Perception Before Capacity: Education, Intelligence, and the Limits of Skill in a Polycrisis

By Devesh Gupta

For citation Gupta, D. (2025). Perception before capacity: Education, intelligence, and the limits of skill in a polycrisis. Emerge Publications. https://doi.org/10.65169/perception-before-capacity

---

Abstract

Education is increasingly framed as a central response to a convergence of global crises often described as a polycrisis, including ecological instability, technological acceleration, political fragmentation, and widespread psychological distress. These challenges are frequently framed as a lack of capacity, to be met through improved skills and adaptive capabilities. This paper questions that framing by examining a more fundamental distinction between capacity and intelligence. Drawing on inquiry into perception, knowledge, and the psychological self, the paper analyses how skills function through memory, repetition, and recognition, and why this mode of functioning is inherently limited in domains involving relationship, ethical sensitivity, and care for life. Through engagement with contemporary educational, sustainability, and governance debates, the paper shows that skills amplify intention rather than generate intelligence, and that when action arises from fragmented perception, increased capacity reorganises disorder instead of resolving it. The analysis further examines whether qualities such as love, compassion, awareness, and wholeness can coherently be treated as skills, arguing that attempts to cultivate these qualities through method or practice reproduce the very movement of becoming that obstructs their emergence. The paper demonstrates that persistent reliance on the known perpetuates division by seeking solutions within the same structures of perception that generate crisis. It concludes that education must be reoriented away from skills as the organising centre and toward the support of life itself, placing perception before capacity and intelligence before performance. Such a reorientation does not reject skill, but situates it within its proper limits, with implications for education, sustainability, and governance in conditions of accelerating global disorder.

1. Introduction: Education and Polycrisis

Across policy discourse, academic literature, and institutional reform agendas, education is increasingly presented as a central response to a convergence of global crises. Climate disruption, ecological degradation, political polarisation, technological overreach, economic precarity, and widespread psychological distress are framed as interlinked challenges that demand adaptive, resilient, and innovative human capacities. This convergence is often described as a polycrisis, a condition in which multiple crises interact, amplify one another, and resist resolution through isolated interventions.

Within this framing, education is assigned a critical role. Schools and universities are expected to equip individuals with the skills required to navigate complexity, manage uncertainty, and sustain social and economic systems under increasing strain. Curricula emphasise problem solving, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, digital literacy, and ethical competence. Intelligence, in this context, is commonly understood as the ability to adapt effectively to changing conditions and to perform competently within complex environments.

This orientation rests on a largely unexamined assumption: that the persistence of global disorder reflects a deficit of capacity. If individuals possessed better skills, more advanced knowledge, and improved competencies, the argument goes, social and ecological systems could be stabilised and guided toward more sustainable outcomes. Education thus becomes a project of capacity building, and the crisis is approached as a technical and managerial challenge. Yet this assumption sits uneasily alongside contemporary reality. Never before has humanity possessed such extensive scientific knowledge, technological capability, and institutional sophistication. At the same time, ecological thresholds are being crossed at accelerating rates, social trust is eroding, and psychological distress is increasingly normalised. The coexistence of unprecedented capacity with escalating disorder raises a fundamental question that education discourse rarely confronts: whether the crisis is truly a failure of skill, or whether it reflects a deeper limitation in how intelligence itself is understood.

This question cannot be answered by adding new competencies to existing educational frameworks. It requires an inquiry into the nature of skill, knowledge, and perception. In Eternal Movement, Gupta (2024) argues that fragmentation in society mirrors fragmentation in perception, arising from identification with thought, memory, and the psychological self. When action proceeds from such fragmentation, even well-intentioned efforts tend to reproduce division rather than resolve it. Education, far from standing outside this dynamic, often reinforces it by privileging achievement, comparison, and performance. Krishnamurti articulated a similar concern in his critique of modern education. He distinguished sharply between knowledge required for practical living and knowledge that governs psychological life. While the former is necessary, the latter, when dominant, conditions perception and sustains conflict (Krishnamurti & Bohm, 1986). Intelligence, in this view, is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the capacity to perceive without distortion. Where perception is absent, increased knowledge does not lead to wisdom.

