Brief summary:
With teachers, my work centers on a simple but transformative shift: from delivering education to inviting learning.
I explore how informal, curiosity-driven learning — rooted in relationships, experience, and attention — can coexist with formal education and restore what often gets lost: agency, motivation, and the joy of learning itself.
The longer version:
Over the years, teachers’ associations invited me repeatedly to lead workshops in Panchgani, a small hill town in Maharashtra. They came with curiosity — drawn to the informal learning practices that had emerged out of our Open School Project — and with a genuine question: how could something so unconventional find a place inside real classrooms?
I usually begin these sessions with a distinction that matters deeply to me: the difference between learning and education.
Learning is something we do for ourselves. It is personal, internal, self-driven.
Education, in contrast, is often something done to someone — structured, delivered, imposed.
The distinction may sound subtle, but it changes everything.
When teachers begin asking, “How can I invite a student to learn?” instead of “How do I deliver the curriculum?”, something fundamental shifts. Teaching moves from instruction to invitation. Learning becomes a shared journey rather than a one-way transfer of information.
This is where informal learning comes in.
Informal learning happens outside rigid structures. It grows from curiosity, lived experience, and genuine interest — through play, observation, trial and error, and conversation. Knowledge is not handed down; it is discovered in context. And because it is personal, it tends to last.
There were countless examples of this in practice. Children learned by watching each other, by falling and trying again, by fixing what broke with the tools at hand. They learned responsibility by organizing activities, negotiating roles, and living with the consequences of their choices. Nothing was written on a blackboard — yet everything was a lesson.
Much of this learning flowed through relationships: peer to peer, across ages and backgrounds, through simple proximity and attention. It was messy, nonlinear, and impossible to quantify. But it was deeply human.
This is how people have always learned — long before classrooms existed — through life itself.
Informal learning does not always provide answers. But it teaches how to ask better questions. And that, I tell teachers, may be one of the most valuable capacities we can pass on.