Time to Rethink, Re-boot, and Re-energize Education : AUB Founders' Day Speech on 2 December 2024 by Carol Bellamy
Mr. President, faculty, students, ladies and gentlemen.
I’m honoured that you have asked me to speak here today, on AUB’s Founders Day 2024. And I applaud AUB for almost one-hundred and sixty years of history as a champion for freedom of thought and expression, for diversity and dialogue.
In a world – and in a region – that is increasingly polarized, increasingly dangerous, and where rational debate is fast becoming a lost art, AUB is a beacon of hope. It demonstrates that the way the world is right now, is not the way it has to be. It shows us that it is still possible to bring young people of many different faiths (and none) together to work and study, and to send them out into the world with a commitment to creative and critical thinking, life-long learning, personal integrity, civic responsibility, and leadership.
Such beacons are needed as never before. Because, ladies and gentleman, education is failing. From pre-schooling to post-graduate levels, too much of the education offered to children and young people around the world is not yet fit for purpose. And in my view, that purpose is to produce the citizens we need so desperately: the problem solvers, the creative and ambitious thinkers. The world changers.
So I’m delighted to have been asked to share my thoughts on the theme of this year’s Founders Day: ‘the critical role of education in securing the future of nations.’
If nations are to have a peaceful, sustainable future, we must get education back on to the global ‘to do list’ – and make sure it is not only high on that list, but connected to everything else on that list. Because our hopes for a half-way decent world – let alone a better one – depend on the availability of a great education for all. And because it is there, in the kindergarten, the classroom, the lecture hall, that we create the well-rounded, well-informed, and resilient global citizens we need to secure the future of entire nations.
Anyone who makes a speech has to decide whether to talk about the bad news or the good news. More often than not, the solution is to rely on a mixture of the two. Today is a little different. I’m afraid to say that there is far too much bad news, with very little good news to add to the mix. And I’m angry. Angry that the bad continues to far outweigh the good, and that we are just not doing what needs to be done.
There are two major challenges: neither of them new. Access to education, and the quality of education on offer. How can we create the global citizens we need when so many of the world’s children and young people still miss out on education, and when those in school often leave without the skills they need to function in our rapidly changing world?
One glance at the bad news confirms that the statistics are grim. From the global to local level, education is in crisis. Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres summed it up: “Given the stakes, the world cannot afford to short-change education, but by nearly every measure, that is exactly what we are doing.”
At the global level: around one in six adults on our planet cannot read or write, and twice as many women as men are illiterate (six-hundred million women versus three hundred million men). But male or female, ninety-nine percent of those who lack these vital skills are in the world’s developing countries.
Around one hundred and fifteen million children aged six to eleven – that’s one in every five – are not in school. Of those who are in the classroom, one in every four drops out before they have had five years of basic education. This means that they are likely to spend the rest of their lives non-numerate and functionally illiterate. There are three regions where all of these problems are most severe: South Asia, Africa, and right here in the Middle East.
This region, in particular, has endured the unprecedented disruption and near collapse of education in recent decades. Like children across the world, the children of the Middle East lost many months of education triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shone a bright light into the deep and pre-existing fault-lines in education. Who was most likely to be left behind? The children who were already the most marginalized. The children who had no access to the Internet, to a laptop or electricity. The children who had to find work to prop up the families plunged into poverty. For many, learning simply stopped.
But the Middle East faces even more extreme challenges that are piling up – layer upon layer – to deprive children and young people of the education that is their fundamental right. Above all: violence. As a result, classrooms in Gaza that should be full of children learning new skills are full of families with nowhere else to go. Schools that should be places of safety and shelter have even been destroyed. Their actual function, their original purpose, has been all but forgotten, despite the courageous efforts of the United Nations. What kind of citizens can be created – what level of education is even possible – in what can only be described as hell?
