by David William Sheehan
Last monsoon, I was watching a group of students in a classroom in Coimbatore settle into a difficult conversation. Two students had reached an impasse over something that genuinely mattered — a disagreement about a community project that had moved from practical to personal without anyone quite deciding it should. The room had that particular quality of charged suspension when everyone is watching to see what the adults will do.
I did very little. And the students, to my mild surprise, did not need me to. What happened instead was a process I recognised without being able to immediately name it: a willingness to let the difficulty sit in the room rather than forcing it toward resolution, a patience with the tension that seemed to assume the room itself would eventually offer a way through. Small acknowledgements. Questions that didn’t demand answers. A quality of attention that was present without being urgent.
It was several minutes before I placed it. It was the particular Irish management of tension in a room — the communal tolerance for unresolved difficulty that operates in Irish social life as a kind of distributed emotional intelligence, held collectively rather than managed by any individual. I had not taught anyone to do this. I had not named it as a practice. No curriculum framework I have ever read describes it as an outcome. It was formation, arriving in a Tamil Nadu classroom because I had carried it out of Kerry without knowing what I was carrying — and recognising it, after fifteen years of working in contexts where I had no particular reason to expect it, felt like watching a river I grew up beside appear in geography I had never mapped.
You don’t notice what formation has made of you while you’re still inside it. You notice it when the same instinct arrives in a context that had no reason to produce it, and you have to ask yourself where it came from.
What that classroom made visible is what I have come to call cognitive portability: the capacity to function without institutional permission, to carry enough of yourself to remain legible across radically different contexts. Not the luggage of nostalgia — the keeping of small objects, the singing of old songs in foreign kitchens — but something harder and more useful. A set of capacities and values so thoroughly internalised that they do not depend on any particular environment to be activated. The portable person is not rootless. They are specifically rooted — rooted in a formation they carry rather than a landscape they return to.
The Irish encountered this problem three centuries before the algorithm. After the broken Treaty of Limerick in 1691, when the Williamite settlement stripped Catholic Ireland of its remaining legal and institutional frameworks, thousands of soldiers left for military service across Europe. History remembers them as the Wild Geese. What they developed under conditions of exile was cognitive portability — and what they can teach us about identity, education, and the limits of generic intelligence is more relevant than it has any right to be.
Pierce Edmond de Lacy was born in Limerick in 1678. He left Ireland at seventeen and spent the next seventy years becoming one of the most decorated military commanders in Europe — Governor of Riga, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, the only foreigner ever to hold that rank. He died in 1751 having never returned to Limerick. His son Franz Moritz became Field Marshal of the Austrian Army. His grandsons served in courts across the continent. The Limerick thread ran through all of it, unbroken, stretched across four countries and three generations, never quite touching home again.
The question his life forces is not the romantic one — not how did he rise so far from so little? — but the structural one: how does a person remain coherent across conditions that have no reason to accommodate them? De Lacy arrived in Russia speaking Irish and whatever French and Latin he had accumulated at school. He left Limerick with nothing except what he could carry internally: skills, formation, a set of dispositions about discipline and loyalty absorbed before anyone named them as education. He built a career, and then a dynasty, from that internal inheritance. Exile, in this reading, is not the tragedy that ends a story. It is the method that begins one.
Alejandro O’Reilly — born Alexander Ó Raghallaigh in Meath in 1723 — left no autobiography. He left functioning institutions. In Puerto Rico he rebuilt the militia from scratch. In Louisiana he suppressed a rebellion and reorganised the entire colony’s governance. He built systems and moved on. He was not constructing a reputation. He was doing work. The reputation arrived as a byproduct, like the residue left by someone who has already left the room.
They served at Fontenoy under French colours, shouting Remember Limerick as they charged. What is remarkable about that detail is not the sentiment. It is the mechanism: carrying the place that discarded you into the battle you are fighting for someone else, and using the memory as fuel rather than letting it become paralysis. The Wild Geese were not rootless cosmopolitans. Their portability was built on a specific rootedness, and they carried their Irish accent — not linguistic, but cultural and cognitive — into every context they entered. The accent was the source of their value, not an obstacle to be overcome.
The most sophisticated systems now being built are designed to produce the most statistically likely continuation of any prompt. Feed them a question, and they return the centre of the distribution — the response that fits the greatest number of contexts, that offends the fewest assumptions, that sounds like the average of everything ever written on the subject. They generate competence without formation, fluency without rootedness. They are, by design, engines of the generic.
This is not a criticism. It is a description of what these systems are optimised for, and that optimisation produces genuinely useful outputs. But it also illuminates something about human intelligence that we have not yet adequately named: that cognitive portability — the capacity to remain coherent, recognisable, and generative when the surrounding institutional framework has no particular reason to accommodate you — may be one of the distinctly human capacities that the present moment most urgently needs.
