THE STILL MIND
"What Tribal Children Can Teach Us About Focus in a Distracted World"
Article by Dr Tom Corcoran. Photographs by Sebastian Rich
Published by ETHNOMAD 2025
The jeep was preparing to leave before sunrise, one of only a handful of such mornings over the past few years. In the dim light, Gurjar children gathered beside it in their best clothes, hair freshly washed and neatly parted, no notebooks or school bags, just big smiles, ready for the day. The forest at that hour holds its breath. Peacocks shift in the scrub. Langurs sit like silhouettes along the ridgelines. The track that winds down from the Kraska plateau is rough, stones breaking through dust, every bend and jarring dip lengthening the descent.
They were heading beyond the reserve boundary to sit their national examinations. It is not a small undertaking. The journey takes them miles from the mud-and-bamboo school that shapes their daily lives and into an exam hall far removed from the forest.
By late afternoon, the same jeep climbed back up the plateau. The children stepped out one by one. There was no visible strain, no tight shoulders or anxious silence. They were dusty, yes, and hungry perhaps, but untroubled.
“It was easy,” said Sajana. “Too easy,” Prim added, laughing.
Only later did I learn that several Grade 5 girls had voluntarily sat the Grade 8 exam, simply to test themselves.
Kraska has no electricity. There are no smartphones glowing late into the night. No private tutors. No coaching centres. No algorithm tailors practice tests to individual weaknesses. And yet these children are outperforming many of their urban peers in literacy and numeracy. The results are documented and verified.
The question is simple: how?
At first light in Kraska, Gurjar children wait beside a jeep that will take them out of the tiger reserve to sit their national examinations. In a village without electricity or digital access, these students consistently outperform many of their urban peers, challenging assumptions about what drives learning.
The Gurjars are a pastoral Hindu community whose lives have long revolved around buffalo and goats. For generations, they moved semi-nomadically through forest and pasture, adjusting to monsoon cycles and dry months, living in intimate proximity to the animals that sustain them. Over time, many settled more permanently in farmland and wooded areas. But over the last few decades, that landscape has changed. As conservation boundaries hardened and Sariska was declared a Tiger Reserve, pressure to relocate intensified. Families were told that protecting wildlife required removing people.
The argument is familiar across much of the world: wilderness must be cleared of human presence in order to survive.
But the Gurjars are not recent arrivals. They have lived within these forests for generations. Their cattle graze in patterns shaped by knowledge of the land. Their movements are calibrated by water sources and seasonal growth. The forest is not scenery. It is context.
When relocation is discussed in policy meetings, it is framed in hectares and compensation packages. What is rarely considered is the cognitive cost: what happens to a child’s mind when the rhythm that formed it is abruptly dismantled?
Across India, and across much of the world, learning outcomes have been declining. Even before the pandemic, standardised test scores in reading and mathematics were trending downward. Increased spending, smaller class sizes, improved infrastructure, and digital access have not reversed the slide in any consistent way. In India, per student spending rose significantly in the decade prior to 2016, yet national surveys showed declining competency in basic arithmetic and reading comprehension. Investment rose. Performance did not.
In Kraska, the trajectory bends the other way.
The school here is modest. Teachers are not decorated with national awards and there are no smartboards mounted on mud walls. But the teachers live in the village for two-week cycles. They walk the same dusty paths as their students. They eat with the families, sit in the same shade, and listen to the same night sounds of the surrounding forest. Teaching here is not an eight-hour transaction followed by departure to a distant town. It is embedded.
“When children start solving problems, they stay fixed until they understand,” one teacher told me. “They trust us and what we teach them.”
Trust is rarely measured in educational policy, yet it may be one of the most decisive variables.
To understand what is happening in Kraska, we need to look beyond infrastructure and curriculum. We need to look at attention.
In this village, children wake early, they milk and feed the buffalo, and they fetch water from the lake. They gather fodder from trees, climbing higher than most urban parents would tolerate. They move through a forest where tiger tracks are real, and leopards are not abstractions from a textbook. They skirt past crocodiles at the water’s edge. These tasks are not romantic; they are necessary, and they demand observation, patience, and steady hands.
Evenings fall with the sun, and as the fires are lit and meals are shared, the day's events are recounted. The food is modest: milk, lentils, rice, chapati, and vegetables traded from outside villages, as park restrictions limit cultivation within the reserve. Research increasingly shows that diets built on whole foods and free from ultra-processed ingredients support cognitive stability and emotional regulation in children. Here, this is not a wellness trend. It is simply how life is structured.
