Why We Built Genla: A Teacher for Every Tibetan Child

Growing up in Tibetan refugee schools in India, I received something precious without fully realizing it at the time. Yes, we learned mathematics, science, and English—the academic foundations that would help us navigate the wider world. But woven through every lesson was something deeper: our culture, our history, our values. Kindness wasn’t a separate subject; it was the air we breathed.

Now, decades later, I watch Tibetan children growing up in Switzerland, America, Germany, and across the globe. They’re thriving academically in their adopted countries. Yet something gnaws at me. That invisible thread connecting them to their roots—the one I took for granted—is fraying.

The Scattered People

Tibetans are a displaced people. We’re scattered across continents, adapting to new languages, new customs, new ways of being. Our children are born into this diaspora, often knowing more about their local culture than their ancestral one. This isn’t a failing of parents—it’s simply the reality of displacement. When you’re navigating survival and success in a foreign land, passing down centuries of tradition becomes another weight to carry.

In conversations with parents across our diaspora communities, I kept hearing the same concerns. Many were subscribing to expensive online tutoring platforms—Khan Academy-style services that teach math and science effectively but, understandably, have no connection to Tibetan identity. Some families could afford these subscriptions. Many could not.

The inequality troubled me. But what troubled me more was the question no one seemed to be asking: even if every Tibetan child had access to world-class academic tutoring, would that be enough?

The Heart and Mind Question

Then I encountered SEE Learning.

Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning is a curriculum developed through a remarkable collaboration between Emory University and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It takes the best of modern social-emotional learning research and weaves in something often missing from Western education: ethical discernment, compassion cultivation, and systems thinking. It’s secular, scientific, and universal—yet it carries the fingerprints of Tibetan Buddhist wisdom.

I was captivated. This was exactly what our children needed alongside their academics. Not religion forced upon them, but the universal human values that Tibetan culture has refined over centuries: attention training, resilience, compassion for self and others, understanding how we’re all interconnected.

But how to bring this to our scattered community? Copyright considerations and implementation complexities made simply adopting SEE Learning directly impractical. So we did what Tibetans have always done—we adapted. We took the core principles and built our own curriculum around them, creating what we call the “Heart and Mind” approach.

My Wife’s Insistence

I should be honest: Genla exists because of my wife’s persistence.

We’d been discussing these ideas for years—the gap in our children’s education, the inequality of access, the need for something that feeds both mind and heart. I had the technical background to build something. But building a comprehensive educational platform from scratch? That felt enormous.

My wife saw it differently. “Make it,” she said. “And make it free.”

Free. Not freemium. Not “affordable.” Free for every Tibetan child, regardless of whether their family struggles financially or lives comfortably.

So we built it.

What Genla Actually Is

Genla—“teacher” in Tibetan—is an adaptive learning platform covering grades 1 through 8. The academic curriculum follows New York State Core Standards, meaning students learn the same rigorous mathematics, science, English language arts, and critical thinking skills they’d find in any top-tier educational program.

But here’s the difference: the lessons are peppered with Tibetan names, cultural contexts, and familiar references. A math word problem might feature a character named Tenzin. A science lesson might reference the Himalayas. These small touches help children see themselves in their education rather than feeling like perpetual outsiders learning someone else’s culture.

The Heart and Mind curriculum runs alongside academics. Students learn attention training and emotional regulation. They explore compassion—first for themselves, then for others. They develop resilience skills grounded in trauma-informed care, relevant for a community that carries historical wounds. They practice systems thinking, understanding how their actions ripple outward.

The platform uses adaptive learning technology, assessing each student at a granular topic level to identify specific knowledge gaps. Instead of labeling a child “third-grade level,” Genla recognizes that a student might be advanced in reading comprehension but need support with fractions. Each learning path is personalized.

Six Months to Beta

It took about six months to build the beta version. We’re still refining it, still adding content, still listening to feedback from the families using it.

The roadmap ahead is ambitious: expanding from grade 8 through high school to cover grades 1–12. We want to incorporate additional languages—French and German for our European communities, and eventually comprehensive Tibetan language instruction. The curriculum will grow to include more cultural education components.

Why This Matters to Me

This project aligns with something I’ve come to see as my life’s work: conservation. Not just of objects or archives, but of identity itself. The Conserve Tibet Project preserves historical recordings. Terma Studio creates content that keeps our stories alive. And Genla? Genla is about conserving something even more fundamental—the thread of continuity that connects a child born in Brooklyn or Zurich to generations of ancestors who lived beneath the same vast Himalayan sky.

When a Tibetan child excels academically while also understanding why compassion matters, why kindness isn’t weakness, why we are all interconnected—that’s conservation in action. That’s ensuring our culture doesn’t just survive as museum artifacts but lives and breathes in the next generation.

A Teacher for Every Tibetan Child

We named it Genla because a teacher is more than someone who transfers information. A teacher illuminates the path forward. A teacher sees potential and helps it flourish. A teacher cares about the whole person, not just their test scores.

The platform is free and will remain free. Currently, my family funds it. Every Tibetan child, anywhere in the world, should have access to a teacher who helps them succeed academically while staying rooted in who they are.

That’s the promise of Genla. That’s why we built it.

Visit genla.org to learn more or enroll a student.