Sarah Tucker on ‘Yoganomics’

Sarah Tucker

One of the more unexpected things about teaching yoga to teenagers for over a decade is that after a while you stop noticing the yoga and start noticing the teenagers. This was not entirely what I had anticipated when I first began teaching thirteen and fourteen-year-olds as part of the school curriculum because, like most people, I assumed yoga was primarily about flexibility, concentration and persuading adolescents that sitting still for five minutes was not a violation of their human rights. Instead, I found myself observing something far more interesting: the changing psychology of an entire generation and, with it, a growing concern about the future of entrepreneurship, innovation and independent thought.

Back in 2018, when I first wrote about yoga, wellbeing and education, the conversation revolved largely around stress. Politicians worried about stress, teachers worried about stress, parents worried about stress and employers worried about stress, while a rapidly expanding wellbeing industry promised solutions ranging from mindfulness and meditation to breathing techniques, resilience workshops and digital detoxes. The assumption was perfectly reasonable. If young people could become calmer, more focused and emotionally balanced, they would surely become happier, healthier and more productive adults.

Eight years later, despite a dramatic increase in mental health initiatives, wellbeing programmes and awareness campaigns, it would be difficult to argue that the overall situation has improved significantly. Anxiety remains stubbornly high, confidence often appears fragile and many young people seem overwhelmed by a world in which information arrives faster than it can be processed and opinions arrive faster than they can be challenged.

Yet what concerns me most is not stress itself.

Having taught hundreds of teenagers over the years, I have watched a subtle but important progression take place. Many of the young people I taught a decade ago arrived angry. Later groups often appeared confused. More recent cohorts frequently seemed uncertain of themselves and lacking confidence. Increasingly, however, I encounter students who appear something altogether different: incurious.

This may not sound especially alarming until one considers what curiosity actually represents. Angry young people still ask questions because they care enough to challenge the world around them. Confused young people still ask questions because they are attempting to make sense of it. Even insecure young people continue to ask questions because they are trying to understand their place within it. Curiosity remains alive because they are still engaged in the process of discovery. The genuinely worrying students are those who have stopped questioning altogether because once curiosity begins to disappear, independent thinking is rarely far behind.

This matters enormously for entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is, at its heart, little more than curiosity applied to problems. Every successful business begins with somebody looking at a situation that everyone else has accepted and asking why it exists, whether it could be improved or whether an opportunity might be hiding inside an inconvenience that others have learned to tolerate. The entrepreneur notices what others overlook, questions what others accept and remains dissatisfied with explanations that appear perfectly adequate to everybody else.

One of the unintended consequences of modern education is that we have become remarkably effective at teaching children how to answer questions while spending far less time teaching them how to generate them. This is understandable because questions with clear answers fit neatly into examinations, league tables and assessment frameworks, whereas more speculative forms of thinking have an irritating tendency to consume entire lessons and occasionally expose the possibility that nobody in the room possesses the correct answer.

A factual question asks for information. A procedural question asks for a method. Both are important and both have their place. The difficulty is that entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders spend much of their lives dealing with speculative and interpretive questions, which are considerably messier and considerably more valuable. They ask what might happen if an assumption is wrong. They ask why something is done a particular way. They ask whether a problem everyone has accepted might actually contain an opportunity. Most importantly, they remain comfortable operating without immediate certainty, which is a skill schools rarely have the luxury to encourage because uncertainty does not sit comfortably alongside standardised testing.

The irony is that while employers increasingly demand creativity, adaptability and critical thinking, educational systems remain largely designed around factual recall and procedural competence. This was perfectly sensible when economies depended upon large numbers of people performing repeatable tasks, but we are now entering a period in which artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable of handling precisely those forms of work. Machines can retrieve information, recognise patterns and execute procedures at extraordinary speed, which raises an uncomfortable question about whether we are preparing young people for the future or training them to compete against software.

This was one of the reasons I became fascinated by the work of Edward de Bono while researching his life. Long before artificial intelligence became fashionable enough to frighten people at dinner parties, de Bono argued that society placed too much emphasis on intelligence and not enough on perception. He recognised that highly intelligent people often become extremely efficient at operating within existing systems while remaining surprisingly blind to alternatives. Knowledge mattered, of course, but what ultimately created value was the ability to see situations differently from everyone else.

Viewed through that lens, many of the qualities associated with successful entrepreneurship begin to look suspiciously similar to the characteristics schools often find troublesome. Entrepreneurs question assumptions, challenge authority, become distracted by possibilities and display an irritating tendency to ask why something is done a particular way rather than simply getting on with it. This may explain why so many successful entrepreneurs would probably have appeared rather difficult pupils.

Richard Branson has spoken openly about struggling within a traditional educational environment that was ill-equipped to recognise entrepreneurial instincts, while Steve Jobs was famously restless, challenging and frequently frustrated by authority. Alan Sugar left school at sixteen, James Dyson built an entire career on refusing to accept that established solutions represented the best solutions and Elon Musk, whatever one thinks of him, appears driven by a relentless willingness to ask questions that most people dismiss as impractical or impossible. What is interesting is not that these individuals succeeded despite displaying such characteristics, but that they succeeded because of them. The very behaviours that often create difficulties within conventional educational settings – questioning assumptions, challenging accepted wisdom, pursuing unusual interests and refusing to accept that there is only one correct answer – are precisely the qualities investors, employers and business leaders later describe as innovative thinking.

The entrepreneur and the troublesome pupil frequently have far more in common than either would care to admit. The difference is largely one of timing because, at fourteen, such behaviour is often described as disruptive, whereas by forty-four it may be described as visionary leadership.

There is another reason this matters. Young people who stop asking questions become easier to influence because they gradually lose the habit of examining information critically. History has repeatedly demonstrated that populations become vulnerable when they stop questioning authority, but the challenge is even greater today because information no longer arrives through a handful of newspapers and broadcasters. Instead, it flows continuously through social media platforms, algorithms, influencers, artificial intelligence and institutions that increasingly compete for our attention. The ability to think independently therefore becomes not merely an entrepreneurial skill but a civic one.

Perhaps this is why I have become increasingly convinced that schools should teach thinking itself as a subject. Not critical thinking as an occasional workshop, nor creativity as a fashionable slogan inserted into policy documents, but the deliberate teaching of how to generate ideas, challenge assumptions, explore possibilities and tolerate uncertainty. Such skills may take longer to develop than memorising facts and they may be considerably more difficult to measure, but they also happen to underpin entrepreneurship, innovation and the ability to adapt to change.

Back in 2018, many of us believed stress represented the greatest challenge facing young people. Today I am not so sure. Stress remains a problem, but a stressed teenager may still challenge accepted wisdom, question authority and imagine alternatives. The greater danger may be the gradual emergence of incuriosity because a generation that ceases to ask questions risks becoming a generation that accepts whatever answers it is given.

For entrepreneurs, that should be a deeply unsettling thought because every worthwhile business, invention and breakthrough begins with a question that somebody else failed to ask. The future may therefore belong not to those who possess the most information, nor even to those who work the hardest, but to those who retain the curiosity to wonder whether everybody else might have missed something hiding in plain sight, because that has always been where opportunity lives.