A Principal, a Lunch, and What Kindness Requires

Toward the beginning of writing something substantial, I notice that older memories start arriving. Needless to say, they surface with careful invitation, offering texture to ideas that might otherwise remain abstract. This reflection has been part of my experience in conceiving the draft of a book chapter I'm finishing on kindness in education.

I was in fifth or sixth grade, being bullied, though nobody knew. I had figured out that humor could serve as a kind of shield, a way to deflect attention before situations escalated. It worked well enough that the whole thing stayed invisible to the adults around me.

Around that time, my school principal started inviting me to lunch. Sometimes at their home, sometimes in the office. They would ask questions that have stayed with me across decades: How was school? What did you like? Did you have your breakfast today? If you could change something, what would it be?

I never mentioned bullying. Whether they knew, I honestly cannot say. But something must have registered, because they also put me on the assembly stage as a prefect. A quiet gesture. Looking back now, I recognize it as an attempt to build confidence in a kid who had very little to draw on.

I return to that school principal often in my thinking. Not because they ran a kindness program or followed some curriculum on social-emotional learning. They never handed me worksheets about empathy. What they did was create conditions. Sustained attention over time. Genuine curiosity about my experience. A visible role that asked something of me. Something shifted because of those conditions, and that experience has shaped how I understand kindness far more than any framework I have encountered since.

Over the years, I have been involved in various kindness initiatives through the Global Citizenship Foundation and in partnership with organizations like UNESCO MGIEP. Programs designed and delivered across many countries, young people engaging with service projects and community action. Some of this work has genuinely mattered. Some, if I am honest, has not.

The initiatives that fall flat tend to share a certain quality. They look busy. Activities and boxes on checklists checked, and clean photographs taken. Schools celebrating participation numbers and visibility metrics. Yet results fail to match the activity level. Scope exceeds depth in such instances. What goes missing, almost without exception, is genuine reflection. Not reflection as an afterthought or a worksheet at the end, but reflection woven throughout the experience. The kind that helps a young person connect what they are doing to something they actually care about.

Without that connection, kindness becomes a treadmill. Kids running hard and unfortunately, arriving nowhere. Nobody paused to ask what the running was for.

I have learned from education leaders who see this work differently.

Leaders like Sunita Mattoo hold onto the possibility and hope instead of fixating on what hasn't happened or cannot. There is an orientation in how she works that creates room for things to emerge rather than forcing outcomes. Dr. Ashok K. Pandey believes in building the capacity of people he works with. He established continuous professional development within his school so that every educator keeps growing, not as an add-on but as central practice. Asha Narayanan and many other inspiring education leaders combine a learner's mindset with grounded persistence, driving initiatives substantively rather than for short-term visibility.

What connects these leaders is that none of them treat the initiatives they champion as a program to be delivered. Whether it is kindness or global citizenship initiatives or anything else that matters. They treat it as architecture. The stuff that shapes everything else around it, not something layered on afterward or as a plug-and-play initiative. 

I have also witnessed the opposite. Schools where leaders carry themselves as if governing small countries. Zero-tolerance discipline that produces compliance when someone is watching and resentment the moment they look away. The hidden curriculum (what students actually absorb from how adults behave) ends up contradicting every inspirational poster on the wall. That is what puzzles me. How are we not seeing this?

Kids notice these contradictions. They learn from the gap between what gets said and what gets practiced. That learning runs deep.

So much kindness discourse focuses outward. Being kind to others, to community, to the environment. All of that matters, obviously. But I wonder whether we actually create conditions for young people to be kind to themselves. How many students learn to turn that same care inward? Schools that seem to understand this share certain qualities. They create genuine room for mistakes. They avoid relying on punitive approaches as a first or last resort. Reflection happens without judgment attached.

A child who cannot extend compassion toward themselves will struggle to sustain it for anyone else. I wish I had understood this much earlier in my own experience.