David Bohm’s analysis of fragmentation extends this insight into the social and institutional domain. Bohm showed how thought, when unaware of its own movement, fragments reality and then treats its abstractions as independent facts. These abstractions become embedded in systems, technologies, and institutions that operate without awareness of their underlying assumptions (Bohm, 1980). Capacity increases, yet intelligence does not necessarily deepen.

This dynamic is particularly visible in governance. In Governance Without the Self, Gupta (2025b) demonstrates how institutions reproduce the psychological structures of those who design and operate them. When action arises from a centred observer driven by fear, identity, or control, governance systems scale those tendencies through policy, law, and technology. Education that prepares individuals to function efficiently within such systems, without examining perception, becomes complicit in the reproduction of fragmentation. The central claim of this paper is therefore not that skills are unnecessary, but that education has mistaken skill for intelligence. Skills belong to the domain of the known and function through memory and repetition. Intelligence belongs to perception and operates in the present. When this distinction is blurred, education risks amplifying the very conditions that sustain the polycrisis.

To explore this claim, the paper proceeds by examining what skill is and how it functions, why recognition cannot substitute for perception, how skill-based education strengthens the psychological self, and how skills developed without awareness translate into power and division. It then turns to a critical inquiry into whether love, compassion, awareness, and wholeness can meaningfully be approached as skills at all. Through this inquiry, the paper seeks to clarify the limits of capacity and to reframe education as support for life rather than preparation for systems.

2. What is Skill? Memory, Repetition, and The Field of the Known

To examine the place of skill in education, it is first necessary to clarify what a skill actually is. In everyday usage, the term is applied broadly, covering technical abilities, cognitive competencies, social behaviours, and even emotional capacities. This breadth often obscures a simple but decisive fact: skill is inseparable from memory. It operates through repetition, refinement, and recognition of what has been encountered before.

A skill is acquired over time. It improves through practice, feedback, and correction. Whether one is learning a language, performing a surgical procedure, solving mathematical problems, or operating a technological system, the underlying mechanism remains the same. The mind stores patterns of response and applies them when similar situations arise. Skill therefore functions by drawing the present into alignment with the past.

This dependence on memory is not a limitation within its proper domain. On the contrary, it is precisely what gives skill its power. In technical and functional fields, reliability depends on consistency. The ability to reproduce an action accurately, to follow established procedures, and to apply learned knowledge is indispensable. Modern societies could not function without this accumulated competence.

It is important to state this clearly, because critiques of skill-based education are often misunderstood as rejections of knowledge or expertise. This paper does not make that claim. Skill has a legitimate and necessary place. The problem arises not from skill itself, but from the failure to recognise where skill belongs and where it does not. Skill belongs to what may be described as the field of the known. This is the domain in which situations can be classified, procedures standardised, and outcomes predicted with reasonable confidence. In this field, improvement makes sense. One can become more accurate, more efficient, and more capable. Errors can be identified and corrected. Progress can be measured. Education has traditionally performed an essential role in transmitting such skills. Literacy, numeracy, scientific understanding, and technical competence enable participation in social and economic life. Without these capacities, individuals are excluded and societies stagnate. There is no serious argument against this function of education.

The difficulty emerges when the logic of the known is extended beyond its appropriate scope and becomes the organising principle of education as a whole. When skill is treated not merely as a tool but as the measure of intelligence, the field of the known expands into domains where it cannot operate without distortion.

Skill approaches the present through recognition. Faced with a situation, the mind identifies similarities with past experience and responds accordingly. In contexts that are repetitive or structurally stable, this is effective. In contexts that are fluid, relational, or inwardly complex, this reliance on recognition limits attention. One reacts rather than perceives. As we mentioned earlier, there is sharp distinction between knowledge required for practical living and knowledge that governs psychological life. While the former is unavoidable, the latter, when dominant, conditions perception and sustains conflict (Krishnamurti, 1985). Skill, when it moves beyond the practical and into the psychological, begins to interfere with direct seeing. The mind no longer observes what is taking place. It interprets according to what it already knows.

This distinction becomes especially significant in education. When learning is organised primarily around skill acquisition, students are trained to respond correctly rather than to attend fully. Success depends on recognition of expected patterns. Curiosity gives way to performance. Attention is shaped by assessment, evaluation, and comparison.

The danger here is subtle. Skill-based education does not simply transmit neutral capacities. It trains the mind to privilege the past. Over time, this training shapes perception itself. The learner becomes oriented toward what is familiar, measurable, and repeatable. What cannot be easily categorised or assessed is marginalised.