Recent years have seen the uprooting of millions of people, both within and across the region’s borders. Lebanon was already hosting the largest number of refugees in the world per capita. And now, with the latest crisis, it seems that almost everyone is on the move, trying to find a safe haven. Educational resources have been stretched far beyond breaking point.
I am acutely aware of the profound impact this is having on the life and work of everyone at AUB, with half of your students displaced, and almost one-third of your faculty and staff either displaced or caring for displaced family members in their own homes. My admiration for the persistence and commitment of AUB faculty, staff and students in the face of these challenges grows deeper each day.
The many other challenges to education here in Lebanon include economic collapse -- exacerbated by the pandemic – and the Beirut Port explosion of 2020. The falling value of the Lebanese lira, falling salaries, rising prices … I’m dismayed to see that all of these are fuelling a brain drain of your country’s brightest and best, including its teachers. These challenges are working in combination to undermine Lebanon’s once proud reputation for excellence in education, and may be widening the gap between better-off Lebanese children who go to private schools, refugee children who may be lucky enough to have support from the UN and other agencies, and ordinary Lebanese children who may have no such educational ‘safety nets’.
The physical destruction of schools, the loss of schools as they are re-purposed to provide shelter, the collapse of state-funded education in the face of one crisis after another – all of these demand an urgent and unprecedented response.
They are the most glaring and catastrophic examples of education in crisis. Yet, bad as they are, they are still only part of the picture.
Even in relatively good times, there is a global learning crisis. And even in relatively wealthy countries, many education systems are failing to equip students with the skills they need, from green and digital knowledge to conflict resolution and critical thinking, to meet the needs of today’s labour markets. As these markets shift, and as technology evolves at an astonishing and accelerating speed, education systems are all too often failing to keep up.
Parents across the Middle East, for example, are losing faith in their state-funded education systems – a signal that education is not delivering. Spurred by a valid desire for a quality education for their children, those who can afford it are turning away from traditional public schools, and turning towards private schools that offer smaller class sizes, well-trained and rewarded teachers, and cutting-edge facilities. They just want their children to have an inspiring, engaging and relevant education in a school that is well-equipped and safe. It’s a pattern that is being seen worldwide, as parents stop waiting for state-funded education to improve. Who can blame them for wanting a good quality education for their child today?
Education itself can’t wait: for wars to be over; for governments to function; for budgets to grow; for the ‘right time’. Because that ‘right time’ will never come until we have a good quality education for all. This is too important to leave to the politicians, and yet we see it being weaponized for political ends – a battleground in the culture wars that are raging around the world, as seen clearly in my own country.
What I find so frustrating is that, as I mentioned, the challenges to education are not exactly breaking news! They have been with us for decades. Equally, the solutions are well-known and proven. So why aren’t we doing it?
Because it is not seen as a global crisis. We can’t make progress until we treat this as a crisis like climate change, like conflict, like the COVID-19 pandemic and more. Because without a good education for all, nothing will ever really change.
So let’s step away from the bad news for a moment, and look at this from a more positive angle. What do we get in return for prioritizing a quality education for every child? Economist Amartya Sen has said that it equips us with the essential and individual power to reflect, make choices, and steer towards a better life.
Education builds a sense of global citizenship – and that is crucial for global problem-solving. The ideal classroom is more than a collection of desks and books, it is also a place where we develop our sense of shared values, and learn to navigate early conflicts. It is where we hone our skills in critical thinking – a skill that becomes more important with each passing day, in an era of misinformation, political populism and the lazy, easy answers that are offered as solutions to complicated, nuanced issues.
As we have long known, education is one of the most powerful ways to reduce poverty and inequality and build the foundations for sustainable and equitable growth. The education of girls, in particular, has been proven time and again to generate one of the highest economic returns. A quality education builds competencies for the future – for a new, clean, sustainable and equitable world economy. And to put it simply, it will be easier to tackle other pressing global challenges if everyone on this planet is well-educated.
So where do we go from here? Earlier this year, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres set out four priorities for education, and I agree with each and every one of them.