The human response to AI should not be to compete on the same terms. A person who tries to be more generically competent than a language model will lose that competition, because the competition is structured in the model’s favour. The human advantage — the only advantage that scales in the right direction — is specificity. The knowledge that comes from having been in contact with a particular reality. The instinct that arrives in a Tamil Nadu classroom and cannot be adequately explained because it was not acquired through explanation.
Educational theory has been wrestling with a version of this problem for decades, though it has not always named it clearly. The philosopher Gert Biesta draws a distinction between three functions of education — qualification (skills and knowledge), socialisation (entry into existing practices), and subjectification (the formation of a person as a person, capable of independent existence and judgment). Most contemporary educational systems, he argues, have progressively reduced the third function in favour of the first two. We have become very good at producing qualified, socialised graduates. We have become correspondingly less attentive to what Biesta calls the existential dimension of education — the question of who a student becomes, not merely what they can do.
Alasdair MacIntyre puts the problem in historical terms. Virtues, he argues in After Virtue, are not transferable competencies. They are acquired through participation in specific practices within specific communities over time. They cannot be abstracted from those practices and taught as general skills, because the practices are constitutive of what the virtues are. Courage in a soldier is not courage in a doctor, is not courage in a teacher — not because the word is different but because the specific community of practice has shaped the virtue into its particular form. The Wild Geese carried an Irish version of specific virtues into contexts that valued different specific virtues, and the encounter was generative precisely because the formation was genuine rather than generic.
International schools face a specific version of this challenge. The mobility of their populations — students who have attended four schools in three countries by the age of twelve — means that the specific, sustained encounter Biesta describes is structurally harder to provide. The solution most international schools have reached for is more curriculum: more explicitly articulated frameworks, more transferable skills, more assessments that will travel across contexts. This is the wrong solution, because it doubles down on the generic at the moment when the specific is precisely what is needed.
What would it mean to take cognitive portability seriously as an educational outcome? Not as a metaphor, but as a deliberate goal of the design of learning environments?
It would mean, first, insisting on rootedness rather than assuming it. A curriculum that grounds students in the specific ecology, history, and community of the place where they are learning is not parochial. It is the precondition for genuine encounter with anything else. The student who knows why the canal behind the market floods every October — who has investigated it, compared official explanations with physical evidence, heard the local memory of the last major flood — knows something that a student whose education has been entirely generic does not. Not a more complete version of the same knowledge. A different kind. The kind that can be surprised by the specific case, because it has been in contact with specific cases.
It would mean, second, resisting the institutional pressure to produce legible, transferable outputs at the expense of the less legible formation that makes those outputs meaningful. The student whose entire educational experience has been structured around demonstrable outcomes has been trained, in effect, to produce what the system can see and measure — which is always a narrower range than what a genuinely formed person carries. Biesta’s subjectification cannot be assessed on a rubric. That is not a failure of assessment design. It is the nature of the thing.
It would mean, third, taking the content of local and cultural formation seriously as educational material rather than as background context. The languages, stories, practices, and social textures of a particular community are not decoration around the real curriculum. They are constitutive of the formation that makes everything else portable. The Wild Geese carried Irish social structures for understanding authority — the preference for relational over positional power, the collective management of tension, the instinct for loyalty that preceded institutional affiliation — into military contexts that valued those capacities even when they did not name them. Those structures came from somewhere: from the particular way Irish communities had organised themselves across centuries of conditions that made institutional loyalty a survival risk rather than an asset.
Schools that treat local formation as merely one strand among many global perspectives miss this entirely. Locally rooted formation is not the opposite of global engagement. It is its precondition. You cannot carry something into new contexts if you are not carrying it from anywhere.
Pierce de Lacy served seventy years in Russia and died there. He would not have described himself as resisting anything. He was doing work, inside the conditions available to him, with what he had carried out of Limerick. The persistence of a specific formation in conditions designed to replace it with something more manageable — that is what exile teaches, given time and enough distance from the original grievance. Not that home was perfect, but that what home made of you is yours. That it works in places home never imagined. That the capacity to carry it, to function without institutional permission, to remain legible across contexts that did not expect you, is not a consolation for displacement. It is the thing displacement, given time, can make.
The Wild Geese charged at Fontenoy shouting a name that nobody on the other side of the field understood. The name was not the point. The formation behind the name was the point. That formation had made them what they were, and what they were was specific enough to be genuinely useful — to themselves, to the institutions that employed them, and, it turns out, to a conversation we are only now learning to have about what kinds of intelligence the present moment most urgently needs.
The most sophisticated systems being built are engines of the generic. The question is whether our schools will be also.
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