More Connected Than Ever

We Are More Connected Than Ever. And We Understand Each Other Less. Here Is What That Means for Education.
International school leaders operate at the intersection of cultures every day of their professional lives. We hire across nationalities, lead staff from diverse backgrounds, manage parent communities with radically different expectations of hierarchy, communication and trust. We attend conferences on cultural intelligence, complete training on diversity, and brief ourselves carefully before difficult conversations. And yet, if we are honest, we often find ourselves surprised. Not by dramatic clashes but by small moments of complete incomprehension. A silence we could not read. A gesture that meant something we had not anticipated. A response that landed entirely differently than we intended.

This was one of those moments.

I was eating alone in a restaurant in a small town in Korea. It was a Tuesday evening, after work, nothing remarkable — a table by the window, a menu I could not fully read, and the pleasure of a meal with no agenda.

Then I noticed the faces.

Four students pressed against the glass, peering in at me with what I can only describe as concerned curiosity. Before I had worked out what was happening, they were inside, standing at my table, asking with great politeness and what I now understand was genuine anxiety, whether I would like some company.

I was fine, I told them. Just having dinner.

They looked at each other in a way that suggested they did not entirely believe me.

Here is what I did not know then and have since come to understand. In Korea, eating alone is not a preference. It is not independence or a taste for quiet. It is a signal that something is wrong, that you have been excluded, that nobody wanted to sit with you. The instinct runs deep. Korean society is rooted in collectivism, in the communal table, in the understanding that to eat together is to care for each other. And these four students had looked through a restaurant window, seen their teacher eating by himself on a Tuesday evening, and done what any decent person in their culture would instinctively do.

They came in.

No cultural briefing prepared me for that window. No translation app, no AI-generated summary of Korean social norms told me what it meant when four teenagers gave up their evening because they could not walk past their teacher eating alone without doing something about it.

I thought about that restaurant window last April when I used it as an example while standing at the front of a room in Lisbon, co-presenting a session on Culturally Responsive Leadership to a group of international school leaders at the ECIS Leadership Conference.

With my co-presenter we shared, listened and discussed for ninety minutes to an engaged room about what changes when you lead across cultures and what remains constant. We relayed experiences from Zambia, Indonesia, Korea, Belgium, Jordan and the UK. The parent who is highly direct and socially close to leadership in Zambia. The parent who raises concerns collectively and never individually in Indonesia. The staff meeting where the room goes completely silent and you cannot tell whether it is respect or disengagement. The message sent with the best intentions on a Sunday — received as dedication in Jordan and as a boundary violation in Belgium.

At the end we could agree on a common language and constants.

What changes across cultures: communication styles, expectations of hierarchy, what engagement looks like, how trust is built. What remains constant: the need for psychological safety, for belonging, for clarity, for the sense that you are seen and that your contribution matters.

And yet, leaving that room, I kept coming back to the same thought.

We have never been more connected. And I am not sure we have ever understood each other less.

Think about what technology has given us.

I can video call a parent in Dubai, a teacher in Nairobi, and a board member in Singapore in the same afternoon without leaving my desk. I can translate a message into Arabic, Mandarin or Slovak in seconds. I can access a cultural briefing on any country in the world before I land at the airport. AI can summarise communication styles, map cultural dimensions, and generate advice on how to lead across contexts.

And none of it would have told me about the restaurant window.

When I was in Zambia, sometimes the electricity went off for up to sixteen hours a day. Loadshedding — the scheduled power cuts which meant that on any given afternoon, the internet was gone, the laptop was dead, and whatever problem was sitting on your desk had to be solved by walking across a courtyard and talking to a person.

It turned out that was often the better approach anyway.

Not because technology is useless. But because the things that most needed solving, such as the parent who felt unheard, the teacher whose silence in a meeting meant something nobody had yet asked about, the colleague whose apparent agreement concealed a reservation they did not know how to voice. None of those were problems the internet was going to fix regardless of whether the power was on.

And it would not have told me about the restaurant window either.

Technology will not tell me whether the parent sitting across from me is being polite or evasive. Whether the teacher who nods enthusiastically in every staff meeting is being resistant or respectful. Whether the colleague who never disagrees with me in public is someone I can trust or someone I should be worried about. Whether silence in a staff meeting means deference or disengagement.

Those are not translation problems. They are not information problems. No app solves them. No AI bridges them.

They are understanding problems. And genuine cross-cultural understanding — not awareness, not sensitivity training, not a cultural briefing — is not something you download. It is something you develop through direct, sustained, difficult encounters with ways of thinking genuinely different from your own.

This is where the question becomes educational rather than just professional.

If the capacity we most need in a world of frictionless connection and genuine cultural complexity cannot be delivered by technology, the question is: where does it come from? How do you develop a person who can read a room across cultural difference, who can inhabit a perspective not their own, who understands not just what someone believes but why their way of thinking produces that belief?

You do not develop that person through a module. You do not develop them through a cultural awareness workshop or an AI competency framework. You develop them by doing something very specific — by placing them, repeatedly and over years, inside perspectives genuinely different from their own, and requiring them to engage seriously rather than observe politely.

You develop them through debate, through working with others with views and ways of thinking different from their own. Through the discipline of arguing a position they have not chosen. Through presentations and standing in front of classmates and peers, alone or in a group and defending a claim, and being challenged by someone who thinks differently.

You develop them, in other words, through exactly the kind of education that has always crossed borders, that places different ways of thinking in genuine dialogue, that requires students to argue from inside perspectives not their own, and that treats the encounter with genuine difference as the point rather than an inconvenience.

They have learned that understanding someone requires more than information about them. It requires genuine encounter. It requires presence. It requires the willingness to sit down at the table with people different from them, just like my students in Korea.

This applies as much to whom we hire as to what we teach. The most culturally intelligent schools I have worked in or visited were not those with the most diverse staff on paper. They were those where the culture of the staff room itself required people to encounter difference daily — in how meetings were run, in how disagreement was expressed, in whose voice was genuinely heard. That does not happen by accident. It is built deliberately, through the same principle that applies in the classroom: genuine encounter, not managed exposure.

At the end of the Lisbon session, we closed with a line that resonated with me.

“Culturally responsive leadership is not about knowing every culture. It is about knowing what to hold onto and what to let go of.”

I think that is exactly right. And I think the education that best equips people to make that judgement — in a leadership role, in a negotiation, in a classroom, in a parent meeting, is not the one that teaches them to use the tools that connect us.

It is the one that teaches them to understand the people those tools connect them to.

We are more connected than we have ever been. Schools that understand what that demands of their students and build their curriculum around it are the ones that will produce the leaders the world genuinely needs.

I still think about those four students and the restaurant window.

They did not consult a cultural briefing before they walked in. They did not run a translation app or generate an AI summary of what it means to eat alone in Korea. They had been formed by their culture, their families, and their community to understand instinctively what another person needed.

That is not something you download. It is something you build.

The question is whether we are building schools that do it.

About the author

Wayne Johnson is Director/CEO of Cambridge International School Bratislava and a former Head of School at the International School of Belgium. He has led international schools across Europe, Asia, and Africa for over 20 years. He is a NEASC Lead Accreditor, former ECIS SIG Committee Member, co-presenter at the ECIS Leadership Conference, Lisbon 2026, and a former media executive.