Many education experts worry that COVID-19 The pandemic has done untold damage to the educational prospects of children worldwide, exacerbating already-existing problems of falling standards, with millions of children receiving the highest possible education. minimal, incomplete or no education at all.
In the days leading up to the Transformational Education Summit, UN News met Leonardo Garnier, a former minister of education and academia in Costa Rica who was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as Special Advisor to the Conference. .
He explains why reverting to the old way of teaching is not an option, and how the United Nations can help bring fresh ideas to classrooms around the world and raise educational standards. education for children everywhere.
United Nations News The United Nations is currently dealing with a lot of major geopolitical issues, such as the climate crisis, pandemic and war in Ukraine. Why was education chosen as the main theme this year?
Leonardo Garnier That’s exactly the right time to do it, because when the economy is down, it often happens that education will no longer be a priority. Governments need money, and they stop spending on education.
The problem here is that the damage this causes is only apparent after a few years. If you consider the education crisis of the eighties, it wasn’t until the 90s and 2000s that you started to see how countries failed because of a lack of investment in education.
Millions of children have to miss school because of the pandemic. But the pandemic also brought about what has been going on for years, because many of those who were in school weren’t really learning properly.
United Nations News Talk to us through the education crisis of the 1980s. What happened, and what were the consequences?
Leonardo Garnier What you see in many parts of the world is stagnant inflation and significant cuts in education budgets. Enrollment rates fell, the number of teachers decreased, and many children dropped out of school, especially secondary education.
And that means, in many countries, only about half of the workforce graduate from primary school. When you look at the rise in poverty and the rise in inequality in many countries, it’s hard not to relate that to the decline in educational opportunities of the 90s and 90s.
© UNICEF / Veronica Houser
A family sits in their home, in an informal settlement for internally displaced people in Kabul, Afghanistan.
United Nations News Do you think what we are seeing now is likely to lead to a repeat of that situation?
Leonardo Garnier That could happen. Between 2000 and 2018, we saw an increase in school attendance in most countries and investment in education. Since then, education budgets have been cut, and then there has been the pandemic.
And then what you have is really two years where education stops in many countries, along with an economic crisis. So yes, there is a risk that instead of recovering from the pandemic, we could be in an even worse position than we are in 2019.
What the Secretary-General is saying is that we must protect education from this great impact, and restore what we have lost in this pandemic. But we really have to go further.
With SDG 4 [the Sustainable Development Goal to improve access to quality education for all]The UN and the global community have set themselves very ambitious goals.
You might think that everyone has a right to an education, but if we continue to do things like we did before the pandemic, we won’t get there.
At the Transformational Education Summit, we wanted to send the message that, if we really want every young person on the planet to have the right to a quality education, we must do things differently. .
We must transform schools, the way teachers teach, the way we use digital resources, and the way we fund education.
© UNICEF / Frank Dejongh
A girl studying online at home in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
United Nations News What is your vision for an education system suitable for the 21st Century?
Leonardo Garnier It concerns the content, what we teach and the relevance of education.
On the one hand, we need the basics of education – literacy, numeracy, scientific thinking – but we also need what some call 21st Century skills. Social skills, problem solving skills.
Teachers need to impart knowledge by arousing curiosity, helping students solve problems, and guiding students through the learning process. However, to do that, teachers need better training, better working conditions and better wages, because in many countries, salaries for teachers are very low.
They need to understand that their authority comes not only from having more information than their students, but from their experience and capacity to lead the learning process.
In any labor activity, productivity comes in part from the tools we use. When we talk about education, we have been using the same tools for about 400 years! With the digital revolution, teachers and learners have access to more innovative tools for teaching and learning.
At the Summit we said that digital resources are what economists call a public good: they require a lot of investment to be produced and they are not cheap, but once they are produced, everyone can use them.
We want digital learning resources to be converted into public goods, so that every country can share its resources with other countries. For example, teachers from Argentina can share content with teachers from Spain; Egypt has a lovely digital education project that can be shared with many other Arab countries.
The potential is there, but we need to bring everything together into a partnership for digital learning resources. This is another thing we are calling for at the Conference.
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