Education systems are often judged by test scores, employability statistics, and rankings. These indicators matter, but they reveal little about whether learners can navigate uncertainty and interconnected challenges. Climate risk, economic volatility, technological disruption, and widening inequality are not separate problems. They are connected. Yet most classrooms still teach subjects in isolation.
India is in the midst of serious education reform. The National Education Policy emphasises interdisciplinarity, competency based learning, and real world relevance. This is an opportunity to align learning with the realities students will face. Yet a quieter concern persists, voiced not only by teachers and parents but increasingly by employers as well. Why do so many learners still struggle to connect classroom learning to real life challenges?
This is not a failure of effort or policy vision. It points to a deeper mismatch between how learning is organised and how the world actually works.
Education does not end at the school or university gate. It shapes how societies respond to climate risk, how communities build resilience, and how economies adapt to uncertainty. When learning helps people see connections and consequences, its influence travels far beyond examination halls.
Where fragmentation begins
In schools, knowledge is divided into subjects, timetables, and examinations. This brings structure and clarity, but it can also distance learning from children’s natural experience of the world as something whole, relational, and interconnected.
Environmental and climate education, for instance, is often treated as an additional topic rather than a lens through which learning across subjects is understood. Students may memorise facts about ecosystems or climate change, yet struggle to see how these ideas relate to history, economics, culture, or their own lives. Over time, a habit forms. Learning becomes about completing fragments rather than understanding the whole.
Depth without coherence
By the time students reach university, this fragmentation deepens even as intellectual rigour increases. Degrees are designed to build specialised expertise, and students are rewarded for mastery within clearly defined domains. Specialisation has undeniable value. The challenge arises when it is not accompanied by opportunities to integrate perspectives.
In a higher education landscape where systems thinking is still emerging largely at the level of discourse, my work has focused on translating it into sustained, hands-on classroom practice across disciplines and institutions.
When I first proposed this approach, Dr Chiranjib Sur at Krea University was among the earliest in higher education to recognise the need for systems thinking in an advanced Computer Science classroom, creating the space for this work to be explored with his students.
What a classroom map revealed before delivery apps hit the headlines
In December 2024, I led a systems thinking workshop at Krea University with advanced Computer Science students, using a systems map of a quick commerce platform to understand wider systemic impacts. As students mapped the platform, patterns surfaced that are rarely visible in conventional coursework. They traced ecological pressure from packaging waste, fuel use and air pollution from repeated last mile deliveries, rising carbon footprints driven by convenience, stress on urban landfills, and the often invisible precarity of gig workers operating under algorithmic control.
At the time, these issues were not part of mainstream public debate. By late 2025, delivery platforms had become the focus of widespread concern around labour conditions, sustainability, and urban congestion. The classroom exercise did not predict controversy. It simply made visible what fragmented thinking often obscures. When optimisation is pursued without systems awareness, consequences appear elsewhere in the system.
Faculty feedback following the workshop pointed to a marked shift in student engagement and application, an outcome also observed by Dr Chiranjib Sur, who noted that students began applying systems thinking to software design and showed deeper engagement with complex concepts.
Many graduates leave university with strong credentials. However, they often lack confidence to work across complexity, anticipate unintended consequences, or hold multiple perspectives at once. They have depth, but little coherence.
The organisational cost
These habits of thinking do not stop at graduation. They carry directly into workplaces and organisational life.
In organisations, sustainability is frequently reduced to reporting and compliance. Leadership challenges are addressed through individual capability building, while the systems that shape decisions remain unchanged. Work is organised in silos, short term targets dominate attention, and unintended consequences surface elsewhere, often affecting communities, ecosystems, or longterm resilience.
What begins as fragmented learning shows up as systems blindness. Well intentioned actions fail to create lasting change, not because people lack commitment, but because systems were never designed to see or respond to complexity.
Beyond one classroom
I have since applied this apprach across diverse higher education contexts, including postgraduate architecture programmes exploring regenerative planning and urban disaster management, as well as faculty development initiatives in the sciences.
Following a session with postgraduate architecture students, Dr Shreya Das observed that systems thinking provided valuable perspectives for addressing the complexities of urban disaster management and encouraged students to adopt more holistic approaches in their future planning work.
During a faculty development workshop at Sister Nivedita University, Dr Siddhartha Dutta from the Biotechnology department observed that hands on systems mapping helped educators visualise relationships within systems and design student projects that connect science learning to society.
Across these settings, a common shift emerges. Theory reconnects with community, science reconnects with empathy, and learning reconnects with life.
Why systems thinking matters now
As education systems scale reforms and introduce multiple initiatives at once, the ability to see how parts interact becomes increasingly important. Systems thinking offers a way to bridge this gap.
Simply put, it is noticing how things influence one another. It shows how decisions made today quietly shape outcomes months or even years later. It is not advanced theory. It is practical wisdom for uncertainty.
When learners and leaders ask what else connects here, or what might this trigger later, they move beyond quick fixes toward more thoughtful responses. This shift moves attention away from blame and towards design. Instead of asking who failed, it asks what in the system made a particular outcome likely.
Rethinking what education is for
India does not need to abandon subjects or reform efforts to move in this direction. Disciplines can be reframed as lenses rather than containers. Learning can begin with real questions and lived experience, allowing knowledge to weave together rather than remain siloed.
As India scales educational change, coherence matters as much as ambition. A systems rethink, grounded in interconnectedness and longterm impact, offers a quieter, deeper way forward. Not by adding more content, but by changing how we see.
This article is written by Soumi Duttagupta, Founder, Regenesys (Regen ED Foundation). She works at the intersection of systems thinking and regenerative learning across schools, universities, and corporates.
