Learning About Learning: 

This is a short version of a much longer article written by Rahul Hulry. In my opinion, Rahul is an outstanding writwer and thinker. I shared the full article with our staff and we took a lot from it. Hopefully the flavour of the original is sufficiently retained in this shortened version, and hopefully you will find it interesting and make connections. I definitely did.

Friends,

I grew up in North London in the late seventies and early eighties. Everything felt beige. Carpets, walls, sofas, television. Even the future seemed small, contained, knowable.

But the street was alive.

Kids were everywhere. On bikes, on walls, in gardens that were not theirs. Someone had chalked a hopscotch grid on the road. Further down, a cricket game with a tennis ball and a dustbin for stumps. Front doors stood open in summer. Parents sat on steps, half-watching, half-talking. You heard someone’s mum call from three houses away and knew it was teatime. You did not choose your community. It chose you. It was small, but it was real.

Then the ice cream van would come.

Greensleeves drifting down the road. A coin in your hand. A run to the curb. A Flake 99.

Or plain ice cream. Or nothing.

That was the menu.

I chose a Flake 99 every time. Nobody asked why it was called a 99. There was no search bar waiting to answer it. It did not matter. The van came. The sun was out. The moment was complete.

And somehow, decades later, standing in a supermarket aisle paralysed by choice, I realised something uncomfortable.

I was happier then.

Not because the past was better. It was not. There were cruelties, blind spots, and rough edges we have rightly left behind. But inside a bounded moment, the cone, the sun, the crumbling chocolate, I was more fully there than I often am now.

Because the van would leave.

And when something might not be there tomorrow, you pay attention today.

Psychologists call this savouring: being fully inside an experience while it is happening. But savouring depends on limits. It needs a boundary. It needs the real possibility that the thing you love is passing.

We lived inside one choice. Now we live inside the infinite.

Fast food used to mean one thing. Television happened at a certain time or not at all. If you missed your programme, you missed it. If you wanted music, you waited for it, recorded it, treasured it. The week had rhythm because things had shape. Thursday night meant Knight Rider. Saturday meant the shops. Wednesday meant swimming. Life had anchors.

And between those anchors there was empty time.

Not scheduled. Not curated. Not optimised. Just empty.

That emptiness taught us things.

It taught us to imagine. To invent. To cope. To wonder.

You saw it in the playground. Games were made up in real time with whatever children had to hand: a wall, a ball, a patch of concrete, an argument about the rules. Half the time the argument was better than the game. There were no downloads, no updates, no adult-designed experiences. Just long afternoons and whatever your imagination could make of them.

You saw it in scraped knees too.

If you grew up in that era, your knees probably remember before your mind does. You ran, you fell, you stung, you cried, you got a plaster that did not stick, and then you carried on. Not because it was noble. Because it did not occur to you that there was another option.

The world did not protect you from every discomfort. It expected you to cope. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you did not. But either way, you learned something important.

You are more durable than you think.

That was the curriculum.

Constraint.

It did not feel like teaching. It felt like ordinary life.

The same thing was true of curiosity. As a child, there were so many things I did not know. Why the sky was blue. Whether the fridge light stayed on when the door shut. Why birds did not fall out of trees when they slept. What adults actually did all day. You could not instantly look these things up, so you did something we are in danger of losing.

You wondered.

You carried questions around for days. You made theories. You asked people who were probably wrong. You sat inside not knowing. Curiosity had weight. Texture. Duration.

Now the answer often arrives before the question has fully formed.

And the question dies.

I felt that recently when my daughter asked me, “Why do songs get stuck in your head?”

It was a beautiful question. The kind I would have lived inside for days as a child.

Instead, I asked a device.

Four seconds later, we had the answer. Repetition. Pattern. The brain’s need for closure.

And just like that, the wonder was gone.

That is what troubles me most about AI and so much of modern convenience. Not that it arrives like an explosion. Not that it replaces us overnight. But that it quietly relieves us of small acts of thinking, wondering, making, refining, and remembering. One email not drafted. One question not wrestled with. One idea not shaped by hand.

It is not apocalypse.

It is slow rust.

Anyone can now produce something competent, quickly. Efficiency is becoming cheap. But what is not practised decays. Depth decays. Taste decays. Attention decays. Presence decays.

This is not an argument for nostalgia.

The old shared world was not kind to everyone. If you were different in the wrong way, there was nowhere to hide. We have gained something important in moving beyond one narrow version of culture and community. More people can now find their people. More voices can be heard. That matters.

But we have lost something too.

We have lost the depth that often comes from limits. The shared experience that comes from scarcity. The meaning that comes from effort.

I think about that when I remember recording songs off the radio. Finger hovering over play and record. Pressing both at exactly the right moment. If you caught the DJ’s voice at the start, so be it. If you missed the first beat, too bad. The imperfection was proof that you were there.

That was not passive consumption.

That was devotion.

And what mattered was not really the tape. It was who you became in the making of it. The patience. The care. The knowledge. The shared excitement with friends who were listening at the same time, waiting by the same phone, risking the same missed opening note.

Love is not optimisation.

Love is attention over time.

That applies to music. It applies to friendship. It applies to thought. And I think it applies to being human.

So where does that leave us?

Not in despair. In choice.

We can still choose depth over speed. We can still leave a question unanswered a little longer. We can still listen to a song all the way through. We can still make something by hand. We can still have an afternoon with nothing in it. We can still show up fully to a concert, a match, a meal, a conversation. We can still be present enough to feel something electric in a world determined to make everything frictionless.

That is why shared human moments still hit so hard. A family watching a World Cup final. A stadium singing one song. Thousands of strangers becoming, for a moment, one body, one voice, one feeling. No algorithm can manufacture that. No optimisation can improve it.

It is inefficient.

And it is alive.

That gives me hope.

Because being fully human again is not something we need to invent from scratch. It is something we need to remember. The child who wondered, who waited, who made things, who got hurt and got up, who paid attention because the moment would pass, that person is still here.

Older, perhaps.

Rustier, perhaps.

But still here.

The world ahead will reward speed, convenience, optimisation, compliance. But it will break without depth. It will become efficient and thin. Functional and joyless.

So perhaps the task now is not to reject the future, but to protect the parts of ourselves the future will not protect for us.

Wonder.

Attention.

Effort.

Presence.

Constraint-trained depth.

The old cardboard cone matters here. Not because the ice cream was better, but because finishing it meant something. You stayed with it. You did not swipe away. You did not optimise. You were there until the end.

I think that is the question in front of us now.

Do we still remember how to finish?

All the way to the cardboard cone.