91�鶹������Ʒ����

Pedagogy should foster the intellectual, social, and moral capacities needed to make meaningful and relevant connections between students, teachers, knowledge, and the wider world. Too often, education is organized around competition – for grades, resources, and rankings – to the detriment of learning to live and work together in an interconnected world. Pedagogies of cooperation and solidarity can be embraced at every age and stage of learning to promote interdisciplinary problem-solving, to foster the expression of diversity and pluralism, to unlearn divisiveness and repair injustices, and to ensure that assessment effectively supports learning.

There is greater access to knowledge today than ever before, but curricula often fall short in connecting knowledge with present and future priorities. Curricula should go beyond a siloed grid of subjects to foster meaningful participation in the knowledge commons. Curricula can mine the breadth and depth of various disciplines – including literacy, numeracy, scientific inquiry, technology, humanities and the arts – while making essential connections among them to engage with ecological, intercultural, and interdisciplinary knowledge. 

Teacher quality is one of the most important determinants of learning. Yet, the teaching profession faces worrying shortages and shortfalls, while struggling to adapt to changing needs. Teaching must be reframed as a collaborative profession, receiving sufficient recognition, value, and supportive working conditions. Teacher education and development must be designed across the professional lifecycle, from novice induction to established experience. 

Connected technology must advance aspirations for inclusive education that facilitates sustainable development based on principles of social and economic justice, equity, and respect for human rights. Key decisions about digital technologies for education and knowledge need to be made in the public sphere and be guided by the principle of education as a public endeavour and a common good. Technology must support the reimagining of education in ways that serve shared futures, and not a handful of private interests. While technology has tremendous potential for improving our lives, it cannot fulfill this promise unless we steer it equitably and ethically.

Our relationship to the planet is far out of balance, and humanity’s one living, common homeland is under existential threat. Education should equip us to adapt to accelerating changes across the planet while also enabling societies to mitigate and renew a harmonious balance with the Earth. The future also holds increasing consequences of climate change on education, including displacement and migration. Greening education involves four pillars: greening schools as examples of carbon neutrality; integrating climate education into school curricula, integrate climate education and capacities in teacher training and education systems, and engaging entire communities in environmental education and action

Learning never ends. Education must be extended and enriched in all times and spaces, strengthening networks of educational spaces for a flourishing learning society. Work, caretaking, leisure, artistic pursuits, cultural practices, sports, civic and community life, social action, infrastructure, digital and media engagement, among others, are all meaningful learning opportunities for shared futures. As social and economic conditions change, adult education will need to open opportunities for career change and reskilling, creating multiple, flexible pathways. Lifelong learning design should prioritize inclusion of the most marginalized, including those who are displaced.

The mission of higher education needs renewal. Recent years have seen a growing critique of higher education as out of touch with what students and societies need for the future.The value of higher education will need to go beyond competitive rankings to instead improve teaching and research capacities among all higher education institutions to fulfil their public mission. Cooperative work between students, the development of research projects, problem-solving, individual study, seminar dialogue, field work, writing, action research, community projects – these and many other pedagogical forms need to infuse higher education. Partnerships across communities, sectors, and institutions can increase perspectives and strengthen the capacity to address complex problems. 

In 2019 the Director–General of UNESCO convened an independent International Commission to work under the leadership of the President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Her Excellency President Sahle-Work Zewde, and develop a global report on the Futures of Education. The 18 members of the Commission were thought-leaders from the worlds of politics, academia, the arts, science, business, and education. The International Commission was charged with carefully considering inputs received through the different consultation processes and ensuring that this collective intelligence was reflected in the global report and other knowledge products connected with the Initiative.

The mandate of the International Commission on the Futures of Education was to collectively reflect on how education might need to be re-thought in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and precarity. The International Commission was invited to challenge and re-evaluate the foundational principles laid out in previous UNESCO global reports about education. Looking towards the year 2050 and beyond, the report suggested visions and strategies for both education policy and education practice to adopt, taking into consideration of the longstanding UNESCO commitment to a pluralistic, integrated and humanistic approach to education and knowledge as public goods. Overall, the International Commission focused on rethinking the role of education, learning and knowledge in light of the tremendous challenges and opportunities of predicted, possible, and preferred futures.

UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative used the concept of futures in the plural in order to recognize that there is a rich diversity of ways of knowing and being around the world. The plural form also acknowledges that there are multiple dimensions to the future and that there will likely be various desirable and undesirable futures – all of which will vary greatly depending on who you are and where you stand. Rather than attempting to chart a single future, looking at futures in the plural validates multiple possible and desirable futures of humanity on our shared planet.

UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative also approached the future as a space for democratic design that is connected to, but not limited by, past and present. Its approach was to build on dedicated evidence-based trend analysis that can help shine light on anticipated challenges and opportunities. This is complemented by participatory mechanisms for envisioning new possible futures of education. Consultations across world regions tapped into the visions and aspirations of a wide range of stakeholders under the understanding that innovation and ownership of the future need to be locally anchored, as well as globally discussed.

The Initiative embraced a fluid, iterative, and collective approach to futures-making to generate discussion and action on the role of education, knowledge and learning in view of the predicted, possible and preferred futures of humanity and the planet.

UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative looked towards the horizon of 2050 and beyond in order to anticipate and shape both nearer and more distant futures. One of the key messages of the International Commission on the Futures of Education's report is that "no trend is destiny". By taking a longer time frame in which to reimagine our futures, we open space for more innovative thinking and reason for hope.

Whilst education is a key element of the , with its own dedicated Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4), there is still an urgent need to look beyond this fast-approaching horizon. While the  lays out a roadmap for the transformation of education systems and affirms a central commitment to inclusion and equity, we must still ask what education might yet become – and what education might yet enable us to become.

Focus group discussions: Thousands of individuals from more than 75 countries came together to collectively reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet. Participants included students, youth, educators, parents, government officials, and academics as well as business leaders, civil society and nongovernmental organizations. The findings were analysed in two report:

Moeller, K., Agaba, S., Hook, T., Jiang, S., Otting, J., Sedighi, M. and Wyss, N. 2021. . Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education report. 

TakingITGlobal. 2021. : Perspectives from the UNESCO Associated School Network’s community of students, teachers and parents. Paper commissioned for the UNESCO Futures of Education

Polls: Over 100,000 people responded to the 1-minute survey, identifying key priorties for the education sector, whilst more than 55,000 people engaged with social media polls.

The Futures of Education Initiative commissioned some 30 background papers to advance thinking on the key issues laid out by the International Commission. They are loosely grouped under 5 themes:

• Human and Planetary Sustainability
• Knowledge Production, Access and Governance
• Citizenship and Participation
• Work and Economic Security
• Thematically Cross-Cutting Issues

All of these papers are available on UNESCO's Digital Library at this .

These papers have not been edited by UNESCO: the views and opinions expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and should not be attributed to UNESCO.  

The UNESCO Secretariat also reviewed over 200 reports to support the International Commission on the Futures of Education (September 2019 - October 2020) to get a picture of the state of research on the future of education. This review identified 9 key questions:

• Public or private good: Who pays for education in the future?
• Singular or diverse curricula: Which perspectives will be included in the curricula of the future?
• Early learning or lifelong learning: When in life is learning most important?
• Personalized learning or collective endeavour: Should learning be tailored to the needs of individuals or groups?
• Transformation or incremental change: Is transformational change needed for education?
• Similar or diverse education trajectories: Will education become more or less similar across countries?
• Top-down or bottom-up change: Will changes in education be top-down or bottom-up?
• Optimist or pessimistic future: Are writers optimistic or pessimistic about the future of education?
• Probable or preferred futures: Are writers more concerned about the future we will get or the future we want?

This new social contract should be grounded in two foundational principles: an expanded vision of the right to education throughout life, and the strengthening of education as a public and a common good. It is not an abandonment of all that we have collectively learned and experienced about education so far, but neither is it a mere course correction on a path already defined and set. Educators, communities, youth and children, families have long identified the limitations of existing educational systems and pioneered new approaches to overcoming them. Yet, without collective moments of structured dialogue about renewal of education, efforts often occur in isolation or with limited impact to large institutional machinery.

Find out more here.