The case for slower and deeper learning

Wisdom is not hidden in the extraordinary but buried quietly in the routines we often rush through, writes Salil Sahadevan

If you are overwhelmed by speed and scale, depth is a form of resistance and a pedagogical necessity. Learning invites self-discovery, yet often pushes learners toward the same idea of success.

Perfect Days, a 2023 film directed by Wim Wenders, follows Hirayama, who works as a toilet cleaner in Japan. He listens to cassette tapes, waters plants, reads, and photographs shadows daily. He speaks little; his life is shaped by meaningful repetition and attention.

In one of the final scenes, he weeps and smiles at the same time, feeling a mix of accumulated beauty and gratitude. Even minimalist lives hold vast inner worlds that we often overlook in mainstream education. A quiet life can be the deepest one.

Formal learning environments

We are told from an early age that we must stand out. To be someone, we must be seen. Education, media, friends, and family expectations subtly fuel this idea at first, then relentlessly.

And then the argument is that everyone is unique. But what we see are all of us- learners, students, and educators alike—chasing similar goals. They teach us that everyone is unique, but when we say it to everybody, uniqueness becomes another form of conformity and a paradox. The pressure builds not to be yourself, but to become a version of exceptionalism that is palatable and consumable to people around us.

Formal learning environments often reinforce this unknowingly. Perform and achieve. But ancient texts and contemporary science, in their own ways, offer a counter-narrative. They suggest that life is not a stage, and not everyone needs to be a performer in the social sense.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman begins with the simple arithmetic of life. If you live to eighty, that gives you just under 4,000 weeks. Subtract childhood illness and the inertia, and you are left with less. It is just a narrow window of time. Within this, the question is not how to become extraordinary, but how to live meaningfully within constraints. That is about an existential limit—a truth as important in life as it is in learning.

The problem of chasing more

This tension between cultural demand and existential limit is a central knot of modern education that we rarely discuss. We are told to do more, maximise, optimise, and reach further. But we are finite. Time does not stretch. It collapses. And what we lose by chasing more is often the ability to see what is already present — within a classroom, within a text, with an AI, or within a moment of understanding.

In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a man makes sushi repeatedly for decades. There is no pivot. No exit strategy. No self-branding. What he gains instead is intimacy with his craft and a relationship with time that is not about speed but depth. This long documentary is considered a lesson on craft that is not often taught in syllabi.

These traditionally non-glamorous lives are fully lived, which is something self-help culture, and sometimes the general idea of education, rarely teaches.

A 2019 study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence found that the pressure to achieve, especially in high-performing environments, correlates with rising anxiety, depression, and a fear of failure. A meta-analysis by Curran and Hill in Psychological Bulletin shows how socially prescribed perfectionism has risen across generations, with damaging effects on mental health.

Self-improvement can sometimes become a trap. It promises freedom but delivers fatigue. What if you do not want to build a brand or turn your passion into a side hustle? What if you just want to learn deeply? This may be something that no longer feels adequate in a culture of constant ambition. This brings us close to the spiritual idea of education.

The ordinary and the learning

In the Book of Kings, a prophet seeks God in grand things such as wind and earthquakes. A wind comes. Then an earthquake. Then fire. But God is not in any of them. Finally, a gentle breeze. And there, God is found in that gentleness. The text disrupts the logic of grandeur. The divine, it says, is in the small. In the unnoticed. In the quiet. It is simply that we don’t learn it anywhere.

Wisdom is not hidden in the extraordinary but buried quietly in the routines we often rush through: lesson plans, feedback loops, discussions, and reflections. Ordinary learning is not less. It requires attention and vision rather than ambition. Its rhythm is slower, more deliberate, asking us not to conquer knowledge but to settle into it. That’s not being lazy, but rather looking for meaning and depth.

Peace comes not from the absence of desire, but from the end of needing more to feel whole. In current-day distractions, attention itself becomes radical. Learners, educators and the rest of us need to pause and see. When everyone is obsessed with scaling up, optimisation, and performance, scaling down and scaling deep is a form of resistance. A poetic resistance to learning.

(The author is Deputy Secretary, University Grants Commission. Views are personal)