• Over the last 25 years in Udaipur, we have seen the Shikshantar movement organically evolve into a powerful incubator and weaver for radical educational experiments in Udaipur and around the world.

• And the fraying of the social contract is getting worse. Americans express less and less trust in many institutions. Substantial majorities of people say that government, business leaders and the media are purposefully misleading them. In striking contrast to older generations, majorities of younger people say they do not believe that “the American dream” is achievable anymore. The health insurance industry likes to cite polls that show overall satisfaction, but those numbers go down when people get sick and learn what their insurer is and is not willing to do for them.

  Things are much better now than in the 19th century. But there is a similarity to the trajectory and the mood, to the expression of deep powerlessness and alienation.

  Now, however, the country is awash in powerful guns. And some of the new technologies that will be deployed to help preserve order can cut both ways. Thompson’s killer apparently knew exactly where to find his target and at exactly what time. No evidence has emerged that he had access to digital tracking data, but that information is out there on the market. How long before easily built artificial-intelligence-powered drones equipped with facial recognition cameras, rather than hooded men with backpacks, seek targets in cities and towns?

• However, all living beings eventually reach stasis. Nothing grows forever. Why? Because to do so would have a terrible impact on a local ecosystem which is finite. CO2 in the atmosphere may be the symptom, and burning fossil fuels the reason, but growing a global human economy with a vast energy surplus by transforming every material in sight on a finite planet is the cause of the crisis.
• Wealth results from using energy to transform natural abundance into personal resources. Every unit of currency represents a material transformation and an expenditure of energy. This is why even if we did facilitate an incredible, global rollout of renewable energy whilst somehow protecting the remaining endangered ecosystems, it would not guarantee a stable planet. Humans use available energy to transform materials to produce wealth. Until we take wealth generation out of the equation, and re-engineer our economies to facilitate human and planet wellbeing, our energy supply will be used for material transformation.
• Yet, rather than discuss minimising our economic footprint, mainstream economics talk about decoupling our economies from the very things that create our economies.

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• Learning is best and deepest, i.e. tied to reality, when it is happening in the context of a Value Adding Process, not abstract courses by an arbitrary categorization of fragmented subjects. Key is developing learnings in the process of contribution learners are making (in real time) to a specific greater whole intended to create a particular value beyond the school, organization, family. There is simultaneous actualizing and potentializing. Learning and manifesting.
• And the group of learners is creating something together, as well as individually, in the process.
• Nothing, no learning, is cold storage to be used after the course is done. It is all applied, in real time, before the next installment, next gathering, or next use of ideas.
• It takes place in a process of making a difference to others’ lives, not for its own sake nor primarily for personal return. The learning becomes an instrument in service of the offering to the beneficiary. It is never learning for a delayed role in some hypothetical future place.
• The old paradigm is based on understanding life by dissection into smaller, often called simpler, ways of studying a whole. E.g. dissecting frogs, fruit flies, or a child by diagnoses. The value-adding process evokes a whole when it has one system serve another. And they are seen as nested, one system within another, from cells within a body to the living body of Earth.

• This is needed for 21st century education because the simultaneous learning and doing inside a value adding process speeds up change, provides a sound basis for innovation, and is relevant because it is specific. It also creates a steeper learning curve for all to grow faster not just in knowledge but in inner-being processes and personal development. People begin to see meaning in their lives by understanding what is significant to work on that will make a difference rather than an abstract idea of “changing the world.”
• The second premise demands a process that activates the learner’s agency and initiation of, or in, the value adding process, awakening and supporting essence expression and reciprocity.
• This premise invites all education systems and processes to support each learner to discover that essence. This happens through finding specific value arenas in the value adding process, in which they are called to contribute to other beings (individual or shared value grouping) that also have essence.

• When a learner is pulled toward work they see what needs doing for another being or group of beings, and the first door is opened. They see it and can take it on as the work they want to do. It is likely an evolution in their current role. It will require new understanding and ableness to work in that arena. Essence is what sees the need and chooses the work.
• The education system must design and develop a Contribution Infrastructure that makes self-initiated new direction and contribution possible, inside the value adding process of the learning context. This means there are no generic assignments from others, no external grades, no rating and ranking of the results. It must be fully-self-directed to wake up and nourish essence.
• It stops comparisons by class or rank. It supports agency being expressed into the world and creativity coming to the foreground. The infrastructure provides some framing for learners to think into, but no procedure that sets the choices.
• nested growth
• But we can also no longer afford to have any child or adult miss seeing clearly that they belong and are needed. No one will continue to think that there are higher or lower success levels in the value system based on class and rank. We need 100% of a population feeling that they are a part of the work of a commercial, social, or planetary process. And they can make a difference.

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• Nature isn’t something we go visit, and it’s not something we can leave behind, either. It is us, we are it. We are primates. We have a relationship of reciprocity and care and dependence. We always have the option to feel into our gratitude more deeply. Children have an innate biophilia, or resonance with nature, that can help guide them.

  Instead of hoping to live with no impact on nature at all, an impossible hope, can we replace that with concern about being awake to our whole impact, and making a positive contribution as well?

• Between 25% and 54% of students say they are not having eight engaging experiences in school, such as feeling that what they are learning is important or interesting. Less than half of students say their schoolwork positively challenges them (49%) or aligns with what they do best (46%).
• The extent to which Gen Z K-12 students feel hopeful about and prepared for their future is linked to how engaged they feel in the classroom. Unfortunately, fewer than two in 10 students strongly agree that what they are learning in class feels important, interesting, challenging or aligned with their natural talents. This disconnect is especially high among students who do not want to attend college, and previous Gallup research finds that engagement declines as students advance along their K-12 journeys.

• Insurers say the growing frequency and severity of hurricanes, wildfires, floods and big windstorms have made it impossible for them not to raise premiums. In recent years, their property insurance businesses have booked losses instead of profits.