As a first-generation learner, guidance did not arrive for me the way it does for many. Mentorship came later, through leaders like Dr. Ashok K. Pandey, but plenty of young people never encounter role models beyond celebrities and public figures. When I design programs now, I try to create what I wished had existed for me. The Mentor-Intern program at the GCF exists because I wanted to offer something most internships neglect entirely. Space for introverts to develop their voice. Support for interpersonal capacities that rarely get taught anywhere. Mentorship that extends well beyond task completion.

Whether from privileged backgrounds or not, so many young people struggle with capacities our societies desperately need them to have. One such capacity I have come to value deeply: helping young people develop good questions rather than chase perfect answers.

Asking the right question at the right moment, with genuine intent, to the right person. This is one of the most important critical skills, and it can be cultivated. Rather than handing students questions engineered to lead toward predetermined answers, we can help them learn to frame questions well and sit with uncertainty when answers do not arrive immediately. With AI proliferating and the challenges that acceleration brings, this capacity matters even more than it did before. Young people who learn to ask genuine questions, rather than optimizing for whatever response seems correct, will navigate what is coming very differently than those who do not.

The chapter I am finishing examines what neuroscience tells us about kindness. Why certain approaches fail despite good intentions. What authentic integration actually requires from schools and systems. The research covers neuroplasticity, distinctions between empathy and compassion, developmental windows that matter, the surprising fragility of intrinsic motivation when external rewards get introduced. Writing it allowed me to reflect more personally on my past observations and experiences, to engage with evidence and critique more deeply. I had a few aha moments and am grateful to have had the time to do that this year.

But the chapter started somewhere more personal. Years ago, visiting schools across India, I noticed something that still is a fresh memory. Classrooms kept immaculate, maintained with obvious care. Posters reminding children to use the dustbin. Then you would walk just outside the school gate and find litter everywhere, scattered as if it belonged to someone else's concern entirely. Later I observed similar patterns in Uppsala and in Berlin. The phenomenon was not confined to any particular culture or place.

That split-screen image stays with me because it points toward something important about where concern stops. The boundary marking who we consider worth caring about. The edge of what we might call the circle of concern.

When drafting the chapter I did not want readers approaching the chapter to encounter only critique. The hope underneath is more straightforward than the analysis might suggest. If you are already working on kindness in education, you have taken a first step that matters. The real question is whether we approach this work with the depth it requires or settle for something more superficial. Kindness as a buzzword, actually, carries its own kind of beauty. It signals that people recognize something important is at stake here. But kindness as genuine transformation asks considerably more of us. It means building conditions rather than just programs. Attending carefully to unintended consequences rather than assuming good intentions guarantee good outcomes. Staying present long enough to observe whether change actually holds or dissolves once attention moves elsewhere.

This requires education leaders capable of seeing past immediate metrics toward horizons that take years to reach.

That principal from my childhood never delivered lectures about resilience or self-worth. What they offered instead was sustained contact, genuine questions, a role that made me visible in a community where I had felt invisible. Something shifted because of how they approached me over time, not because of any particular content they taught.

I carry this into every school I work with now, every partnership I help build, every initiative we launch through the GCF or Global Debates. The question underneath all of it is, are we constructing conditions where kindness or global citizenship can actually take root and grow? Or are we adding posters to walls and calling it progress?

I cannot claim to have resolved this tension. What I can say is that sitting with it has changed how I evaluate our own work, how I respond when schools ask for quick solutions, and how I think about what counts as success in this domain.

The chapter goes further than I can go here. It gets into neuroscience, names what fails and why, and offers something practical for education leaders who are tired of initiatives that look good on paper but change nothing in hallways. These notes are where the thinking started. The chapter is what emerged after sitting with these questions long enough to find something worth saying.

A chapter on the neuroscience of kindness in education is forthcoming. These notes were written before submitting the draft publication, reflecting on origins and aspirations that formal writing sometimes obscures.