that? You know, how is that harming our ability to use the whole human body? If that's— if the whole human body is the brain, how is the modern way of not using the body harming us?

Oh, I think it's so, so important, this issue. I think you look at Gen Z, Gen Alpha, Gen Beta, the Zoomers, and kind of the younger generations, and you really see the pain of this. The— exactly for what I was saying, because we haven't understood this, that our cognitive development is an embodied development. Like, you actually can't get away from that. So we've separated it. And this becomes, I think, even more kind of critical when you have people sitting in front of boxes of light and they're not actually— I mean, this is still wonderful that we, we would never be able to all meet in person probably today. So I'm not saying that technology is bad, but I think that we don't understand that we need the body. You know, Laura, nobody probably can see you, but you're standing up and you have this beautiful atmosphere around you, and that makes a cognitive difference for you and for us as we watch you, you know. And I don't think kids now, or anyone, not only kids, you know, all of us, we're not really aware of the actual bodily habits we're creating as we're doing this. It's not that I'm saying you shouldn't be on Zoom, but I'm saying you should realize you're having a bodily kind you're developing your cognition in a certain way. And if you only narrow it and keep it like that, you're actually narrowing what's possible for you to feel and understand. And it's a kind of knowledge, right? So you wanna, you wanna find other ways to know whatever it is that you're so excited about, not only through a particular one medium. And I could go on and on about that, but I think just it's a really important idea, especially when we think about what we're starting to see, what you mentioned earlier about LLMs and this turn towards prioritizing a very particular language-based idea of what cognition is. And as I was saying, that's the very tip of the iceberg of actually what cognition is. So until we have a wider understanding of how cognition develops and how it's bodily from the beginning, maybe we're going to continue to prioritize that for the same reasons that I think Jamie and you, Tim, were talking about, or all of you, about that being a safer space, a more accessible space. A seemingly more rational space, things like that.

Andrea, what you're saying, it reminds me just of an experience that I had recently, which— but it was incredible because I was working with this leadership coach a few months ago, and I'm used to processing things by talking about them, right, or writing about them. And those are the only two ways in which I process stress or trauma, right? And when she started working with me, and this, this woman, I think honestly in some ways it's It feels like a love that I've experienced after— I can't remember the last time I experienced this dimension of love, and I didn't know how much I needed it until I got it from her. But what she did was just kind of interrupt my way of processing, which is all verbal and all thinking through stuff, to just bring in so much of the physical. And I had just never experienced that before. So it's a lot of the use of sound as it flows through my system and then physical touch and what is the role of that. And it blew my mind and connecting with the earth, the ground. So I, when you, when you're saying that, right, that even the cognitive is also physical, I, I understand that experience in a different way. So yeah, it's just so helpful getting the vocabulary for that.

That's actually very beautiful. Thank you for sharing that because that is actually the, that's why it means so much to me because it actually is so sensual and so connective and so extraordinary to remember that. Or even some people never knew that. That's why I brought up Gen Z, Gen Alpha, Gen Beta. Like, we actually— some people, we don't realize it because we've had the contrast, but some kids right now, they don't actually experience that, you know, that release as a kid. We can kind of remember that. Like, you, you sound like you're remembering it a little bit, but we're all in different ways. But I think what you just shared there, it's so powerful and it's so important, and it reminds me a little bit of Jamie's work with meditation and things like that too, of How do we connect to the body, right? You can do it in so many different ways and maybe in different contexts we need it, that intervention that you described in different ways.

Laura, did you want to? You look like you were—

I don't want to speak too much, but man, I feel so passionate about this. Look, you know, I do another mental kind of connecting of the dots. I'm a dancer. I grew up in the 1970s. Everybody was dancing. As I was growing up, you know, in the '80s, I was living in New York City, the birth of hip-hop. And then something happened in the '90s where dancing stopped. And I feel like there's a relationship between people's disembodiment and when dancing stopped. You know, when I work with teenagers, inevitably I bring in music and the body, and I'm known for my conscious DJ skills. And that first hurdle of getting teenagers to move their bodies in a dancing way in front of an adult like me Horror. It's terrible, you know, makes the hair on your skin rise. But then there's a moment that ends when everybody's finished giggling and they're like, wait a minute, this actually feels good. There's something about the fact that we're not dancing like we used to that is part of the harm, because it's in that dancing that you return to the body. It's in that dancing that you're in your feet and not in your mind. It's in that dancing that you have community. And that you also vent. Obviously, you know, culturally, dance, all of the arts have been used to share these strong feelings and for communities and cultures to be able to deal with the ravages of living, right? And we've put the cultural elements on the side. So you go to a ballet, it's very expensive. That's where you see dance. You go to an art gallery for an exhibition. Somehow the arts have been taken over and removed from society where they belong as a way for us to deal with what is happening in the complicated lives and world that we live in. So that is my kind of loose dot connecting of the harm that dance and the absence of it is doing. And just for everybody to know, I have bought the domain name for thedaytimedisco.com because I seriously, if I have another, you know, wind, want to create daytime discos. For people to start to dance during the day.

