Amidst these tensions, progress made through international co-operation and global advocacy indicates that collective action can offer hope. The recent past has shown that global challenges like pandemics, climate change, disruptions in energy supply, or cyberattacks can best be addressed through international efforts. Pooling scientific expertise and financial resources can enable societies to respond more swiftly and effectively to global crises. Similarly, international co-operation and agreements can help consolidate social progress on human rights, equality, and non-discrimination by setting global norms and standards.
Within countries, trust in democratic institutions and participation in elections are declining, but people who feel they have a say in government decisions report much higher levels of trust. This highlights the importance of citizen participation, with various forms of participative governance holding the promise to for citizens to influence public decisions in meaningful ways. But citizen voice is expressed in increasingly diverse forms, challenging traditional democratic processes to adapt. Movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and Fridays for Future, as well as the spread of decolonial perspectives, have fuelled debates about whose stories are being told and heard within democracies and in a globalised cultural landscape. While the explosion of digital technologies and social media has created new challenges by enabling the spread of false and misleading claims, it has also opened democratic debate to more voices.
More broadly, technological advancements and innovations are transforming all aspects of our lives and help imagine new approaches to global issues like climate change, food security and public health. Frontier technologies including artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and virtual reality are already changing how we work, learn and communicate. While concerns about job displacements, data privacy, equity, and mental health abound, the promise of these technologies to drive prosperity and transform fields as diverse as agriculture, transportation, medicine, and culture are fuelling investment and innovation.
For education, rapid labour-market transitions have raised questions about how to best anticipate future skill needs and diversify educational pathways to meet the rising demand for high-skilled workers and lifelong learning. Given the rapid pace of change, how to best combine the teaching of specific skills with that of broader competencies needed to continue learning throughout life, including metacognitive skills? How can education systems address both foundational and more complex sets of skills in a way that complements rather than compromises one for the other? And how can the education sector use technologies to optimise its own core processes?
Thinking further ahead, how radically will technological developments and sustainability imperatives impact the need for human labour and the way that humans interact with each other? Shifting priorities indicate that, for increasing numbers of young people, work no longer constitutes a core component of their identity. AI is expanding the capacity of robots to work with humans in different fields, meaning that more of us will work collaboratively with intelligent machines in the years to come. And while human relationships remain central to caring for others, new technologies have the potential to transform social interactions. With less time spent in direct human contact, can education help maintain a sense of community and foster socio-emotional learning and well-being?
These and other questions for education are explored throughout this report, encouraging readers to engage actively with its content, explore alternative futures with an open mind, and adapt questions, scenarios and thinking tools to support constructive stakeholder debates and forward-looking education policies.