In The Mirror and the Map, Gupta (2025d) develops this distinction by showing how frameworks, models, and competencies function as representations of reality rather than encounters with it. Maps are useful. They organise information and guide action. Yet no map can replace direct perception of the terrain. When education mistakes the map for the territory, perception is displaced by abstraction. This displacement is reinforced institutionally. Skills are favoured because they can be standardised and certified. Educational success becomes synonymous with acquiring transferable competencies. Intelligence is inferred from the ability to perform within predefined criteria. Learning is measured by outcomes rather than by quality of attention. Such institutionalisation transforms learning into a form of consumption. Knowledge becomes something delivered by systems and validated by credentials, skill becomes an object to be possessed, rather than a response arising in context.

This transformation has consequences beyond the classroom. When individuals are trained primarily to operate within the known, they carry this orientation into social and political life. Novel situations are approached through familiar categories. Problems are addressed by applying existing techniques. When those techniques fail, new techniques are added. The underlying movement of recognition remains unquestioned. Understanding the nature of skill therefore requires recognising both its necessity and its limit. Skill is indispensable in the field of reality. It enables coordination, continuity, and precision. It cannot, however, generate intelligence in domains that require sensitivity to relationship, context, and consequence. When skill is elevated to the centre of education, it obscures this distinction.

The next section examines this distinction more closely by turning to the difference between recognition and perception. It asks why intelligence cannot be trained in the same way skills can, and why education organised around recognition inevitably constrains the very intelligence it seeks to cultivate.

3. Recognition and Perception

If skill operates through memory and repetition, its fundamental mode is recognition. Recognition allows the mind to identify a situation by matching it with what has been encountered before. This process is efficient, economical, and indispensable in many areas of life. Without recognition, ordinary functioning would be impossible. One would have to rediscover how to speak, walk, or perform even the simplest tasks at every moment.

Yet recognition is not the same as perception. This distinction is central to understanding why education organised primarily around skill acquisition encounters a structural limit. Recognition approaches the present through the past. Perception, by contrast, attends to what is taking place without immediately translating it into established categories.

Perception is not opposed to knowledge, but it is not produced by knowledge either. It is a quality of attention in which observation is not governed by expectation, conclusion, or prior interpretation. When perception is active, the mind is sensitive to nuance, context, and relationship. When recognition dominates, attention narrows to what fits existing patterns. Krishnamurti insisted that this difference is decisive. He observed that most human beings rarely see anything freshly. They look through images formed by memory, experience, and conditioning. These images intervene between the observer and what is observed, shaping response before understanding has time to emerge (Krishnamurti, 1985). The world is encountered not as it is, but as it is already known.

Education reinforces this movement when it privileges correct answers, expected interpretations, and predetermined outcomes. Students learn to recognise what is required of them. Intelligence is equated with the speed and accuracy of this recognition. Over time, this training dulls perception. The mind becomes efficient but inattentive.

This is not a moral failing. It is a structural consequence of how learning is organised. When success depends on conformity to established knowledge, deviation is penalised. When understanding is measured through reproduction of information, insight is secondary. Recognition becomes the safest and most rewarded response.

Bohm’s analysis of thought helps clarify why this process is so pervasive. Bohm argued that thought tends to treat its own products as independent realities. Concepts, theories, and models become reified, shaping perception rather than remaining provisional tools (Bohm, 1980). When this happens, the mind ceases to observe its own activity. It operates within its abstractions as though they were facts. In education, this reification is institutionalised. Disciplines are divided, curricula structured, and knowledge packaged into discrete units. Students are trained to navigate these structures successfully. Rarely are they invited to question the assumptions underlying them or to observe how thought itself shapes what is seen.

In The Mirror and the Map, Gupta (2025d) argues that this substitution of representation for perception lies at the heart of contemporary educational failure. Maps are necessary. They organise experience and make learning transmissible. Yet when the map becomes the primary object of attention, the mirror is lost. The learner no longer observes their own responses, reactions, and assumptions. They learn about the world without learning about the movement of thought that interprets it. Perception cannot be trained in the way recognition can. There is no method for seeing freshly, because method is itself a product of the past. Any attempt to cultivate perception through technique inevitably turns perception into an object of becoming. One practices attentiveness in order to achieve a future state. The mind is again oriented toward what should be, rather than what is.