Just saying. I'm in.

Yeah.

Okay, good. You and me on the dance floor.

And I'm franchising that in Pakistan.

I love it.

100%. I spent a lot of my 30s going to Morning Gloryville in London. Have you heard about that, Laura? It's a rave before work from like 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM.

Wow.

And at its peak, there was like 1,000 people in one of the kind of the coolest venues in East London. Raving together before having a quick wipe down and trip into the office. So yeah, we need more of that.

That's amazing. Oh my goodness. So maybe dance floors in the Houses of Parliament, Jamie, how about that? In the House of Westminster.

I'd love to see it. I tell you what, when they started introducing mindfulness to British parliamentarians, they adapted the course so it didn't need any mindful movement because if someone came into the wrong room and saw everyone sitting straight-backed in, in outback chairs, they could deal with that. But if they were doing some kind of yoga or tai chi or mindful movement, that would've been a career ender.

It, it's fascinating though, right? That is so interesting to me because I feel the same. I see it all the time. I even feel it myself. I was in a conference in Helsinki recently and it was, you know, as soon as someone brings in an embodied kind of moment, then you can just feel people squirming in their seats of like, oh my Oh my goodness, I'm going to have to move. I'm going to have to get up and I'm going to be embarrassed in front of these other people. I mean, it really is a thing, right? For a lot of culturally in certain places, way more than others. And it's super interesting to notice and then to be in other contexts where it just isn't a thing and people are moving much more freely and there's just no sense of embarrassment or public shame about that. I mean, it just, as an anthropologist, I find that completely fascinating piece.

It also reminds me of this relational care as relation and love, you know, the radicalness of it that we try not to deal with or see or maybe hide from. I had a talk with Beck Todd, who's a neuroscientist, but she started out in dance and she was a dance choreographer. And a lot of what Laura was saying really resonates with that. She talks about the third entity. I don't know if you've heard of that, Laura, but this idea in dance where when you're dancing, this third sort of entity, which is the kind of dance comes together. And actually, we're all sort of always in third entities. I mean, you know, that is this actuality of what bodies together are doing. We're co-creating each other all the time. We're co-creating the world together through that dance. But we don't let ourselves see it, feel it, express it because we're embarrassed by it. Or we think we, you know, whatever the body is somehow different from cognition or the mind and what needs to be controlled by it. And maybe for a time we needed to do that. You know, I'm not saying like that it's bad to think about a lot of these things as separate sometimes, but perhaps, you know, like T.S. Eliot, we're coming back to where we started to know it for the first time in a way, and we can re-inhabit our bodies and not judge each other for our bodies, because that's a lot of it too, is like let it be okay to move and to dance. And I hope and think that maybe bringing this idea of that your body is already cognitive as it's developing before you can think could help us like make that a little more normal, even scientific, because we have, we have the science. And also it made me think when just one of the thought that came to mind when everyone was talking was about teachers I know who tell me about the kids when they try to take them out to let them play and they have to put their phones away and they don't know how to play anymore, or they don't know what to do with their bodies. They're just sort of standing there, you know, kids of a certain age.

That's a crisis.

This tells us a lot, right? Like, something's wrong there. Yeah. Something's not being sensed and felt fully in that.

Right. And I don't think that media is helping. I think bodies are too sexualized. You know, if you're dancing to music and you're a woman, oh, you know, you're being sexy. No, you're actually just feeling the rhythm of the music. This is a problem. And I think that some of that fear and the courage that's needed to overcome the fear to dance like nobody is watching. That's a long time ago, but that was acceptable in the, in the years of dance. And now it's not.

