Leonardo Garnier - Special Adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations
New York – Wednesday, July 6th, 2022, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Why the summit now.

Yes, there was some progress in education during the first two decades of the 21st century. But no, we were not even close reaching SDG4: access to quality education for all in 2030. Millions were out of school and, of those actually attending school, many were not even learning the basics. And then, we had the dramatic impact of the pandemic.

This is the context in which the Secretary General convened the Transforming Education Summit, which is not a technical, but a political Summit. Its goal is to galvanize social and political commitment to promote the necessary transformations so that we can really guarantee a quality education for all on this planet, as we had agreed in SDG4.

The Summit does not start from scratch but based on the abundant knowledge, research, and existing best practices. Neither is the Summit an end in itself, but rather a turning point: it pretends to ignite a movement for the transformation of education that goes beyond business as usual, beyond doing things a little faster or a little better, and beyond merely recovering from the pandemic.

We must aim higher. We must reimagine and transform education into a passionate and rigorous process of individual and collective self-discovery and self-development, so that every student has the best opportunities to flourish in every sense.

What do we mean by transforming education?

First, we must develop each student ́s capacity for learning the fundamental building blocks of knowledge that we usually sum up as literacy, numeracy, and scientific thinking. These are essential to develop critical thinking and for our capacity to distinguish valid and well-supported arguments from mere opinions or – worst – from fake, invalid or unsubstantiated arguments.

Second, education is critical for the capacity to learn and re-learn through life the skills for the changing world of work – from its technical and organizational aspects to the managing of human relations.

A third essential task of education is to develop our capacity and the values necessary for learning to live together: this has to do with ethics, equality, and justice; with civic responsibility, democracy, and human rights; with the respect and enjoyment of human diversity; and, of course, with our capacity and active commitment with sustainable development.

A fourth and usually underappreciated role of education is that of developing our capacity to enjoy life and to live it fully and well. This includes many of the most sublime aspects of the human endeavor: our creative potential; our aesthetical capacity to enjoy and to express ourselves through the arts; our disposition for leading a healthy life; our practice of physical activities, games, and sports; as well as the pleasure of stimulating entertainment and our capacity for sharing this joy with others.

In a nutshell, education should give every girl, every boy, every young or not so young person both the ambition to expand their dreams and the capacity to make them real, the capacity to become the person they want to be and to participate in the creation of the world they want to live in.

For education to reach such heights, we need other critical transformations.

We must transform schools into inclusive, safe, healthy, and stimulating learning places: schools should accept every girl, boy, or young person, and make them feel welcome, cared for, protected, stimulated, and supported. The school and its surrounding educational community should become the space and time of human integration, of our coming together in our rich human diversity, without discrimination of any kind, mockery, abuse, or aggression.

As we transform education, teachers – and teaching – must also transform themselves, going from passive to active; from vertical and unidirectional to collaborative; from teaching answers to promoting learning based on questions and curiosity; from merely transmitting content to developing the capacity, the joy and the discipline for problem solving. Teachers should become leaders and guides of their students’ increasingly autonomous learning.

For such a transformation, teachers must be well selected, formed, and trained; equipped with the proper competencies; motivated, respected and granted relative autonomy in their quest for excellence in teaching; and – of course – remunerated according to the relevance and responsibility of their work. They should also be well equipped with adequate teaching resources.

Fortunately, we are living through a digital revolution, and digital teaching and learning resources could become one of the most powerful tools for transforming the way in which teachers teach and learners learn, as well as for democratizing education through expanded access. However, if not harnessed properly, the digital revolution could become instead a dangerous force for furthering educational inequality.

The pandemic showed both the promise and the peril. Even in times of emergency, digital technology allowed many schools and teachers to reach their students and promote their learning; but especially in low- and middle-income countries, many teachers and students did not have access either to the necessary equipment or to reliable connectivity.