This does not mean that perception is mysterious or inaccessible. It means that perception arises when attention is not occupied by the effort to become something. When fear, ambition, and self-image subside, sensitivity emerges naturally. The difficulty is that education rarely creates conditions in which such attention can operate. Instead, education often equates awareness with information about awareness. Students learn definitions of mindfulness, empathy, or ethics. They are taught frameworks for reflection and self-regulation. While these may encourage introspection, they remain within the domain of recognition. The learner recognises appropriate responses rather than perceiving the movement of thought as it occurs.

The distinction between recognition and perception therefore has ethical and educational consequences. When action is guided by recognition alone, it reproduces established patterns. This may be adequate in stable contexts, but it fails in situations that demand sensitivity to emerging realities. The ecological crisis, for instance, cannot be resolved by applying existing solutions more efficiently. It requires a shift in how human beings perceive their relationship with life itself. Education that prioritises recognition prepares individuals to operate competently within existing systems. Education that attends to perception opens the possibility of intelligence that is not bound by past structures. This intelligence is not opposed to skill. It places skill in its proper context.

The challenge, then, is not to abandon recognition, but to understand its limits. When recognition dominates perception, the mind becomes enclosed within the known. When perception is active, recognition becomes a tool rather than a master.

The next section explores how this imbalance between recognition and perception contributes to the formation of the psychological self, and how skill-based education inadvertently strengthens that self through processes of becoming, comparison, and achievement.

4. Skills, Education, and the Psychological Self   

 The dominance of recognition in education does not remain a neutral cognitive habit. Over time, it contributes directly to the formation and consolidation of the psychological self. Skill acquisition, when embedded in systems of evaluation, comparison, and achievement, becomes inseparable from identity. What one knows, how well one performs, and how one is recognised by others begin to define who one is. The psychological self is not an entity separate from learning. It emerges through the accumulation of experiences, memories, and evaluations. Each success strengthens an image of oneself as capable, intelligent, or superior. Each failure threatens that image. Skill, in this context, is not merely functional. It becomes a means of becoming someone.

Education reinforces this movement structurally. Assessment regimes reward correct responses and measurable outcomes. Ranking systems place individuals in visible hierarchies. Credentials signal worth and legitimacy. These mechanisms do more than measure learning. They condition attention. Students learn to watch themselves through the eyes of the system, anticipating judgment and calibrating behaviour accordingly.

Krishnamurti identified this process as the root of psychological conflict. The self, he argued, is sustained by comparison and becoming. As long as one is striving to be better, more successful, or more enlightened, fear and competition remain active (Krishnamurti & Anderson, 1991). Skill-based education, when it becomes the centre, institutionalises this striving. This does not mean that effort or discipline are inherently problematic. The issue lies in the direction of effort. When effort is directed toward improvement of the self, it strengthens the very structure that fragments perception. Learning becomes a project of accumulation rather than an inquiry into life

In The Illusion of Masking, Gupta (2025c) examines how ethical behaviour and psychological refinement often conceal fragmentation rather than dissolve it. Individuals learn appropriate ways of speaking, responding, and presenting themselves. They may acquire skills in empathy, communication, or leadership. Yet these behaviours frequently operate as masks, allowing the self to function more smoothly within social expectations while remaining fundamentally unchanged. Education contributes to this masking when it treats values as competencies. Compassion becomes a skill to be demonstrated. Awareness becomes a practice to be mastered. Reflection becomes a technique. The learner is trained to perform inner qualities without questioning the structure from which performance arises. This dynamic produces a subtle form of alienation. Youth and students at large may behave responsibly and speak ethically while remaining inwardly conflicted. They learn how to appear attentive, caring, or inclusive, yet these qualities are often mediated by self-image. The question “How am I being seen?” quietly overrides direct attention to what is actually taking place.