Amazing. Thank you. I, I wonder just, so I guess I hadn't fully kind of anticipated the, how much the body is in, and that's like, I love that, but it's also, there's something else for me about this idea of love in relation to education and I want to say kind of relational fields or something else that is a bit, it's not outside the body, but there's something about this field building or, and I, if I can, Jamie, I'd love to ask you a little bit about that because I think given all of the amazing work you do around societal resilience and climate literacy and existential risk, I mean, building that conceptual bridge between those things of where does the love come in when you start talking on that scale of like now we're talking about policymaking or whole countries or even whole continents and thinking about how do we hold that as a kind of set of ideas. That feels also really important to this connection with love.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I think there are many ways that educators have a role in developing love, both love as something that, that can be a disposition, a capacity, and also has a role in teaching us what is worthy of love. And sometimes that is an explicit policy. And so you might look, like a contemporary example might be Chinese education policy is in part about teaching love of country, love of the party. And there are very clear functional reasons for that. And our minds can often go there, you know, thinking, oh, well, is this sort of like brainwashing? But it's always, whether explicit or implicit, always happening. Countries are telling stories about themselves in order to help us to collaborate with each other at scale, in order to self-sacrifice in the service of the greater interest. And often history curricula and other forms and what's on the English literature curriculum, politicians often have very strong opinions about that. That's because they want to, they love certain things about their world, their country, and they want to pass that love on to and therefore shape shape the future of that people based on an image, a mythos about what is worthy of love. And so it's always happening, whether we have an explicit conversation about that or not. A new education secretary will be subtly or not so subtly doing it, but it's such an important thing. I don't think it should be left up to those kind of back office conversations between ministers and public servants or curriculum setters that actually that conversation about who are we, what do we love about our past, what was difficult about our past that needs to be owned up to and learned from, how is that shared sense of shared pain or overcoming or complicity woven into our narrative about that? And how can our, the way in which we're responding to that to be part of the story of love are all super important. And so yeah, like going back to Laura's point about the humanities, and, you know, the, the role of all of those subjects to rounding out the individual and giving us a sense of sort of soulfulness and love for the world. You know, I'm, I'm minded of the American author Richard Louv, who, who wrote the book, um, Last Child in the Woods. And that includes the quote, you know, we won't protect what we don't love. We won't love what we don't know, and we can't know what we don't see or touch or hear. So in a way, love is about the stories we tell.. It's about the culture and the mythos and the things that pass down from parent to child in neighborhoods, by politicians, by education institutions, but it's also about individual and collective experience. And so both that, like paying for artists to be able to tell stories about us and to inquire into that and evolve it can be a matter of public policy. Our statues, our public holidays, our national anthems, you know, these are all things that have been at one time way more explicitly constructed in order to cultivate certain sentiments. But we can also, you know, have policies around what are the experiences which will engender love, have that, like, that embodied connection of the woods, but also an embodied connection to democracy, perhaps. You know, what's the experience of really being involved in choosing or firing our elected leaders or being involved in some kind of collective decision-making? It's one of the reasons why neighborhood democracy, democracy at different levels, is so important because it would give us a much more immediate, direct experience of what it is to be part of the body politic, to be part of, you know, a civic landscape. And these are, yeah, these are all things that we can invest in. We can invest in the physical landscape of people's lives and in the social cultural landscape of people's lives to engender love.

That's so interesting. Thank you, Jeremy, because it just highlights to me just again, how fine the line is between education and propaganda or indoctrination. It's like the idea of policy being an invitation to love something, such an interesting idea, right? Because it's not often, it's just like a technocratic mechanism of control. But yeah, I mean, it's happening, right? There's ideology being smuggled in all over education that people often don't like to admit, right? Whichever side of whichever discussion you're on, it's like a wit, You know, they're the ones with the ideology. We're just bringing in truth here. This is just how we are. This is just people being, and it's like there's values and there's care and there's invitation to love everywhere. But as you invoked Trump at the beginning, you know, he's doing the same thing, right? You know, there's an invitation to love something and it's like, well, I want you to love the thing that I tell you to love, or that the thing that I say is important here. So there's a whole bunch of really interesting tensions around all of that.

Yeah.

So fascinating.