But access to broadband connectivity and to the necessary gadgets – computers, tablets, smartphones – is only half the story. The other half has to do with the educational content and the teaching and learning resources that could be available through digital media.

These are typical public goods because, while they require a significant effort and a high fixed cost to be produced, once produced, they can be widely used by an increasing amount of teachers and students everywhere, with very little or no additional cost. If left to the market, such resources could become artificially scarce and quite expensive. That is why we must transform digital teaching and learning resources into free and open global public goods, so that their financing, design, production, and distribution is organized to guarantee free and open access of teachers and learners all over the world.

Finally, of course, all these transformations don ́t come cheap, they cost money, so we are also proposing the obvious: to invest what it takes to have quality education for all, and to make sure that those resources are allocated equitably and used efficiently.

Here, I must confess that I have a problem. Or maybe I should say “we” have a problem, because we have said similar things in the past about transforming education, about improving schools and the conditions for teachers, about taking advantage of the digital revolution and, of course, about investing more in education so that by 2030 no person would lack access to quality learning opportunities. That was our commitment. But in most countries, and especially in lower- and middle- income countries, we did not deliver on that commitment.

Why didn ́t we?

Until we understand our answer to this question, and address it, we would be naïve if we think that just by proposing – again – these kinds of transformations, a new summit will make them come true.

The truth, today, is that educational opportunities – and educational investment – remain highly unequal both between countries as within countries. According to recent data from the Global Education Monitoring Report, rich countries invest an average $8.500 per year per school-age person; upper middle-income countries invest about $1000; lower middle-income countries invest just $275; and the poorest countries invest less than $50 per year per school-age person. The distance is staggering.

And within countries, we also know that from birth, the educational opportunities of the children of higher-income and better educated families are dramatically different, as are their learning resources and their learning outcomes, thus reproducing inequality.

We must transform the financing of public education from a seemingly unsolvable expenditure problem into the most efficient investment we can make. There is increasing research which demonstrates the potential economic advantages of increasing educational investment. The rationale is clear: no other investment has a higher private rate of return than education, especially early child education. Returns are even higher when we consider not just the private returns on education investment in terms of future income, but also the external returns produced by each person ́s education in the income and welfare of other people and the society at large.

So, if we know that investing in education pays more than any other investment, why don ́t we just do it? The answer, again, has to do with the specific and different contexts in which educational investments occur.

Allow me some simplification. When a country is highly unequal and has a large supply of very cheap labor, it can find itself in a low-level equilibrium or poverty trap. The type of investments mostly attracted by the abundance of cheap labor are typically unsophisticated investments, with low capital intensity, low productivity, and little need for human capital. But still, they can be very profitable. With no need for an increasingly qualified labor force, there is little incentive in such an economy for raising taxes in order to finance education, which is perceived as a mere expenditure. The situation can be even more complicated when countries get entangled into the typical race to the bottom, where they deregulate the labor market, the exploitation of natural resources and grant generous tax exemptions to further reduce costs and attract foreign investment.

As Acemoglu and Robinson have argued, in countries where these extractive or low-productivity economies prevail, the institutional framework tends to be weak and the balance of economic and political power is significantly skewed towards the upper echelons of income and wealth, which again tend to oppose the kind of tax increases that would be necessary to finance universal quality education.

Transforming education for sustainable development: to ignite a movement

Poverty traps are precisely the opposite of sustainable development. They are inequitable, they are environmentally destructive, and they are economically inefficient. But they are profitable both for the local and for the global elites. They are a perverse equilibrium. They are the main obstacle for the transformation of education into a true human right.

Here, we should remember that, historically, no human right has been graciously conceded. They all have had to be fought for. Education will not be different. Those who are being excluded from education, excluded from learning, will have to fight for their right.

Thus, if this summit is to achieve its goal, it will have to ignite a movement for the transformation of education, which will have to be also a movement for equitable sustainable development and against poverty traps. Only then we will transform education into a true human right.

Thank you