In November 2021 the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, noted that today’s education systems are no longer fit for purpose.
Calling for “access to life-long learning opportunities that help them acquire the knowledge and skills needed to exploit opportunities and to participate fully in society,” he convened the summit on Transforming Education, an event that has just taken place during the 77th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA).
The LearningPlanet Alliance strongly agrees with Secretary-General Guterres. Creating new ways of thinking, learning, tooling up, and interacting are the very reasons we were created in 2020 by the Learning Planet Institute and UNESCO, and it is this purpose that unites us and our 300+ global partners.
Around the globe we see engagement with traditional politics, economic indicators, and democracy in decline, yet this decline is not necessarily a sign of resignation. We interpret this as a strong signal that the time is ripe for new focuses, narratives and ways of collaborating and co-existing, rather than the divides created by traditional party politics. In today’s VUCA* world our past methods are not tools for future success; collectively we must learn, act and interact very differently.
We must also evolve learning to include essential skills to support equity, the environment & well-being, and expand it to include all affected individuals. That over a 3rd of the Earth’s population, approximately 2.6 billion youth, does not have a way to affect what is happening around them is not something that LearningPlanet considers optimal for humanity’s future. Equity is essential to engagement and ownership.
The aim of the UN’s Transforming Education Summit, held on 16-19 September 2022, was to mobilize political ambition, action, solidarity, and solutions with a view to transforming education between now and 2030.
The LearningPlanet Alliance and our annual Festival is complementary to this. Its purpose being to mobilize planetary ambition, action, solidarity, and solutions to transform education.
The Festival is the annual gathering of the Alliance partners and has become the global event to showcase efforts, join forces on ideas, share data and learnings, and to celebrate and power up our ambitions.
The LearningPlanet Alliance believes we must not restrict either the transforming actors, nor limit our ambitions! We welcome anyone that wants to join us in this ambition as ‘Planetizen’. Planetizens share our conviction that learning and education enable us to turn knowledge, data and ideas into action, work together to learn to overcome personal, local, and global challenges, and are defined by persistent common efforts to learn to take care of ourselves, others and our planet.
And so the LearningPlanet Festival 2023 calls on all Alliance partners and all Planetizens to join us!
From 24th January 2023 (the International Day of Education) until the 28th, hundreds of online and onsite free events will take place around the world.
The LearningPlanet Festival is a free and global event, harnessing planetary ambition to Transform Education and Enable Action. Our focus being on to take care of oneself, others and the planet through core themes of Equity, the Environment and Well-Being.
Alliance partners: Watch your inboxes! You’ll be receiving a dedicated message with more detailed and tailored information in the next few days!
Organizations: Click here to learn about joining the LearningPlanet Alliance and being a part of the 2023 festival.
Planetizens: Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and/or LinkedIn!
*VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous
