Learning as a Living Relationship
Leverage Points for Transforming Education
"Life cannot be made to conform to a system, it cannot be forced into a framework, however nobly conceived... The highest function of education is to bring about an integrated individual who is capable of dealing with life as a whole." — J. Krishnamurti
Pavel Cenkl | Dean of Academic Affairs
Prescott College | Arizona
International Centre for Sustainability | London
Regenerative Learning Network | International
A Systemic Crisis
The Polycrisis Meets the Metacrisis
The crisis in higher education is systemic.
Polycrisis
"A complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet." — Morin & Kern, 1999
Metacrisis
"An aggregation of educational crises of sense-making, capability, legitimacy, and meaning." — Stein, 2022
35%
Public Trust
Down from 57%
$1.84T
Student Debt
Total outstanding student U.S. loan burden
36% / 60%+
Increase in tuition since 2000
Private / Public

These are symptoms of a deeper failure: the siloing of learning itself.
  • Knowledge privatised.
  • The more-than-human world expelled from the curriculum.
  • Students optimised for performance, and debt creation rather than for inquiry.
  • The system reproduces itself, not free minds.
This is no time for incremental change
The modern university is built on unstable and unsustainable premises
Transactional
Knowledge moves from expert to novice. A one-directional transaction.
Individual
The unit of learning is the isolated mind. Community is merely instrumental.
Siloed
Disciplines transcend place, season, soil. Knowledge belongs nowhere.
Institutional
What works for a few cannot be standardised for millions without loss.
Lessons from Tagore
Santiniketan: Learning Under Open Skies
"The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence." — Rabindranath Tagore
Relational Ontology
Learning arises through relationship with place, community and the more-than-human.
The Living Self
The living self is realised only through immersion in the world. Silos diminish capacity building.
The Experiment
Santiniketan dissolved the wall between classroom and living landscape by learning through art, movement, and seasonal rhythms. An institution that tried to undo itself.
Relationality
Relationship as foundational learning theory
All phenomena arise in relationship. The self is not prior to learning: it co-emerges with it.
Learner
Not a container to be filled. A node in a living network.
World
Not a backdrop to learning. An epistemic actor in its own right.
Relationship
Not a means to learning. The medium through which it arises.
From Network to Field
Networks: Nodes & Links
Most leaders think in terms of discrete connections and information flows.
Fields: Continuous & Dynamic
Regenerative systems behave more like fields—driven by forces, tensions, and gradients.
Spontaneous Reorganization
Patterned ground in the Arctic demonstrates how structure emerges through ongoing movement.
From Stability to Metastability
"Metastability describes systems that remain coherent while undergoing transformation. This is the 'art of staying alive' through change."
Living systems:
  • Hold tension
  • Stay open to new relations
  • Shift between configurations
Leadership becomes the practice of navigating uncertainty with responsiveness rather than rigidity.
What Metastable Systems Look Like
01
Coherence without uniformity
Shared purpose and values, diverse approaches and perspectives.
02
Capacity to reorganize under disruption
Antifragile systems that grow stronger through stress.
03
Vulnerability as a strategic asset
Openness to feedback enables rapid learning and adaptation.
04
Decisions informed by feedback, not fixed plans
Sensing and responding in real-time to changing conditions.
Examples: agile teams, distributed networks, open-source communities, regenerative agriculture cooperatives.
"Co-operation itself is the best aspect of the truth we represent, it is an end and not merely the means" -Tagore
Leverage Points in System
  1. Numbers – Constants, subsidies, standards
  1. Buffers – Stability reserves (time, money, resources)
  1. Stock & Flow Structures – Physical systems, pipelines
  1. Delays – Speed of response
  1. Balancing Loops – Self-correcting feedbacks
  1. Reinforcing Loops – Growth/decline feedbacks
  1. Information Flows – Who has access to what information
  1. Rules – Incentives, punishments, constraints
  1. Self-Organization – Ability to evolve structure
  1. Goals – The purpose of the system
  1. Paradigms – Mindsets out of which the system arises
  1. Transcending Paradigms – Capacity to step outside and evolve worldviews
Donella Meadows, "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System," 1999
Leverage Points
Where to Intervene in the System
Donella Meadows identified twelve leverage points in any system, ranked by power to produce change. Higher education spends 90–95% of its reform energy at the bottom of this list. The high-leverage interventions for a regenerative educational future are:
1
2
3
4
5
1
Transcending Paradigms (1)
Adaptive, resilient, cross-sector, whole-person, whole-community learning. Capacity to evolve new worldviews.
2
Paradigms (2)
Regrounding in community, civic, bioregional and ecological engagement. The mindset from which the system arises.
3
Goals (3)
Reframing purpose: from credential production to ecological and community flourishing.
4
Self-Organization (4)
Transdisciplinary design, cooperative structures, relational networks. Capacity to evolve from within.
5
Rules (5) & Information Flows (6)
Credentialing, accreditation, governance. Who controls what can be known and said.
Reform works at 12. Regeneration works at 1–6.
Toward Regenerative Practice
Reframing Skills, Metrics, and Institutions
From Skills to Capacities
  • Systems thinking and ecological analysis
  • Collaborative facilitation and participatory leadership
  • Conflict transformation and intercultural communication
  • Adaptive problem-solving and ethical reasoning
  • Strategic storytelling and narrative design
Value That Flows Back
  • Systems impact: graduates contributing to ecological and social resilience
  • Relational capacity: collaborating across difference and discipline
  • Adaptive agency: navigating uncertainty
  • Civic imagination and lifelong flourishing beyond graduation
Distributed, Co-Creative, Alive
  • Distributed learning across complementary cross-sector organisations
  • Shared risk and responsibility; co-creative networks
  • Living, adaptive curricula
  • Moving from scarcity and competition to collaboration and reciprocity
  • Inhabiting alive spaces where community, bioregion and institution interweave
An Invitation to Action
How can we move from sustaining the higher education to regenerating it?
What would it mean for a regenerative learning network to belong to no single institution?
How is our work in education accountable to place: ecologically, historically, culturally, ethically?
Who authorizes knowledge in a distributed relational network — and can a regenerative learning network avoid replicating the authority structures of the institutions it critiques?
Can learning ever be "owned" by an institution if knowledge itself is understood as emergent, impermanent and co-arising?