Absolutely. And it, it's very difficult to love an abstract principle. It requires enormous amount of imaginative capacity and we need to kind of bridge the particular to the more general. So we need to like learn to love other people in a wider and, and wider groups through embracing certain elements of tribalism, having a beautiful rendering of patriotism, for instance, that can give us a bridge to internationalism and a, and a, and a love of greater humanity. And that imaginative faculty also can be, you know, part of a curriculum. You know, compassion meditations are in part training people in being able to, to imagine having offered their love or compassion towards people more immediate to you, to then extend it to all of humanity or living beings or whatever is an imaginative exercise. And, and yeah, this could be an education outcome worth investing in.

Yeah, I think so much of what Jamie is saying, I think it goes to the heart of the way that I understand the education crisis in Pakistan and also just where Pakistan is as a country. I think about how important it is to, you know, when we talk about love, kind of get into what kind of love are we talking about, right? Because the kind of love that when it is engendered by people who are at the helm of affairs of a nation-state is often not love, but manipulation of emotion so that you have loyalty and fidelity to achieve a certain end. And that is an exclusionary love. It says love nation over community, love nation over your tribe, love nation over whatever group of people who you feel closer to. And it just doesn't have to be like that. It's— that's not love, that's fear. Right. And I think the truest and most honest forms of love are, are really difficult because they force you to really consider injustice that may have been perpetrated by people of that tribe that you belong to, or that community that you belong to, onto others. It is a love that, that forces you to think about what is going to be good for that community, that country, this world. 100 years after you're dead and gone. And I think we're just not thinking deeply enough about that as an outcome. And as Jamie was saying, I think I actually feel like it is, it is really urgent. You know, I live in a country that where the educational outcomes are dictated often not by people coming together and a large national consensus on what do we want for kids, but the educational outcomes are dictated often by, from some donors who are trying to do the right thing, some technocrats who are trying to do the right thing, and we set our outcomes at 'Oh, our kids should have this much literacy and numeracy.' We're not thinking about, you know, love and creating loving human beings, even though that is the greatest crisis in this world today. And it's, I think, more tragic when you consider that we come from a— earlier, Tim, you were talking about the difference between cultures. We come from a culture where the disembodiment is part of colonization for us, right? It is part of that history for us, because in our history, there is a great rootedness to the land. There is a great connection between the physical and the emotional and the spiritual and the cognitive, right? And that is, that was the heart of what education used to mean, right? The nourishment of a child, of a human being, of a human spirit used to mean. And I think the project of colonization has been the project of disembodiment in many, in many ways, and the separation of those domains. And so I think right now, the most worthy pursuit, I think, in a context like ours is to redefine at the level of outcomes of education systems. And also I think of other systems that are thinking about what do we want for our kids and what do we want for them in the next 20 years, right, as they grow into adults, is to really just redefine that and at the outcomes level, redefine them as full human beings and then work backwards from that, right, to say what will we need at the level of policy and systems and implementation, execution and all of that other stuff.

Yeah. Thank you. Jamie, did you want?

Yeah. You mentioned in a question earlier, like what does, what does love mean for, for instance, societal resilience or the systemic transformations that we need to see? And I think it's gonna be very, very difficult to make the kind of deep changes that we need without some kind of strong emotion. Like change is often quite slow and generational, incremental, you know, cultural and systems change until it kind of happens all at once sometimes because of crisis. And that unleashes all kinds of emotions. You know, to Khadija's point, there's, you know, strong emotions that are more difficult to handle, perhaps easier to conjure, like fear and anger, grief, et cetera. But these are also times of, of opening up about a discussion about what, you know, what do we really want to do here? Like what, what, what have we got that's worth saving? And that's the conversation that we are moving into. It really is about survival. Certainly about survival of our, of our systems and things that we might love within them. And it might be about survival of ourselves and our, and our future generations. And so where some of these strong emotions like fear lead to fragmentation, lead to disintegration in many ways, they could be considered to be entropic, as in like tending towards entropy and the fracturing and spinning out of order in our world. And we need to think seriously about what our neg and entropic forces. And love is sometimes talked about as being as the opposite. You know, it, it's a kind of holds things together where other forces will, would spin them apart. And so what are the, what are the collective rituals that we can create to hold communities together, to hold societies together? And I'm, and I'm, I went to the football this weekend and 30,000 people were silent for 2 minutes because it was Remembrance Weekend. You know, the, the weekend when we marked the end of World War I and those who gave their lives in service of democracy and freedom since then. And 30,000 people listening to the last post on the trumpet, you know, as deeply touching. And I was moved to love for the 30,000 people around me who were also in silence observing that moment. And also from, yeah, to some extent for my country and for all the, you know, for this positive articulation or positive manifestation of force, of power, of standing up for what is important and right. And there'll be a lot of that that is required. So yeah, what, what, what are the, what are the things we can, we can use to celebrate and remember what is, yeah, what is worth saving?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I, I, I think about that a lot in relation to the kind of, we talk about spaces in the work we do with Festival of Hope, but like kind of creating spaces and creating almost containers for some of these things. Cuz I think what you're speaking to there is, speaks to me about, as you say, ritual or the dance floor, Laura, or just these different places where things can emerge and humans can be together in some kind of synchronous way or some kind of connected way where maybe a field can open up in relation to where this love comes from, or, or I don't know, surfaces somehow. I don't even know what the language is really, but there's some, that's why it's an interesting contrast with the idea of policy and, and telling people what to love or invite, because it's like Somehow this idea of love is, it's emergent. It has to be emergent. It can't, you can't control for it, right?

