Educational Purpose and Governance in an Interconnected World
By Elena Toukan
Over the past 75 years, the international community has made remarkable efforts to extend access to education around the world through a spirit of shared commitment and cooperation. The accelerating challenges facing humanity and the planet, however, provoke urgent questions. What kind of education is needed to establish just, peaceful, and prosperous societies for all? Are current educational arrangements adequate to this aim? And what can the international community do to strengthen educational systems and processes at all levels?
Reflecting on educational purpose
Societies and governments worldwide have recognized the centrality of education in raising individual and collective capacity. Leaders, governments, and policy makers have drawn on educational solutions to pursue aims such as fostering shared national identity, increasing economic productivity, training a skilled workforce, and reducing exclusion. Notwithstanding these noble intentions, however, educational programs have had limited success in ensuring wellbeing for participants worldwide, as humanity’s shared challenges accelerate.
Often, the underlying assumptions of educational programing are rooted in fostering individual competitive advantage for economic gain. Knowledge often becomes fragmented and conceptualized as discrete sets of techniques or packages of information delivered to recipients. To address a wider range of shared concerns before humanity, the international community must broaden its notion of education far beyond the purview of human capital accumulation and accruing advantage in competitive systems.
Education can foster powerful environments for building bonds of solidarity and cooperation, thereby enabling rising generations to address shared challenges of individual, community, and worldwide concern in new ways. Throughout history, education has been a key instrument for imparting knowledge and experience from one generation to the next. Merely reproducing methods and solutions of the past, however, will not suffice to meet the challenges of the present. If the roots of individual and collective wellbeing are to be strengthened in lasting ways, thoughtful attention will need to be given to the faculties of the human spirit—what the Governance Befitting statement describes as “that essential quality which seeks meaning and aspires to transcendence.”
Raising new capacities for shared wellbeing
If education is to raise discerning citizens, problem-solvers, and agents of change dedicated to their own excellence and the wellbeing of the world around them, no longer can individuals be viewed as passive recipients of facts, nor educational approaches cater to the desire to be entertained. Educators should see their students—all individuals and communities, in fact—as active protagonists of their own learning. This demands educational leaders to reflect on convictions about human nature and what it might take for educational systems to shift from viewing participants as consumers of information, to instead perceiving them as protagonists of individual and social transformation.
More than ever, humanity needs education capable of fostering deep commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, justice, and truth, pursued in a spirit of open heartedness and humility. A challenge for society will be to move beyond designing educational experiences that fulfil the comfort of one’s own opinions, segregated by divisive interests and susceptible to influence and exploitation. Education must instead provide a bulwark against manipulation, propaganda, and emotivism as the arbiters of truth.
Educators build the capacities of rising generations in diverse contexts, labouring at the frontlines of societal challenges in real time. In many parts of the world, schools are essential institutions at the heart of a community, reflecting shared commitment to the wellbeing of present and future generations while extending protection and support. The international community can learn much from teachers, schools, and other educational institutions by recognizing their unique social roles and responsibilities in the generation and application of knowledge about community wellbeing.
Educational governance in an interconnected world
Effective governance depends on education’s ability to foster profound understanding and capacities to promote the wellbeing of communities, societies, and humanity. The abilities to consult, cooperate, achieve true consensus, and act in solidarity can all be nurtured through education. While many challenges are physically tangible—environmental and climate change, pandemics and disease, hunger and poverty, for example—they are in fact rooted in shortcomings of human decision-making. The Governance Befitting statement highlights that if material advancement is divorced from spiritual and ethical advancement, progress for all is unattainable. Moral and ethical considerations underlie social trust and collaboration. Educational processes that cultivate noble values, qualities, and attitudes are therefore indispensable in fostering a culture of cooperation and common concern—from grassroots interactions to top echelons of leadership—that can give rise to just and fair-minded decision-making.
The means by which governance unfolds, however, must be fitting to its purpose. For example, as access to education has grown, the international community has increasingly relied on comparative rankings to assess educational progress. Students are consequently expected to reproduce the information they assimilate in measurable and standardized forms. This kind of “governance by the numbers” leaves the purpose of education largely out of sight, and can lead to undesirable modes of competition and penalization, particularly for those already facing greater challenges.
Strengthening educational systems will require the international community to look beyond such limited indicators, seeking the means necessary to uplift all. The voices, wellbeing, and experiences of all communities must be considered in stewarding the flows of learning, experience, resources, and support that will be needed to extend and strengthen educational systems and processes in every society.
A much broader set of capacities is required than what many of the world’s education systems currently provide. Good governance—from the local to the international community—will be vital to creating society-wide conditions for education that empowers individuals and communities to read their own realities, to apply what they learn, and to generate new insights about a widening range of present and future concerns and contexts.
Dr. Elena Toukan is an instructor at the University of Toronto and an independent researcher. Her research and teaching focus on the interplay between global education policy and local agency, as well as the acquisition, generation and mobilization of knowledge through education, particularly as it relates to community development.