Bohm’s analysis of fragmentation clarifies why this occurs. When the observer is taken as separate from what is observed, action is shaped by division (Bohm, 1980). Skill strengthens the observer by giving it greater capacity to act. It does not dissolve the division between observer and observed. As a result, the self becomes more effective without becoming more intelligent. Education rarely addresses this division directly. Even reforms that emphasise wellbeing, ethics, or emotional literacy often operate within the same framework of improvement. New competencies are added. New assessment tools are developed. The underlying assumption remains that psychological qualities can be cultivated through method. This assumption is rarely examined. It rests on the belief that inner life can be shaped in the same way as technical ability. Yet psychological qualities are not objects to be acquired. They emerge from perception. When perception is obstructed by fear, ambition, or self-image, no amount of training can substitute for insight.

Institutional education often confuses methods with ends. Learning becomes something administered rather than lived. When this logic extends into the psychological domain, individuals become dependent on external validation for inner qualities. The authority to define intelligence, empathy, or maturity is transferred to systems and experts. The result is a paradox. Education seeks to produce autonomous, ethical individuals, yet it conditions dependence on structure and approval. The self becomes increasingly sophisticated in navigating systems, while remaining dependent on them for identity and meaning. Recognising this does not imply rejecting education or assessment outright. It calls for clarity about what education can and cannot do. Skill can refine behaviour. It can transmit knowledge. It cannot dissolve the psychological structures that sustain fear and division. When education attempts to do so through method, it reinforces the very patterns it seeks to overcome. This insight becomes critical when skill-based education is scaled through technology, governance, and global systems. The next section examines how skills developed without awareness translate into power, and how this power intensifies division at collective and planetary levels.

5. Skills Without Awareness: Power, Technology, and Division   

When skills are developed without attention to perception, their effects do not remain confined to individual psychology or classroom dynamics. Skills scale. They move into technologies, institutions, and systems of governance, amplifying the intentions and assumptions from which they arise. At this level, the distinction between capacity and intelligence becomes not merely philosophical but materially consequential.

Modern societies possess extraordinary technical skill. Scientific knowledge allows precise intervention in natural systems. Engineering enables large-scale infrastructure and global connectivity. Digital technologies process information with unprecedented speed and reach. Yet these capacities coexist with accelerating ecological destruction, social polarisation, mass surveillance, and militarisation. The problem, once again, is not the absence of skill. It is the absence of awareness guiding its use. Skill amplifies intention. It does not determine direction. When action arises from fear, identity, or competition, increased capacity intensifies those movements rather than correcting them. Education that prioritises skill without examining perception prepares youth and individuals to operate efficiently within fragmented systems, not to question the assumptions that sustain them. The example of aviation is illustrative. The technical mastery required to design and operate aircraft enables global mobility, cultural exchange, and economic activity. The same mastery enables aerial bombardment and precision warfare. Skill does not discriminate between these uses. It refines execution. The ethical direction depends entirely on the perceptual ground from which action proceeds.

This pattern repeats across domains. Advances in data science and coding promise optimisation and connectivity, yet they also enable mass surveillance, behavioural manipulation, and concentration of power. Communication skills shape public discourse, yet they are equally capable of conditioning populations through fear, images, and selective narratives. Media sophistication increases the effectiveness of persuasion without necessarily increasing truthfulness.

In Governance Without the Self, Gupta (2025b) argues that institutions mirror the psychological structures of those who design and operate them. When governance arises from a centred observer seeking control, security, or advantage, fragmentation is embedded in policy, law, and technology. Systems become increasingly efficient while remaining insensitive to consequence. Attempts to address these issues often remain within the same logic. Ethical frameworks, regulatory guidelines, and capacity-building initiatives seek to govern the use of skill through additional rules and competencies. While such measures may limit excesses, they do not address the perceptual root of action. The self that seeks power remains intact. This limitation is especially visible in contemporary approaches to complexity and systems thinking. Integration frameworks promise holistic solutions by connecting domains and scaling best practices. Yet as Complexity Without Perception shows, these approaches often reorganise problems rather than resolve them because they leave the fragmented observer unexamined (Gupta, 2025a). Complexity becomes something to be managed, not understood.

Bohm warned that fragmentation becomes most dangerous when thought fails to recognise its own role in producing the structures it then confronts (Bohm, 1980). Skill accelerates this feedback loop. The more capable the system becomes, the more deeply fragmentation is entrenched. Solutions multiply. Intelligence does not. Education plays a decisive role in this process. When learners are trained primarily in skills without inquiry into perception, they are prepared to participate efficiently in fragmented systems. Education becomes a mechanism for reproduction rather than transformation. Graduates may be highly competent, innovative, and adaptable, yet inwardly disconnected from the consequences of their actions. This disconnection has ecological implications. Environmental destruction is often framed as a failure of management or technology. More sophisticated models, cleaner technologies, and better data are proposed as solutions. While such measures are necessary at a practical level, they do not address the perceptual separation between human beings and the rest of life. Skill can optimise exploitation as easily as it can mitigate harm.

The same applies to social and political division. Skills in negotiation, communication, and leadership are promoted as remedies for conflict. Yet when these skills operate from identification with ideology or group identity, they become instruments of persuasion rather than understanding. Dialogue becomes strategic. Listening becomes selective. Recognising these limits does not lead to the rejection of skill. It leads to a more demanding question: what quality of perception must precede skill if capacity is not to become destructive? Awareness, in this context, is not a cognitive framework or ethical code. It is a direct sensitivity to relationship, consequence, and life as a whole. Such sensitivity cannot be engineered or imposed. It emerges when attention is not occupied by fear, ambition, or self-image. When this awareness is absent, skill operates blindly. When it is present, skill finds its rightful place as a servant rather than a master.

This brings the inquiry to a critical threshold. If awareness, compassion, and love are necessary to prevent the misuse of skill, can they themselves be approached as skills to be developed? Or does the attempt to cultivate them through method undermine their very nature? The next section turns directly to this question.

6. Are Love, Compassion, Awareness and Wholeness Skills?   

At this point in the inquiry, a critical question arises. If the absence of awareness allows skill to become destructive, and if education is to support life rather than merely extend capacity, then qualities such as love, compassion, awareness, and wholeness appear central. Yet the moment these qualities are named, a familiar response follows. They are treated as attributes to be developed, capacities to be cultivated, or skills to be trained.

This response appears reasonable within the prevailing logic of education. If one can learn to code, communicate, or manage complex systems, why should one not learn to love, empathise, or be aware? Emotional intelligence programmes, mindfulness curricula, and ethical leadership frameworks are built on precisely this assumption. Inner qualities are reframed as competencies, placed alongside technical skills, and subjected to methods of improvement. The difficulty lies not in the intention behind these efforts, but in the assumption they rest upon. Love, compassion, and awareness do not belong to the same order as skill. They are not products of repetition, accumulation, or practice. To treat them as such is to misunderstand their nature. Skill functions through time. One practices today in order to improve tomorrow. There is a trajectory of becoming. Love does not operate in this way. One is either attentive in relationship, or one is not. Compassion is not the result of rehearsal. It arises when there is direct perception of suffering, without the mediation of image or self-interest.

Krishnamurti was unequivocal on this point. He rejected the idea that love could be cultivated through discipline or practice. Any effort to become loving, he argued, is rooted in the self seeking improvement, and therefore cannot produce love (Krishnamurti & Anderson, 1991). The very movement of becoming obstructs the quality it seeks. This insight has far-reaching implications for education. When awareness is approached as a skill, it becomes an object of desire. Students learn techniques of attention. They follow instructions. They measure progress. Yet this process reinforces the authority of the past over the present. Awareness becomes something to achieve, not something that emerges when obstruction ends. In Eternal Movement, Gupta (2024) explores this paradox in detail. The text shows how the known, having created fragmentation, seeks solutions within itself. Knowledge attempts to correct the consequences of knowledge. Method is applied to heal the damage caused by method. This circularity sustains the crisis while giving the appearance of progress. The same pattern appears in contemporary educational responses to psychological distress and social division. Practices are introduced to manage stress, regulate emotion, and promote wellbeing. While these may offer temporary relief, they often leave the deeper structure of fear, comparison, and identity intact. The self becomes calmer, more functional, and more socially acceptable, yet remains at the centre.

Love and compassion do not arise from improved self-management. They arise when the self is not the organising centre of experience. This does not mean that the self must be destroyed or suppressed. It means that attention must be free from the constant reference to “me” and “mine”. Awareness, in this sense, is not a technique. It is the absence of distortion. When thought is quiet, not through control but through understanding its limits, sensitivity is present. This sensitivity is not selective. It does not choose whom to care for or when to be attentive. It responds directly to what is. Bohm’s notion of wholeness provides a parallel articulation. Bohm suggested that fragmentation arises when thought divides what is fundamentally interconnected. Wholeness is not something to be constructed. It is the natural state perceived when the fragmenting movement of thought is seen and no longer given authority (Bohm, 1980). This seeing is instantaneous. It cannot be accumulated. From this perspective, the attempt to train compassion becomes deeply problematic. Training implies imitation. One learns appropriate responses by observing models and reproducing behaviours. Yet imitation is not love. It is conformity. A person may behave kindly while remaining inwardly indifferent. The behaviour may be correct. The relationship is not alive.