No, but you can fund it. You can fund it. And that's the role of artists in society. In so many ways, we have stripped and defunded art to the extent that we are unable to tell these stories about ourselves. But if we think back in the United Kingdom to the 2012 Olympics, people were really down on the whole project before it happened. And they were talking about being a waste of money or whatever. But actually, it led to a genuine uplift in Britain's sense of itself and a positive, good feeling. And part of that was the work of Danny Boyle with the opening ceremony and celebrating the NHS and doing this amazing piece of art, which was about Britain telling a story about itself. And so, yeah, you couldn't have told— in a Stalinist way, you can't tell artists exactly what to do and it still be a spontaneous beautiful piece of art, not often anyway. But you can, you can have policy that opens up the space for that and makes it more likely to happen.

Yeah. No, that's interesting because it's also then to your point about the imaginative leap of expanding the kind of circles of love, like how do you do that thing without making it the exclusionary thing that Khadija, you were talking about and, and drawing the, the very impermeable boundaries around the things that you love. And then, which is to invert saying, well, all of that that stuff out there is stuff that we therefore don't love because we're somehow uniting together in this more tribal way. And again, that just feels like such a challenging thing to hold when at its core education, to bring it back to education, is really coming from a place of, as you said, Khadija, what do we want for our young people, right? You know, this feeling that I have as a father of my children, like I want things for my children and there's something deeply tribal in feeling. And then at the same time, I also want something for the natural world, for all of the nature that we are and are part of, and that they are, are and a part of. And it's this really difficult thing to hold those two kinds of tribal and planetary feelings at the same time.

Yeah. In her book, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Martha Nussbaum talks about the Greek myth of, is it Scylla and Charybdis? It's the monster in the whirlpool that I think Odysseus has to has to navigate. And it's basically like the, the razor's edge between a bad outcome on the left and a bad outcome on the, on the right. And the one side, it's like generating strong emotions that can lead us astray and get tethered to bad outcomes. And on the other side, it's weak motivation. It's the giving in to the, the entropic forces that would, that would just fragment and lead us astray in another way. So, like, as you say, what's the, what's the right balance? Between having enough love for the world, for society, for the country, for the, for nature, and not, not so much that it's, it gets channeled in unskillful ways and, and, and leads to outcomes that we, that we wouldn't want.

I think the word fragmentation is sort of where we need to find ourselves and then go backwards from it to make the whole. We're broken. We have so many things that are broken outside, and we are broken inside. And to use the wise words of pop culture's RuPaul, who says, "If you can't love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?" He ends every episode of RuPaul's Drag Race that way. And those are food— words of food for thought. This fragmentation of— you have to start from the whole from you and then go out. You can't start with a fragmented part of yourself and then go out because then everything's going to stay in pieces. So in terms of education, how do we make our children whole? They are in pieces. How do we bring that sense of completeness of I am me and me is I? You know, let's go back to this wisdom of what, what makes a whole and how Do we get that? How do we find that? Without that wholeness, we can't fix what we fragmented.

