Many education experts believe the COVID-19 pandemic has done immeasurable damage to the educational prospects of children around the world, leaving millions of children with minimal, inadequate or no education. We are concerned that we are exacerbating already existing problems of declining standards, such as a complete lack of education.

Leonardo Garnier and Marco Bassano, Special Advisors of the Transforming Education Summit

A few days before the Education Transformation Summit, UN News met Costa Rica’s former Minister of Education, Leonardo Garnier, who was appointed as Special Advisor to the Summit by the UN Secretary-General.

He explains why we can’t go back to old ways of teaching and how the United Nations can help bring fresh ideas to classrooms around the world and raise the educational standards of children around the world. Did.

United Nations news The United Nations is currently grappling with so many big geopolitical issues, including the climate crisis, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Why was education selected as a key theme this year?

Leonardo Garnier When the economy slows down, education usually goes under the table and becomes less of a priority. The government needs money and has stopped spending on education.

The problem here is that the damage this causes will only become apparent after a few years. Speaking of the education crisis of the 80s, it was only in the 90s and his 2000s that countries began to suffer losses due to the lack of investment in education.

The pandemic has taken millions of children out of school. But the pandemic also brought about what had been happening for years, as many of the people who were in school weren’t actually learning properly.

United Nations news Tell us about the education crisis of the 1980s. What happened and what were the consequences?

Leonardo Garnier What we have seen in many parts of the world is stagflation and drastic cuts in education budgets. With lower enrollment rates and fewer teachers, many children lost access to education, especially high school.

And that means that in many countries, only about half of the working population has completed primary school. Given the growing poverty and growing inequality in many countries, it is very difficult not to associate it with the decline in educational opportunities he had in the 80’s and his 90’s.

© UNICEF/Veronica Hauser

A family sits inside a house in an informal settlement for internally displaced persons in Kabul, Afghanistan.

United Nations news Do you think what we’re seeing now could lead to a repeat of that situation?

Leonardo Garnier it could happen. Between 2000 and 2018, most countries increased enrollment rates and investment in education. Since then, education budgets have started to be cut, resulting in a pandemic.

And in fact two years of education halted in many countries alongside the economic crisis. So yes, instead of recovering from the pandemic, there is a risk that we could end up in an even worse situation than we were in 2019.

What the Secretary-General is saying is that we must protect education from this devastation and regain what we have lost in this pandemic. But actually we have to go further.

Together with SDG4 [the Sustainable Development Goal to improve access to quality education for all]the United Nations and the international community have set very ambitious targets.

You might think that everyone should have the right to an education, but we won’t get there if we keep doing the same things we did before the pandemic.

At the Transforming Education Summit, we want to send the message that if we really want every young person on this planet to have the right to a quality education, we have to do things differently.

We need to transform the way schools, the way teachers teach, the way digital resources are used, and the way education is funded.

© UNICEF/Frank DeJon

A girl studying online at home in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

United Nations news What is your vision for an educational system fit for the 21st century?

Leonardo Garnier It has to do with the relevance of what we teach and what we teach.

On the one hand, we need the basic building blocks of education: literacy, numeracy, and scientific thinking, but we also need what some call 21st century skills. social skills, problem-solving skills.

Teachers must impart knowledge by stimulating curiosity, helping students solve problems, and guiding students through the learning process. But that requires better training of teachers, better working conditions and better wages. Because in many countries teachers’ wages are very low.

We need to understand that their authority comes from their experience and ability to guide the learning process, not simply because they have more information than their students.

In any work activity, productivity comes from some of the tools we use. When we talk about education, we’ve been using the same tools for about 400 years. The digital revolution has given teachers and learners access to more creative tools for teaching and learning.

The Summit says digital resources are what economists call public goods. Digital resources are expensive and require a large investment to generate, but once they are generated they are available to everyone.

We want to transform digital learning resources into public goods so that every country can share its own resources with others. For example, a teacher in Argentina can share content with a teacher in Spain. Egypt has a nice digital education project to share with many other Arab countries.

The potential is there, but it must all come together in a partnership of digital learning resources. This is another thing we’re looking for at Summit.