Education that confuses imitation with intelligence risks producing individuals who know how to act ethically without understanding why. Values become scripts. Sensitivity becomes performance. The deeper question of perception is bypassed. This does not mean that education has no role in relation to love or awareness. Its role is negative rather than positive. It cannot manufacture these qualities, but it can avoid obstructing them. It can refrain from intensifying fear, comparison, and competition. It can question the dominance of achievement as the measure of worth. It can create spaces where attention is not constantly directed toward outcomes.

In Governance Without the Self, Gupta (2025b) extends this insight to collective life. Policies and institutions that seek to engineer compassion or ethical behaviour often fail because they treat inner qualities as programmable variables. Without a shift in perception, structural reforms reproduce fragmentation in more sophisticated forms. The implication for education is clear but demanding. If love, compassion, and awareness are not skills, then education must abandon the ambition to produce them through method. Instead, it must examine how its own structures inhibit or allow their emergence. This requires a profound reorientation of educational purpose.

Such a reorientation moves education away from the project of improvement and toward the responsibility of care. It raises a final question. If education is not fundamentally about skill acquisition or inner development, what is it for? The next section addresses this question by reframing education as the support of life itself.

7. Education as The Support of Life   

If skill has a limited and clearly defined place, and if qualities such as love, compassion, and awareness cannot be produced through method, then education must be reconsidered at a more fundamental level. The question is no longer how education can better prepare individuals to function within existing systems, but whether education can support life itself. This shift in orientation alters not only curriculum and pedagogy, but the very meaning of learning.

To support life is not to train individuals to adapt endlessly to unstable conditions. Adaptation, when divorced from perception, can become a refined form of accommodation to disorder. Life, in its fullness, includes relationship, sensitivity, responsibility, and care. These qualities cannot be reduced to competencies. They arise when attention is not fragmented.

Education that supports life begins with an understanding of relationship. Relationship is not merely interaction between individuals or roles. It is the field in which perception operates. How one relates to another person, to nature, and to oneself reveals the quality of attention that is present. When education privileges competition, ranking, and comparison, relationship is distorted at its root. The learner is conditioned to see others as benchmarks or obstacles rather than as fellow participants in life.

Krishnamurti repeatedly emphasised that the purpose of education is to help human beings live rightly, not merely successfully. Right living, in his view, was inseparable from right relationship. Without understanding the movement of the self in relationship, knowledge becomes dangerous rather than liberating (Krishnamurti, 1985). Education that neglects this inquiry produces clever individuals who lack sensitivity.

Supporting life also means restoring the primacy of attention. Attention is not concentration directed toward a task for the sake of performance. It is an open, choiceless awareness of what is taking place inwardly and outwardly. When attention is present, learning is natural. Curiosity is not imposed. Intelligence operates without effort. This understanding challenges many assumptions of contemporary education. Structures built around constant evaluation fragment attention. The learner is rarely present with what is being studied. Instead, they are preoccupied with outcomes, grades, and future advantage. Learning becomes instrumental. The present is sacrificed to an imagined future.

In Eternal Movement, Gupta (2024) argues that this sacrifice of the present is a central feature of modern disorder. Psychological time, the movement of becoming something other than what one is, displaces direct engagement with life. Education that reinforces this movement deepens fragmentation. Education that questions it opens the possibility of freedom. Supporting life does not imply the absence of structure or responsibility. Children and young people require guidance, care, and practical knowledge. Skills remain necessary for navigating the material world. The issue is not whether skills are taught, but whether they dominate the meaning of education. When skill is placed in service of life, rather than life being subordinated to skill, its role becomes constructive. The role of the educator is therefore transformed. The educator is not primarily a transmitter of knowledge or a manager of outcomes. They are a participant in a shared inquiry. This does not mean that authority disappears. It means that authority is grounded in understanding rather than position. The educator observes themselves as they teach, aware of how fear, ambition, or identification may shape their responses. Such observation cannot be institutionalised as a method. It depends on seriousness and humility. It requires acknowledging that education is not something done to students, but something lived in relationship with them. Where this relationship is alive, learning unfolds naturally. Where it is absent, no amount of reform can compensate.