What many would describe as “simple” is, in fact, disciplined. And in a world organised around speed, stimulation, and constant interruption, such discipline has become surprisingly rare.
Focus, in this setting, is not a technique. It is the outcome of how life itself is arranged.
"It is not trained through carefully thought-out choices. It is cultivated through the environment we share, in which we have always lived."
Gurjar children sit cross-legged in their bamboo classroom as their teacher explains a lesson. In a school without screens or WiFi, concentration is shaped by proximity, trust, and the steady rhythm of village life.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson observed decades ago that patterns of thought are inseparable from patterns of relationship within an ecosystem. Attention does not float free of context. It is shaped by it. The children of Kraska are not relics of a fading past. They are navigating national exams while tending buffalo. They are moving between two worlds with a steadiness that unsettles assumptions about what constitutes educational advantage.
It would be easy to romanticise such steadiness. That would be a mistake.
The school in Kraska opened fourteen years ago. A few years later, conservation authorities shut it down. For eight long years there was no classroom here. During that period, some boys continued studying outside the reserve, living with relatives in nearby towns. For many girls, the interruption marked the end of formal education.
One young woman, Vinod, recalled her brief time in school with pride. When I asked gently whether she might return now that the school had reopened, her smile faded. She turned without a word and resumed gathering fodder. Lost opportunities rarely announce themselves loudly. They settle into the fabric of daily life.
Today, change is visible but fragile. When I asked the current students what they hoped to become, many answered without hesitation: teachers.
At first, I assumed this reflected limited exposure to other possibilities. I was wrong.
They know about cities. They have seen them. Some have travelled. They chose teaching because they have witnessed its impact.
One girl wants to teach mathematics. “It is easy for me,” she said, “but others struggle. I want to help them.” Another declared she would join the police. Her father laughed, though there was pride beneath it. “She will arrest us first,” he called out, “for being so slow to support girls’ education.” The courtyard filled with laughter, but the joke carried weight. A generation ago, such ambition would have been unthinkable here. Now it is spoken openly, teased, and half-confessed in front of fathers and neighbours. Change does not always arrive through policy or funding. Sometimes it arrives through a daughter who knows she has options.
“In a village without screens or Wi-Fi, children learn to stay with a problem until it makes sense, not because it is easy, but because attention here is a cultivated habit, not a commodified product.”
Vinod remembers the classroom she once attended before conservation orders shut the school. Now, her days are shaped by work and routine. Across India’s tribal landscapes, girls’ education often falters not for lack of ambition, but for lack of sustained opportunity.
For primary school children, especially, the lesson is difficult for modern systems to accept. At this age, more money, more devices, more platforms, and more innovation do not necessarily produce better outcomes. Attention, trust, rhythm, sleep, nutrition, and relational stability matter more. Without them, hardware becomes decoration.
Many of the most educated societies are deeply invested in the idea that educational progress must look like technological expansion. New tools. New metrics. New reforms. We equate change with improvement. We rarely pause to ask whether the foundations are intact.
In Kraska, there is little to fracture attention. Children sit with a mathematics problem until it yields. They do not glance at a screen or abandon it at the first sign of difficulty. They listen carefully, carry the method in memory, and test it until it holds.
At the same time, there is no pressure to rush, no constant comparison, no performance anxiety calibrated by ranking or metrics. Effort is expected, but panic is not. After a long jeep journey down from the forest and back again, they return laughing about the exam.
Intelligence here is not defined solely by scores. It includes patience, responsibility, attentiveness to animals and land, and the ability to remain present. These are not sentimental virtues. They are cognitive strengths.
In a period when global education systems struggle despite rising investment, this forest village offers more than a counterpoint. It offers evidence that the foundations of early learning are older and more durable than our latest reforms.
Focus is not simply a mental skill to be engineered. It is a cultural condition. In Kraska, that condition still exists. The question is not whether these children can adapt to modern systems. They clearly can.
The question is whether modern systems are capable of preserving the conditions that make such focus possible in the first place.
A student listens intently before answering his teacher in Kraska’s village school. In a community where daily life trains patience and observation, focus is less a technique than a habit formed over time.
The stillness of Kraska’s classrooms is only part of the story. Beyond the lessons and exam papers, young women are growing up inside a tiger reserve, balancing buffalo herding, conservation politics, and new possibilities their mothers never had.
Their lives offer a deeper look at what it means to come of age where wilderness, policy, and ambition intersect.
