Global education isn’t working well enough. National systems don’t prioritise global citizenship, character or skills. Most young people learn the wrong things in the wrong ways. And 75 million kids aren’t in formal education at all.
What
We need to revolutionise education around the knowledge, skills, and character that today’s learners need to thrive in the 21st century.
We need new global learning goals of the head, hand, and heart.
How
We have a plan, and actions to take.
Learners, parents, teachers, universities, tech leaders, business people, governments and international organisations are all needed to make the learning revolution happen.
Who
We met the pioneers of the next learning revolution, in Abu Dhabi, London, Mumbai, Silicon Valley, Nairobi, Lebanon, Singapore, Oslo, Canberra and beyond. We are building the connections that will make this revolution happen.
Why
We Need a
Learning Revolution
Humanity faces an existential challenge. This is a time of unprecedented technological change and movement of people. What it means to be human is in flux.
But what is taught is not connected to the demands of the future economy and society.
This generation will not be equipped with the skills they need. Polarisation, extremism, inequality, drift, intolerance and distrust will increase.
Education content and assessment focus on classic academic knowledge, not character and skills. Education systems reinforce existing hierarchies, not helping young people build networks of global citizens.
Fail to educate people about the wisdom of coexistence and we will get more wall builders and warmakers.
Tom Fletcher is director of Towards Global Learning Goals – for more on Tom and the rest of the team see ‘About Us’.
What
We Need
To Learn
We need a revolution in how and what humans learn. The foundation for this should be new global learning goals of the head, hand and heart.
We will have to be brave enough to master technology rather than be mastered by it.
To be kind enough to reduce inequality rather than widen it.
To be curious enough to invent new ways of living and organising ourselves.
We will need the knowledge that humankind has built over millennia. And the skills and character to thrive, adapt, learn, create, and coexist as global citizens.

1. Learn how we evolve
2. Learn how we coexist
3. Understand our relationship with our planet

4. How to learn (and keep learning)
5. How to adapt
6. How to manage yourself and your life

7. Stay kind
8. Stay curious
9. Stay courageous
How
We Can
Get There
We need a reawakening of global education.
Thanks to the internet, young people anywhere could access top-class education and collaboration resources. Learning in the future will be more collaborative, more digital and more human.
The digital economy will bring extraordinary opportunities to learn, innovate and create together. Global citizens will gain greater control of their own lives, including their education. The internet can liberate humanity’s ability to reason together.
At its core, this is a challenge of politics not education. We need to create new coalitions for change, and give a voice and a platform to those who can shape and win the arguments.

More
on ‘How’:
Who
Can Lead
The Way
The world is full of pioneers who can make the global education awakening happen. Learners, parents, teachers, universities, businesses, the tech industry, governments and international organisations.
Meaningful change will not be top down. Instead it requires a connecting of the dots. Our aspiration has been is to highlight these talismanic examples; to help to connect them; to expose the obstacles they face (collectively, by sector and individually) and to make practical recommendations that will liberate them to drive the change that is needed.
Educators and governments; the businesses that want to see people better equipped with the right skills; the parents who want their children to thrive. And most importantly young people themselves, who will lead the next learning Renaissance.
Here are some pioneers whose work we want to champion.



“One of the ways in which we can make progress is to break what is a very ambitious undertaking: I don’t hope that we are going to have necessarily every country in the world ready to include a mandatory global citizenship curriculum in their courses. `{`...`}` but I don’t doubt for a second that you can build coalitions with various individuals and groups and networks, interested in global citizenship, and that you can tell them how to do it.``






“Instead of educating kids with the hope that they find some job somewhere, you have to look at the needs of the economy, and work backwards - that’s an uncomfortable thing to do but that’s how we’ve always done it. Some people will say, how can education be dictated by private sector, education is a human right, there is value in education in its own right. There *is* inherent value in learning, but there is a significant cost, and somebody has to pay for that learning, and if we don’t find a model for how to pay for it, there’s not going to be any education at all.”



“When we were in first grade we were taught the importance of colouring inside the lines. We need to learn the exact opposite: the importance of colouring outside the lines.”


the skills and knowledge they have developed, that can have credibility with future employers and others. It would mean the disruption of national control of educational qualifications.



``Students who grow up with great smartphones but poor education are facing very significant and unprecedented risk. in the past teaching content knowledge was always a tower of education but in the world in which we live today we are no longer rewarded for what you know.``


“We’re still in this third stage, the factory model of education. Very few people in education ministries around the world have explored what education is or can be - what it means to be human. This needs to be understood more clearly as we are now entering the fourth education revolution, which is the most important revolution for 500 years: artificial intelligence is altogether different from what happened earlier.”

More
on ‘Who’:
A prime minister, a neuroscientist, a toy-maker, and an AI expert talk about what we should learn.
Listen here:
What
Next?
Everyone should be able to develop the knowledge, skills and character they need to thrive as global citizens.
We will continue our journey towards Global Learning Goals by:
1) Nurturing a network of influential champions of change.
2) Making the case for education of the whole child.
3) Supporting initiatives that will have the highest impact.

We are all educators.
We are all learners.
Get involved.
© Towards Global Learning Goals 2019