And I agree with everything everyone has said, except I will push a little bit on all of it at the same time, because for exactly that reason, because I think part of it is just trying to hold this tension, hold the paradox or whatever, but also that it's not like wholeness or fragmentation. The wholeness is there too, and the fragmentation is there. And how do we see the fragmentation as part of, you know, this connective of ongoing life that we're all sharing. And, you know, to like, you know, there's so much I could say about oxytocin and different chemicals in the brain, you know, that create the kinds of stuff that you were talking about in terms of this emotional connection. Like, you know, when you have— you basically have heart rhythms, brain rhythms, sine waves, um, norepinephrine, dopamine, you know, all these things literally kind of going in your body when you create certain situations in the way Jamie was talking about, and that have certain effects. And that's powerful, that's amazing that we do that. So we don't want to reject that, but it's better if a lot of people understand it maybe too. And if we understand that this is not like— again, this is a kind of ongoing process, that's the way we develop our bodies. But also, you know, we're talking about— we can talk about individuals, but we can talk about groups of people, like, you know, people at the sports match. That's creating an entire sort of— if you want to call it a cognitive space or an emotional space. I mean, for me, those are We're talking about the same thing there. And so, you know, understanding that that is possible and that's a power that we have, and that like anything else, it can be abused or it can be used in good ways. And to me, that comes to what Khadija was saying again about love is hard, and there's a lot of different kinds of love. To that fractal versus wholeness, it's not that we're going to have to choose different things or put pieces together, but we need to see that there's so many different pieces and how is it all talking together? How can it better talk together? And that means at different times we're going to have different kinds of experiences of care or love, and that it's going to be difficult, right? As she was saying, like, being able to understand that that is— that almost is the evidence of the love, that it feels hard for you, like with your kids or with, you know, the groups of people that you are responsible for and care about. That hardness, that tension is the care and is the love in a way. At least in these kind of very deep situations that we're talking about here, I think.

I completely agree with you because that makes me think of the conversation I have with my partner about parenting and when you want to hold the line with your children because, you know, there's something you really care about. This is really important. You know, it may seem small to some people, like we have this conversation regularly about table manners, right? And how important are table manners? And there's this sense of this is something I really care about. And it feels really important. And therefore you have to do something which is uncomfortable because then your children don't like you for quite a while. If you're imposing a sanction or just drawing a line around that. And it, in a way, it's much parenting's much easier if you don't care that much. 'Cause it's like you just let them do whatever they want, whatever feels good at the moment, but actually you're holding multiple timescales at the same time about the kinds of people they are becoming. So that comes up for me in that.

I think you're really speaking to the need for power and love, like healthy use and modeling of, of power and, and love together. And my Harvard colleague Nicole Marie, who is a pedagogue gister, good word.

Yeah.

Preschool and primary education. And she describes particularly preschool as an intense laboratory of power and love. Because working with young children, you have to kind of direct power to keep them safe, to stop them running in the street, but also model other forms of power, power with, power for, and also balance that with, with like loving nurturing instinct. And she says that in the context that she's worked with and tried to develop curricular and, and teaching competency, people are often more actually comfortable with the love bit and they need more help with the power and it might be the particular approach that they, that they use and therefore the kind of teachers that they attract to that organization. But as a parent and as a, as a teacher, I think getting the balance right there is really tricky because my colleague also says that permissive parenting has actually some of the worst outcomes. It's worse than, you know, authoritarian. And neither of which are as good as authoritative. Which is to say healthy use of power balanced with love. Fascinating.

That makes me think of Andrea. You and I have both had Mina Salami on the podcast and, um, in such an interesting and difficult word, power, right? And she talks about power in such interesting ways because too much to go in now. But I, again, it's just a really tainted and difficult word, power, right?

Yeah.

We could do a whole separate conversation about the word power actually.

Absolutely. I had the same feeling when Jamie started saying it as if it's opposite to love because And I know he didn't really mean it that way, but it, there's a danger in that way of thinking too, actually, that is very hard to talk about and very hard. Like I was thinking of tough love or something like this, or, you know, what you were saying, Tim, like about you can just, if you just let it all go, it's easier. It's easier in the sense that you don't have to hold that tension and feel that tension.

Right.

But I think that's the love actually. Is that, that parenting is the love, you know, what is the love if it's not that, I mean. And I think with like Mina also, she's also saying there's all these layers and we need to sensually understand them, you know, sensuous knowledge, the body. And, and I think that's like the depth of— instead of thinking of power over here and love over here and you choose them, that actual real love is, is that kind of power. But how do we make that kind of power the kind of power that actually gets into power in terms of, you know, educational systems or politics?

Yes, absolutely. And that Martin Luther King quote, which is often just quoted in the first part in the way that I did earlier on, goes on to say that power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. So absolutely, many philosophers have talked about them as kind of poles or dichotomies, but they are included within each other, of course.

