Think about the hashtag#teenager in your home or near you. Smart, capable, digitally fluent, and at the same time also overwhelmed in ways they cannot name. We live in a hashtag#VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). hashtag#AI has turbocharged these as it rewrites entire industries between one school year and the next. A young person today will navigate careers, relationships, and ethical choices that no previous generation has a map for. And into this storm, we are sending them armed with information and skills, but almost no internal compass.

Every civilisation that lasted long enough to be worth studying understood that hashtag#puberty is the precise moment to hand a young person that compass. The Jewish Bar Mitzvah assigns a 13-year-old with an important responsibility. From this day, you are answerable for your own actions. Similarly, the Aboriginal Walkabout sends a boy into the wilderness alone for months, to deepen his connection to identity and belonging before he returns as a man. Japan’s Seijin Shiki gathers every young person who has turned 20 and says collectively: you belong to this society now. You owe it something.

Indian Culture had its own answer, the hashtag#Janeu or hashtag#Upanayan sanskar just before hitting puberty. Upanayan means bringing near, bringing a young person into proximity with dharm, with their own deeper nature. The child receives the sacred thread, taught the Gayatri mantr, and is formally initiated into student life under a guru. In South India, the Ritu Kala Samskaram marks the same threshold for girls. These are civilisational frameworks designed at exactly the moment a young person most needs one. There is nothing stopping us from removing any caste, religion and gender barrier from this sanskar, is there? Who will say no for this to their child? Gargi underwent it. Maitreyi underwent it.

At the heart of the Upanayana is hashtag#Vivek, the faculty of discernment, the ability to distinguish hashtag#dharm from adharm, right action from merely convenient action. A young person with Vivek does not get overwhelmed by VUCA. They read it, they develop appropriate frameworks and become capable of seeing around corners, prepare for what may be coming, and make their moves with steadiness and purpose. That is a very different thing from anxiety, from reactivity, from the paralysis that so many young people carry today without even knowing why.

Most Indian families still perform the Upanayan, but the gap between ritual and meaning is the gap an entire generation is falling through.

hashtag#EduCulture proposes to close it. A young person shaped by their civilisational inheritance does not need to be told how to behave in a VUCA world. They already carry the framework. They know what changes and what stays constant. They can take advantage of what is coming without losing their sense of what is right.

When did we decide that producing skilled people was enough, and stopped asking whether we were producing good ones?