At an institutional level, supporting life requires restraint. Not every aspect of learning needs to be measured. Not every outcome needs to be predicted. Systems that attempt to control every variable often generate anxiety and compliance rather than intelligence. Allowing space for attention is not inefficiency. It is care. This orientation has implications beyond education. Individuals educated in this way do not simply acquire skills. They develop a sensitivity to consequence. They recognise when capacity is being used without intelligence. They are less likely to participate blindly in systems that harm life, even when those systems are efficient or socially rewarded. Such individuals are not produced by programmes or curricula. They emerge when education ceases to obstruct perception. This emergence cannot be guaranteed. It can only be invited through conditions that do not distort attention. Education, then, is not a solution to the polycrisis in the conventional sense. It cannot engineer intelligence or manufacture compassion. It can, however, stop reinforcing fragmentation. It can place skill where it belongs and allow perception to guide action. In doing so, education aligns itself with life rather than with systems.

8. Conclusion

The contemporary faith in skill as the primary response to global disorder reflects a deeper confusion between capacity and intelligence. Skills are indispensable within the field of the known. They enable continuity, coordination, and precision in practical life. Yet when skill becomes the organising centre of education, it obscures the limits of what the known can do.

This paper has argued that the polycrisis is not the result of insufficient skill, but of action arising from fragmented perception. When perception is conditioned by fear, identity, and the psychological self, increased capacity amplifies disorder rather than resolving it. Education that prioritises skill without examining perception prepares individuals to function efficiently within fragmented systems, not to question them.

By distinguishing recognition from perception, the paper has shown why intelligence cannot be trained through method. Recognition operates through memory and repetition. Perception operates in the present. Attempts to cultivate awareness, compassion, or love as skills reproduce the very movement of becoming that obstructs their emergence. Love is not a competence. Awareness is not an outcome. Wholeness is not achieved through accumulation. Education oriented toward the support of life recognises these limits. It does not reject skill, but it places skill in its rightful context. It attends to relationship, sensitivity, and attention as living realities rather than as objectives to be attained. It acknowledges that intelligence arises when obstruction ends, not when capacity increases. Such education does not promise solutions or guarantees. It demands seriousness, humility, and restraint. It requires educators and institutions to question their own assumptions and to observe how fear and ambition shape learning. In doing so, education becomes less a mechanism of reproduction and more a space of inquiry.

The future of education, if it is to serve life rather than systems, depends on this shift. Perception must precede capacity. Intelligence must guide skill. Without this reorientation, education will continue to refine the tools of a fragmented world while remaining unable to address the source of its disorder. In this ending of the known, is the true essence of youth, which is vitality.

References

Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.

Gupta, D. (2024). Eternal movement: An exploration into self help, spirituality, psychology, society, relationships, education, self transformation, consciousness change, love and action. Emerge Publications. https://doi.org/10.65169/q7d2z6

Gupta, D. (2025a). Complexity without perception: Why the inner development goals and systems thinking cannot deliver transformation without perception. Emerge Publications. https://doi.org/10.65169/inner-development-complexity

Gupta, D. (2025b). Governance without the self: Consciousness and the end of fragmentation, systems, and complexity. Emerge Publications. https://doi.org/10.65169/a9m3p4

Gupta, D. (2025c). The illusion of masking: Thought, wholeness, and the ending of fragmentation. Emerge Publications. https://doi.org/10.65169/masking-thought-illusion

Gupta, D. (2025d). The mirror and the map: Perception, frameworks, and the limits of representation. Emerge Publications. https://doi.org/10.65169/the-mirror-and-the-map

Krishnamurti, J. (1985). Education and the significance of life. Krishnamurti Foundation India.

Krishnamurti, J., & Anderson, A. W. (1991). A wholly different way of living. Krishnamurti Foundation Trust.

Krishnamurti, J., & Bohm, D. (1986). The future of humanity: Two dialogues. Krishnamurti Foundation Trust.