CBD 2026: The Discovery of Who We Are: How we can cultivate basic human values through contemplative education and a rich pluralism with Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, PhD, DPhil

Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning (SEE Learning), called "SEL 2.0" by Daniel Goleman, is a unique program that integrates contemplative education into SEL alongside systems thinking. Drawing on years of implementation across diverse cultural settings in over 36 countries, this keynote presents SEE Learning as a comprehensive framework for cultivating basic human values in secular educational contexts worldwide. The talk explores how contemplative and compassion-based approaches to education contribute to our emerging understanding of prosocial development in children and adolescents. It examines the neuroscience and developmental literature on prosocial trait cultivation, identifying critical developmental milestones and neurological structures that support ethical growth. The presentation concludes by considering how this knowledge must inform educational policy regarding artificial intelligence—arguing that AI integration in schools requires age-appropriate approaches grounded in developmental science and careful attention to how technology either supports or undermines the cultivation of human capacities for empathy, ethical reasoning, and relational connection. Through contemplative pedagogy and genuine pluralism, we can discover and nurture what is most essentially human in an age of rapid technological change.

This keynote is part one of a two-part series with Brendan Ozawa-de Silva in the Contemplation By Design Summit.

To extend the knowledge and skills you develop during this keynote lecture, please consider attending Brendan Ozawa-de Silva's interactive workshop titled Applying Secular Ethics in the Era of AI on Tuesday, Oct.20 from 4:30-5:45pm.

You are welcome to join one or all three of Brendan's Summit sessions.

Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, PhD, DPhil is an Associate Teaching Professor at the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics at Emory University. For over twenty years he has engaged in research on the cultivation of basic human values from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including philosophy, comparative religion, psychology and education. He served as a co-designer and principal curriculum writer for Emory University’s SEE Learning (Social Emotional and Ethical Learning) program, a free SEL and contemplative education program from pre-K to higher ed, and was also founding director for the Chillon Project, a college program for incarcerated women in the state of Georgia, and a co-founder of the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, a national non-profit. Together with his wife Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, he co-directs the Social Empathy Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab at Emory University.

This session is part of the FREE Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 14-25, 2026.

The full summit schedule for this year will be posted at: https://med.stanford.edu/contemplation/summit.html.