Ask Sheela Patel what learning humanity needs right now, and she begins with the distance between climate language and climate reality. “We spend enormous time talking about the stratosphere, the ozone level, the carbon level, generating wonderful words around mitigation and resilience building and adaptation,” she says. “Meanwhile, we do nothing for the people most critically affected by all the transitions occurring right now, people who don’t have the knowledge or resources or support structures even to understand what is changing, let alone think through what to do or access the means to do it.”

These are the people who know how to survive, she explains, they already carry knowledge that humanity urgently needs. Yet when we talk about knowledge, we treat it as something to be delivered to them rather than learned from them and that is a fundamental reversal we must make.

“Knowledge is like water,” Patel says. “You can’t live without it in modern environments, and if you have the opportunity to explore and understand how and access that knowledge, it can transform your life. The question is: whose knowledge do we recognise as worth knowing?”

What traditional education systems miss about how people actually learn together

Working alongside marginalised communities over time reveals something Patel finds remarkable. “There is an amazing excitement, a deep commitment to learn and an extraordinary graciousness with which communities engage with young elite educated professionals who come to work with them,” she says. “These communities actually train these young people. They teach them how to talk to them.”

What stands out for her is “the care and nurturance they bring to these engagements, and the confidence with which they challenge whatever they think will not work for them”. They push back. They renegotiate. They tweak solutions, change them, experiment. They get inspired by what others are doing. They meet each other, learn from each other. They know, as Patel puts it, that “nothing anyone suggests will work entirely, because real life does not come in packages”. Everything has to be adapted, modified, made local.

In SPARC‘s learning labs, its model for collaborative problem-solving centred on community expertise, “we try to create methods by which people assess for themselves what is wrong or what is below par,” Patel says. What communities teach, she argues, is that learning is not just something done to you by an expert; it is something you do with others. They train masons and carpenters to learn new techniques and materials. They look at new innovations and start bringing them in when they see a market. They encourage producers of local materials to experiment. And when something does not work, they say so directly. They do not accept solutions because an outsider designed them.

Reimagining education with marginalised communities as epistemic authorities

A genuine triangle between communities, universities and city government, Patel argues, produces transformation that nothing else can achieve. “Knowledge then flows into the academic system, young people come and work not as saviours but as learners and contributors and universities start thinking differently about what their role is,” she says.

This, she says, transforms how students and professionals understand their disciplines. A student of architecture is not just learning buildings. They are learning what it means to design with people, not for them. A student of transport learns that infrastructure is not neutral, it reflects whose needs matter. An engineer discovers that technical solutions always have social dimensions. When young people experience this education, they see that rigorous knowledge happens in communities. They understand the politics of access, why low-income people do not have services, and then they use their technical skills to develop programmes that actually reach them.

In this way, knowledge gets embedded in academic systems. More young people understand this is not something separate from their profession, it is central to it. Instead of a few people doing this work all the time, every neighbourhood has young people trained in different disciplines, working alongside residents, bringing their knowledge and learning theirs.

“That is what a decolonised educational system looks like,” Patel says: “a genuine co-production between communities and professionals, teaching and learning from each other.”

Redefining learning for a better future

This conversation is part of the No Limits to Hope initiative, a collective response to a question that has only grown more urgent in the decades since it was first asked: what does learning need to become if it is to meet the scale of the crises facing humanity today?

The latest report to the Club of Rome, Constellations of Hope: Cases and Perspectives of Transformational Learning collects case stories of transformative learning from authors based across five continents, working in places as varied as flood-affected villages in Pakistan, Indigenous-led networks in the Amazon, rural communities in the Scottish Highlands, early childhood centres in Europe, engineering classrooms in Africa, and design studios reckoning with their own colonial inheritances. It is coming out this November at the International Conference of the Club of Rome happening in Bucharest, 4-6 November. Sign up here.

The book is part of No Limits to Hope, a collaboration between The Fifth Element and the WEEC Network.