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The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged our structures and has had a tragic impact all around the world. But this crisis is also an occasion to question our ways of living and to redesign our societies in a more sustainable way.

What world do we want to live in? What is necessary to rebuild in a more sustainable and equitable way? How can education contribute to the transformation needed?

These are some of the questions which framed the discussions of the first online workshop of the series “The transformative power of Education for Sustainable Development for the world beyond COVID-19”, which took place on 9 September 2020.

The event gathered hundreds of participants from all over the world, who shared their visions and perspectives on what Education in the post-crisis should look like.

The workshop was opened by Vibeke Jensen, the Director of the Division for Peace and Sustainable Development of UNESCO’s Education Sector, who spoke about the new global framework ‘ESD for 2030’, which seeks to further strengthen the contribution of Education for Sustainable Development to all 17 SDGs: “ESD for 2030 will place particular emphasis on the importance of individual and societal transformation for sustainability and the contribution of education to the survival and prosperity of humanity”.

In her words of welcome, Maria Böhmer, the President of the German Commission for UNESCO, stated that the transformative power of Education for Sustainable Development ”lies in creating empathic learners with critical thinking skills” and emphasized that young people should be empowered to take action: “We need to give them the opportunity to actively contribute to rebuilding more resilient systems.”

Satish Kumar, Editor Emeritus of the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, highlighted the need for education to build a new worldview of the relationship between humans and nature. From his perspective, education systems should not teach about nature as a mere resource for the economy anymore, but as a “source of life itself”, with its own rights: “For me COVID-19 is a cry from the Earth. (…) The new post-COVID 19 worldview education system should be that human and nature are one. We are connected, we are interdependent. There is no separation, there is no disconnection”.

Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, Rector of International Islamic University Malaysia, spoke about lifestyles and emphasized the need to integrate values into our education systems: “Let’s bring back the values. The values that we can live together with nature symbiotically, benefitting from one another.”

Katsutoshi Hori, student and member of Climate Youth Japan, compared the COVID-19 crisis with the climate crisis, both caused by the excess of human activities. Katsutoshi Hori spoke of the need of ethics and responsibility for the future, while Maja Göpel, Secretary General, German Advisory Council on Global Change, recalled the importance of building resilience.

The speakers concluded that the role of education in the post-crisis goes beyond the simple ‘provision of knowledge’. If we want our societies to change, education needs to go beyond the ‘brain’ to encompass the whole body. Learning should not only mean ‘learning to ‘know’ and ‘learning to do’, but also ‘learning to be’. As Satish Kumar says, education needs to teach “not only the heads, but also the hands and especially the hearts”.  At the workshop, many key questions on the role of ESD have been collected from the audience across the world, which will feed into the following monthly online workshops on specific thematic areas.  

This online workshop is part of the online workshop series organized by UNESCO, in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany and the German Commission for UNESCO in preparation of the UNESCO World Conference on ESD.

• More information on the series of workshops

URL:

https://en.unesco.org/news/power-education-towards-sustainable-societies-world-post-covid-19