Yeah.

I actually had Adam Kahane on the podcast a while back and he's written a book on love and power and he has come to exactly that insight that actually if you bring justice in there as well, you get this really interesting triad. Yeah, exactly as you say. If I may just round it out, Khadija, just to come to you perhaps, if we could talk, 'cause one of the things that came up for me as we were having some of that earlier conversation is about the people that are holding the spaces for our young people. So like we've talked about parenting and you know, the ways these show up at home or in different spaces, but also there's such an important, like a critically important role for educators, for teachers. And I just wanted to ask you, how do you help your educators as you are training in inverted commas? I don't love that word, but let's use it for now. You are helping those educators to step into the space of being that person in the classroom, in the space that is holding all of the things that we've been talking about. Yeah, perhaps just speak to that a little bit. How do you work with that, especially when you've got love as a guiding kind of principle supporting your work at Teach for Pakistan?

Yeah, Tim, and I think even as I was listening to this, the last like 10 minutes of this conversation, I was just realizing it feels like quite an obvious principle which doesn't get, I think, talked about enough in policy development. Research circles when it comes to thinking about, you know, how do we prepare educators. And actually the same is true, I think, of anybody who comes into contact with a child, including parents. I think parents need a lot of help, which is that, you know, you can't create an experience for somebody else that you haven't yourself experienced, which seems like quite an obvious principle. And so I think when we talk about like being able to— if you want to see around our kids, for instance, in classroom spaces, if you want to see classrooms that have this beautiful balance of structure and actually, again, I think love great structure in a classroom that's enabling kids to thrive and, you know, be able to really fully develop their many, many talents that they already have and explore stuff and grow. I think that kind of structure is very much an expression of a teacher's love In my head though, I keep thinking, when we talk about teacher preparation or teacher education or teacher training, we kind of take all of that, the humanity of the teacher, out of the equation when we're talking about it, particularly when we're talking about it at scale. And you know, we've been talking since the beginning of this conversation about the difficulty of talking about love. Why do, why do people struggle with it? I think in the context of teacher development, one of the big reasons is we don't know how to scale it. We don't know how to scale growing teachers into loving educators. And that's a real challenge, right? But, and I don't know that I know the answer to the scale question, honestly, but one of the ways in which we've seen it come to life is that it has to start with who this teacher is, who this educator is as a human being, and their full humanity has to be part of the process of growing and learning, right? And so within like our 6-week teacher preparation program before our incoming cohort of teachers gets to work, almost all of them are people who've never taught before. One of the critical streams in that 6-week program, because it's a short program, right? Time is of the essence. We have to be really economical with how we use it. But one of the core themes there is that it all starts with the self and it starts with kind of unpacking what are the identities that I am coming into this, this work with? How have I experienced privilege and power in those identities? And also the experience of disempowerment or being oppressed, right? What has that felt like to me? And that is your starting point of thinking about how do I as an individual engage with this big thing that is the system around me? And that feels like it is an essential place to start because without that self-awareness, there is no way of you being able to relate to somebody else, right? And then the first layer of relation that we try and build with a lot of intentionality is to be able to relate to the other educators who are in this work with you. And that we feel like is essential because the power that this group has together to kind of, you know, go through this intense experience, which teaching in hard context is, it's an intense experience. I think that's the first layer. And then the second layer in which that extends then is how do these teachers then relate to their students, right? And so it's almost like layers upon layers of helping people really discover and be in sync with and really consider all parts of themselves, bring them into the whole. That's one way of what we, you know, when Laura was talking about making children whole, that's what I was thinking about. That's how we work actively to make our educators remember that they are whole people. And then we see that layer being replicated at the level of the students very naturally. Like, that's how they operate then when they go into a classroom where They see all kinds of divisions of class and gender and religion and ethnicity. And then they have to really empower this group of young people, of students, to work together as a collective where every single individual loves themselves, loves their classmates, loves the natural environment, has love for their community, and also has love for their country. I think it all starts with this kind of humanization process that happens when, when we start working with our educators. And I've seen incredible things. I'll just end with this one note. I think it's like the power of that is something that moves me to tears every time I think about it, because I have seen countless times people grow into their full power and potential as changemakers in ways that that, you know, one could never have imagined had you just read the resume or just met them on day 1 of our training institute. And it is because I think that they, once you really deal with people at a human level, they open themselves up to being changed and moved and inspired in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise, right? I think that's the thing. Even when it comes to something as simple as when a coach gives a teacher like feedback How is that feedback going to be received? Do they let that coach reach the deepest parts of them, right? Because that's what it takes. You know, it takes something very deep to reach a very deep part of you. That's, I think, what turns you into a great educator. And I think you only allow that when you are truly, truly vulnerable and you are truly safe and you feel seen and valued for all parts of you in that relationship. So that's a very, very long answer to a short question you asked.

No, no.

Beautiful. Thank you, Khadija. I couldn't agree more. I think that's actually a lot of where this invitation came from, to invite you all into this space, because I do feel strongly that we often get enamored by the technical solutions to the problems, perceived problems, that kind of managerial response, Jamie, you talked about earlier. And so much of it is just the thing you were talking about just now, Khadija, like like how do we open up to not the technical, but to this kind of relational love thing that we are trying to, to somehow speak to all of us together. And it's just, I had a beautiful conversation with, I don't know if you know Karima Kadaoui who runs the Tamkeen Project in Morocco, and that's one of the places I'd actually listened to her earlier again today just to connect back. Cause she is another person like you Khadija, who does this in the most beautiful way. And it, like, it takes such a level of care and trust to kind of enable that opening up of that space for educators to not resort to the technical and the, oh, what's my curriculum saying, what's my lesson plan saying, and just to do that deep human thing that you were talking to there. And like, for me, in a way, like, that's it, that's the thing. And of course you need all the other bells and whistles, of course, but if you haven't got core, that heart, it just feels like, yeah, we're lacking. So I just want to say thank you so much. But if anybody has any final things you wanted to say, feel very free.

The opposite of tension, which is a word we've been using a lot in this conversation, is flow. And I strongly believe with every piece of myself that if we can support our learners, the people that we come in contact with who are students, to find their flow, to find their wholeness, and from that place develop the power and the courage to show love and to participate as being loving. I think that those are elements that are going to help our world become a better place.

Yeah, I like to say when you hold the tension, you feel the flow, because I think that's exactly the When you can acknowledge the tension, then you can dance, so to speak, or something. And, uh, also I agree so much with everything everyone just said. And it, I really feel like teaching and educating is so maybe the most important thing we have right now, even though it seems like people think that we're, it's going to be taken over by technology. But for exactly those reasons that you all just brought up, that space to me feels like the most urgent, most important. Crucial thing that we, that we have right now and that actually kids are hungry for and adults too. But I really, yeah, I just, so I just want to say that that to me feels like, as you said, Tim, the most important thing. Yeah.

And we have, we have evidence-based practices. We often talk about compassion, loving kindness, care as being self-evident goods, and we can just will them into being by talking about them. But in addition, we have some tried and tested methods that have been adapted from ancient wisdom traditions, and now many have thousands of peer-reviewed studies supporting their benefits. And these, these are in many countries being brought into the, to the classroom as standard, you know, Japan, Singapore, many countries across Europe. I was really struck by the amazing leadership of the Indian education policy from 2020. Which talks about, you know, love and care and compassion as, as national priorities. And we haven't gotta start from scratch here, you know, as well as teaching kids what's wholesome and worthy of love, we can also develop the capacity or the disposition of care and kindness and love in an evidence-based way.

Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy. No, I, I, I hear you and I would say if all of those conversations about the evidence base is about the evidence and not the person holding the evidence or the feeling of the person holding the evidence or the relationships that hold all of the, like, you know, I agree with you that we, we have tried and tested methods, but so often that becomes the focus and it's like part of what I'm— rather than a whole school approach and just, just a whole, yeah, whole community, whole culture of exactly that holds those because you can bring in any kind of evidence-based method into a highly toxic culture you like and it it will not do the thing you need it to do. But I also really appreciate that you're saying, and in a way, Andrea, as well, we were saying earlier, you know, this is about the science and the care, the love and the philosophy altogether. It's not about one or the other. Absolutely. Yes, you are all beautiful humans. And thank you so much for having this amazing and beautiful conversation. And just thank you for everything you're doing and taking the plunge with me into this.

Thank you for the invitation. It takes courage to love. And it takes courage to talk about it. But the reward at the end of that is, you know, is this where we're all trying to go.

Exactly.

Thank you for the invitation.

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