International Day of Education – Changing Course, Transforming Education

On this upcoming Monday, 24 January, the world celebrates the annual International Day of Education. The purpose of the annual commemoration offers an opportunity to promote education as a human right, encourage debates about challenges and solutions, and celebrate government, civil society and individual initiatives to develop and promote education. 

The time has come to reignite our collective commitment to education – António Guterres, UN Secretary-General  

This year’s International Day of Education is special because of the release of UNESCO’s ‘Futures of Education’ report, a report that has been in the making for two years. It showcases important transformations necessary to realize the fundamentals of education for everyone, as well as how to build a more sustainable, inclusive and peaceful future. The aim is to encourage debates on how to enhance education as a public and common good, required digital transformation, supporting development of teachers, and caring for the planet. 

Today a careful estimate is that about 258 million children and adolescents in the world do not have the opportunity to enter or complete school, and 617 million children and adolescents cannot read and do basic math. Central to the efforts of bettering education, is to acknowledge it as a human right for everyone. All people, in all countries, all ages, genders and with different abilities should have a good quality education to allow them to be able to explore the future – offering an opportunity to complete a well-planned and well-delivered education and a ladder out of poverty.   

Furthermore, education is key to sustainable and peaceful development of our societies and our planet. Education systems have traditionally been instilled with beliefs of short-term results, valuing individual success, competition and economic well-being, unfortunately often being the opposite of broader solidarity and understanding of global interdependencies, and caring for each other and the planet. As such, the UNESCO report stresses the importance of education to unite students from all over the world around collectively important endeavours and spur knowledge, skills and innovation needed to shape common goods and sustainable futures. 

In case you would like to read more and find out more about how this will be possibly undertaken, read the UNESCO ‘Futures of Education’ report. In case you would like to get a quick introduction to the report, see the UNESCO video on YouTube.