A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT FOR EDUCATION AND BEYOND
UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative aims to rethink education and shape the future. The initiative is catalyzing a global debate on how knowledge, education and learning need to be reimagined in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and precarity.
With accelerated climate change the fragility of our planet is becoming more and more apparent. Persistent inequalities, social fragmentation, and political extremism are bringing many societies to a point of crisis. Advances in digital communication, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology have great potential but also raise serious ethical and governance concerns, especially as promises of innovation and technological change have an uneven record of contributing to human flourishing.
Knowledge and learning are humanity’s greatest renewable resources for responding to challenges and inventing alternatives. Yet, education does more than respond to a changing world. Education transforms the world.
This initiative aims to mobilize the many rich ways of being and knowing in order to leverage humanity’s collective intelligence. It relies on a broad, open process of co-construction that involves youth, educators, civil society, governments, business and other stakeholders.
One central piece of the work was guided by a high-level International Commission of thought-leaders from diverse fields and different regions of the world. In November 2021 the commission publish its report Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education, which presents a forward-looking vision of what education and learning might yet become and allow us individually and collectively to become.
“Thinking together so we can act together to make the futures we want“Unesco