The Invisible Work Behind Every Classroom

Every Friday evening, when I was excited for the weekend and getting ready to leave school, I used to notice my teachers sitting with their special notebooks, writing page after page. My friends and I would joke that it was their homework. Little did I know that I would someday be doing my own "teacher's homework."

For 10,000 years, the Earth balanced its temperature, not exceeding ±1°C. Scientists call it the Holocene. Everything we know, our cities, our food, our seasons, exists because of it.

In just 50 years, we've started breaking it.

At Bhoomi, we recently learnt about this from the Netflix documentary called Breaking Boundaries - the Science of Our Planet. Scientists call these "planetary boundaries." There are nine of them. We've crossed most. Here's where we stand.

Somewhere along the way, learning became separated into boxes

We began placing knowledge into neat compartments - science in one period, mathematics in another, language after lunch, history somewhere before the bell. Nature, too, was assigned its place: a chapter in environmental studies, perhaps a diagram in science, occasionally on awareness day. But the more one sits with the idea of integrating subjects with nature, the more this separation begins to feel strangely artificial.

Because when we step outside, nature does not exist in subjects.