Adult education has a critical role to play in combatting climate change, not only in supporting changes in behaviour but also, and much more crucially, in giving people the means to challenge, change and galvanize political will, argues Paul Stanistreet
You know that moment
in a disaster movie when a TV anchor conveys the terrible news that the world
is facing a catastrophic threat and hope is all but lost. Well, it happened
yesterday for real. The funny thing is, hardly anyone noticed.
4 April 2022 may go
down as one of the darkest days in the late history of humanity, a marker not
only of our inhuman treatment of one another, the harrowing cruelty of war, but
also of our failure to act on climate change, despite a mountain of evidence
and the starkest warnings yet from climate scientists that we are passing the
point of no return when it comes to staving off its worst effects. Continue reading →
The Futures of Education report is a chance to depart from our current ‘unsustainable path’ in education, and build new relationships, with each other, with the planet, and with technology, writes David Atchoarena
On 10 November 2021, the much-anticipated
UNESCO report, Reimagining our
futures together: A new social contract for education, was launched in
Paris at the organization’s General Conference. It was prepared by the
International Commission on the Futures of Education under the leadership of
Her Excellency Madame Sahle-Work Zewde, President of the Federal Democratic
Republic of Ethiopia.
The report follows in the tradition of the Faure
Commission’s 1972 report, Learning to Be:
The World of Education Today and Tomorrow, and the Delors Commission’s
report of 1996, Learning: The Treasure
Within. Due to the rapid changes in our globalized world and the rising
importance of education and lifelong learning therein, this year’s report could
not come at a better time. Global challenges such as the
climate crisis, technological and demographic change, and inequalities further
exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic require urgent action. The world is at a
turning point, the members of the International Commission on the Futures of Education argue: we can continue on the current ‘unsustainable path’ or
radically change course. How we respond to these challenges will determine what
future lies ahead. Continue reading →
The United Nations COP26 climate conference is an opportunity not only to galvanize political leadership but also to reflect on the role of education and the contribution of lifelong learning to climate action, writes Paul Stanistreet
@ Run always/Shutterstock.com
The future isn’t
what it used to be. Whereas once we imagined a future of chrome-plated,
high-tech convenience, limitless space exploration and driverless vehicles
scudding across the commuter-crammed skies of cities, it is now difficult to
imagine any kind of long-term future human civilization as we know it. Our
habits of production and consumption, our ways of living, without any sense of
planetary limitations, and our fetishization of economic growth are incompatible
with human survival. Humanity faces unparalleled global challenges, with the
future of the climate at their heart, and the warnings, from the United
Nations and others – and the consequences of further inaction
– are dire.
The need for
international cooperation is pretty much unprecedented; greater, I would say,
than it has been at any point since the United Nations was created to promote
and facilitate it. The COP26
climate change conference, held this week and next in Glasgow, is an
opportunity for leaders from across the globe to discuss ways of combatting the
effects of climate change and, crucially, of minimizing
further warming. Yet it comes at a moment when the spirit of
global cooperation has been in retreat. As UN Secretary‑General
António Guterres noted last month, vaccine
nationalism in the richer parts of the world is putting
global recovery at risk. The pandemic has not been the cause of nationalism, of
course – as in many other cases, COVID-19 has highlighted an area in which we
need to do better – but it has demonstrated how the leaders of the developed
world can struggle to act in a genuinely cooperative, multilateral way, even when
it is in their interests to do so. Continue reading →
