In 2013, with two very young children I asked my spiritual mentor if he had any parenting advise. He smiled, “Samirji, the biggest challenge of your generation is providing artificial scarcity to your children.” I did not fully get him then, but over the years this has proven to be the best parenting tip.
Every previous generation had scarcity built into the world for free. Information was hard to get, attention had to be earned through effort. A child who wanted an answer had to go to a library, ask an elder, or sit with the discomfort of not knowing for a while. Today’s children inherited a world where every answer, every distraction, every shortcut is just one tap away. If we want our children to develop a mind capable of depth, we have to manufacture the very friction that used to come built into life itself.
My sons are going to be 15 and 17 soon, and neither of them have owned a mobile phone as yet, but both are deeply respected by their friends and teachers for the depth of their understanding and the maturity they bring to a conversation. They use AI to explore new concepts, and parents’ phones for calls and to look at social media, and do both with a level of awareness that came directly from years of artificially engineered scarcity before any of these tools entered their hands.
Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced on June 19, 2026 that hashtagGenerativeAI tools would be barred from classrooms for children aged 6 to 13, citing the risk of hashtagCognitiveOffloading, where children outsource effortful thinking to a tool rather than building the capacity themselves. The scientific principle behind this concern is called Desirable Difficulty, the finding that learning tasks requiring real effort produce far stronger long-term retention than tasks that feel easy in the moment. One of history’s most rigorous developed economies just legislated, by force of law, a principle my mentor handed me over a decade ago in a single sentence!
This is precisely the territory of hashtagNyay. The word carries two meanings in our tradition, and both are relevant here. Nyay is one of the six classical schools of hashtagIndianPhilosophy, built entirely around the discipline of rigorous hashtagLogicalReasoning, of refusing an easy conclusion until it has been tested, argued, and earned. Nyay is also the everyday word for hashtagJustice. The ancient guru-shishya tradition operated on exactly the desirable difficulty Norway has now written into policy. A shishya wrestled with a question under a guru’s relentless questioning rather than being handed the answer, because the wrestling itself was the curriculum.
hashtagEduCulture‘s argument is simply that we do not need to wait for Norway’s parliament to tell us what our own civilisational pedagogy already knew. We need parents, teachers, and policymakers willing to provide their children the artificial scarcity the modern world no longer provides for free. Question of AI era is how should our hashtagLegalEducation handle hashtagDesiredDifficulty?
