WHEN I WAS A STUDENT, I remember
learning. I can picture it vividly. I
remember my feet carrying me to a designated
room where all learning happened.
You knew where knowledge lived — in
classrooms, in libraries, in the echoes of
lectures. Learning had a sense of materiality.
A memory.
And yet, today, if I ask you, where do
you learn? Is there an image you keep
returning to, in your mind? Or does it
change the many faces it wears?
The definitive geography is shifting.
Learning doesn’t live within walls anymore.
It’s everywhere. At the tip of your
fingertips, turning into screens, defying
borders.
The question I ask is this: if learning
can happen everywhere, why should
students go anywhere at all? How do we
define learning? Is learning truly confined
to textbooks and bound by syllabi?
Is it enough?
SHOULD WE LEAVE HOME AT ALL?
Learning once felt like something you acquired
in a specific place, at a specific time,
from specific people. You went somewhere
to get it. And when you left, you carried it
with you — a degree, a set of knowledge,
proof you’d been there. Evidence.
Now learning is fluid. The dust never
settles. It follows you. It morphs. What you
learn might already be obsolete, and the
skill you spent years nurturing might be
outdated. Yet mobility itself is an essential
part of learning.
Where you go in search of knowledge,
and how you get there; they’re part of learning.
Physical presence simply changes
meaning in this new world. What it teaches
you, at the end, is calibration.
When students move across borders,
they gain context. They learn that their
‘right’ answer fails in another place. That
common sense isn’t common—it’s local.
That the world is both larger and smaller
than they imagined. This friction, this unfamiliarity,
offers more than textbooks do.
It offers you perspective.
Technology hasn’t made mobility obsolete.
It’s more important than ever: the
human act of being present. In a world
where information is everywhere, the skill
isn’t to hoard most of it — it is deciding
what is useful. It is deciding what matters.
It is deciding what you do with it. Should
you move countries in pursuit of knowledge?
I don’t have the right answer.
I have this: mobility isn’t obsolete. Having
access to knowledge isn’t the same as
knowing. The world is set in motion, and
we must talk about it.
WHAT MOVES PEOPLE?
The question isn’t whether students will
keep moving. They will. The world is too
interconnected, opportunities too global,
aspirations too big to be contained by
geography. Mobility will continue. The
question is whether we’ll be relevant when
students arrive.