A schoolmate recently sent me a piece he had written tracing the history of sports at Rishi Valley across nearly eight decades. What emerged from his account was a portrait of surprising continuity: a sporting tradition that survived successive administrations, each interpreting Krishnamurti differently, without ever being forced to resolve the tension between competition and the philosophy that nominally governed the school. His piece was factual, affectionate, and illuminating. Reading it triggered something less comfortable.
For eighty years, Rishi Valley has maintained a sporting tradition indistinguishable from any English public school of the 1920s — cricket, football, basketball, inter-house matches, NIS-trained coaches, state-level selections. Children spend thirteen hours a week in sport. The school has produced Ranji Trophy cricketers and Davis Cup contenders. Alongside this, it has carried Krishnamurti’s proposition that comparison is the root of psychological violence, that competition manufactures envy, and that a free human being does not need to measure themselves against another to know their worth.
We have called this tension generative. It has also been convenient. Sport kept children healthy and meaningfully exhausted. The Krishnamurti framework was applied transformatively in the classroom, generously in the pavilion. Nobody had to choose.
The choice is now unavoidable.
The standard defence of competitive sport that it builds character, prepares children for a world that judges by performance was always weaker than it sounded. The resilience built by losing a cricket match is not the resilience required to navigate structural unemployment or civilisational disruption. The character formed on the field is better described as the capacity to subordinate oneself to hierarchy, follow instructions, and suppress ambiguity precisely the qualities industrial capitalism needed and AI is now making redundant.
But accept the argument on its own terms: AI still destroys it.
When every child with a smartphone has access to a system that outperforms any human at chess, mathematics, legal reasoning, diagnosis, and coding and most coordination tasks, what are we building character for? The answer that sport prepares children to compete collapses when competition is no longer primarily a human contest. We are preparing children, with considerable dedication and expense, for a race they have already lost.
There is a version of Krishnamurti’s philosophy that AI finds entirely congenial. The dismantling of fixed authority, rejection of rote learning, emphasis on individual inquiry, all of it repackages neatly as personalised learning, adaptive assessment, self-directed education. Silicon Valley has been doing exactly this for twenty years, with enthusiastic funding and catastrophic results. The child staring at a screen learning “at their own pace” through a gamified interface has not escaped comparison. They have been inserted into the most sophisticated comparison machine ever built, one that tracks every hesitation, every wrong answer, and serves the next optimised intervention accordingly.
This is Krishnamurti’s nightmare dressed in his language.
The genuine insight, the one worth defending, is that freedom is not something educational technology can deliver. It is a quality of relationship. It exists between people paying full attention to each other, not performing for an audience or an algorithm, willing to be changed by what they encounter together. This is what the best Rishi Valley teachers have always practiced, on the field and off it. No version of AI-assisted education has come close.
The case for sport in an AI world, then, is not character-building. It is that sport is irreducibly embodied, unrepeatable, and shared in real time. When a child dives for a catch and holds it, something happens in their body and in the bodies of everyone watching that cannot be extracted, stored, or replicated. Its value is intrinsic, the rarest kind of value in the world AI is building. A student from the 1950s recalled: “I was my own judge. I was my own competitor. There was no rivalry or jealousy. I just had to try and excel.” That child had received something genuinely rare. Not a competitive advantage. Not a credential. The capacity to be fully inside an experience without needing it to prove something about them.
In the world we are entering, that is not a luxury. It is the last line of defence against a civilisation that has forgotten why it was playing.
Rishi Valley will face pressure to justify sport in the language of outcomes: health metrics, leadership competency frameworks, social-emotional learning rubrics. It will be offered AI-assisted coaching, performance analytics, video analysis of batting technique. Some of this will be useful. Most will be a distraction from the only question that matters. When children walk off that valley’s fields at the end of an afternoon, are they slightly more free than when they walked on? Not freer in the sense of having been given choices. Freer in Krishnamurti’s sense: less driven by comparison, more capable of full attention to the present moment and to the person standing next to them. If sport achieves that, even sometimes, even partially, it is doing more than most educational interventions in history have managed.
If it does not, if it is producing, as it does in most schools, a ranked hierarchy of winners and losers who carry that hierarchy into the classroom and into life then the tradition has failed to digest its own most important insight, and the beautiful valley and the careful philosophy are decoration on a conventional machine.
The machine is now being replaced by a better machine.
What survives, what is worth everything to protect, is the possibility that somewhere in the world, children still spend their afternoons learning to strive together, to inhabit their bodies in a world that increasingly does not require them to have bodies at all, to lose without hatred and win without contempt.
Krishnamurti asked whether the truth of the word compete — to move toward something together — could be captured instantly, as a living perception rather than a philosophical position. The valley is still the right place to find out. But only if we stop pretending we have already answered the question.