It was my honour to be invited to the Dharma Civilization Foundation Academic Symposium to lead a session on “Education — Learning Beyond Data” with Professor Prasad Jayanti. My talk, Learning as a Living Relationship (link), underscored the urgency underlying our current educational tipping point.
DCF colleagues Dr Anand Rao and Dr Alok Chaturvedi outlined a “transactional world” in which data is given enormously disproportionate weight, yet remains only a small sliver of reality: “The system is inside the field it describes [and] evaluation participates in what it evaluates.” Most institutional failures, they argued, are built on inertia marketed as coherence.
We have confused the map for the terrain.
Rabindranath Tagore identified this confusion more than a century ago. For him, the highest education was not information transfer but the cultivation of a self in living relationship with the world. Krishnamurti pushed further: the conditioned mind cannot uncondition itself through more conditioning. His challenge seems increasingly relevant today: are we building freedom, or a more appealing enclosure?
The DCF breakout discussions showed why these remain live provocations. Four threads emerged with particular force: the necessity of deep listening and internalisation as a disposition rather than a technique; a renewed emphasis on pedagogy over content that explored how we teach rather than what we teach; the urgent question of how to create holistic, regenerative education rooted in the understanding that all phenomena arise in relationship; and the primacy of immersive, experiential learning situated in place and genuine encounter with both human and more-than-human communities.
In the closing comments, I reflected that we were enacting a truly transdisciplinary approach, bringing together scholars from different traditions and discovering that we were asking the same question:
What does it mean to educate a whole person for a world in which our inherited maps have run out?
Regenerative Learning Network 