Close the access gap. Wherever students are, and no matter who they are, they all deserve – and have an absolute right to – a good quality education. Whatever is happening around them, they have the right to a good quality education. No matter who is in power, they have the right – you guessed it – to a good quality education. Rights are not ‘flexible’ or ‘optional’ they do not change with circumstances, location, gender, religion or class.
Start a revolution within education systems. That means rethinking what students are learning — with a strong focus on quality, on critical thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as skills in green and digital technology. It is time to shift the focus from testing and rote-learning to practical, 21st century, real-life skills. It is also time to create new structures and approaches to support lifelong learning, so that those who have missed out have every chance to catch up, and so that learning never has to end. Let me add here that this revolution must strengthen education at every level: from pre-schooling to primary, and from secondary to higher education. Because access, literacy and numeracy should be the floor, not the ceiling – the starting point for our ambitions, not the end goal.
More respect and support for the women and men on the front lines of education – its teachers. It doesn’t matter who you are, rich or poor, you need a great teacher. Yet there are too few of them – in fact, we need forty-four million more of them worldwide. And millions of teachers lack the support, tools and training they need. Just think how important teachers have been in our own lives. We can all name one who has shaped us, inspired us. Picture that person for a second … who else, outside your own family, has had such an influence on you? Don’t they deserve a seismic shift in the way we treat them, from their salaries to their training and their working conditions?
And close the financing gap. Whatever the final price tag, it pales into insignificance when set against the insane cost of failure. Leaders must meet, and where possible, exceed the international benchmark of dedicating fifteen per cent of their domestic revenue and four per cent of their GDP to education. The poorest countries can’t do this alone, so donors must step up. The global financial architecture must be reshaped to give developing countries access to education finance.
So how do we get there? To put it simply: solidarity. Solidarity that spans every level, from the global to the local. Solidarity: across communities, spanning teachers, parents and students. The very notion of solidarity is something that has to be rebuilt in a world that is now characterized and even driven by division, and this is an increasingly uphill battle, but a battle that must be won.
I’d like to end by sharing something with you: something that sums up why it must be won. These words appeared on a poster at the entrance to a university in South Africa. They read as follows:
“Destroying any nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or the use of long-range missiles … it only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in examinations by the students.”
The poster then sets out the dire consequences:
“Patients die at the hands of such doctors …
Buildings collapse at the hands of such engineers …
Money is lost at the hands of such economists and accountants …
Humanity dies at the hands of such religious scholars …
Justice is lost at the hands of such judges …”
It concludes very simply by saying: “The collapse of education is the collapse of the nation.”
Thank you.
I’m honoured that you have asked me to speak here today, on AUB’s Founders Day 2024. And I applaud AUB for almost one-hundred and sixty years of history as a champion for freedom of thought and expression, for diversity and dialogue.
In a world – and in a region – that is increasingly polarized, increasingly dangerous, and where rational debate is fast becoming a lost art, AUB is a beacon of hope. It demonstrates that the way the world is right now, is not the way it has to be. It shows us that it is still possible to bring young people of many different faiths (and none) together to work and study, and to send them out into the world with a commitment to creative and critical thinking, life-long learning, personal integrity, civic responsibility, and leadership.
Such beacons are needed as never before. Because, ladies and gentleman, education is failing. From pre-schooling to post-graduate levels, too much of the education offered to children and young people around the world is not yet fit for purpose. And in my view, that purpose is to produce the citizens we need so desperately: the problem solvers, the creative and ambitious thinkers. The world changers.
So I’m delighted to have been asked to share my thoughts on the theme of this year’s Founders Day: ‘the critical role of education in securing the future of nations.’
If nations are to have a peaceful, sustainable future, we must get education back on to the global ‘to do list’ – and make sure it is not only high on that list, but connected to everything else on that list. Because our hopes for a half-way decent world – let alone a better one – depend on the availability of a great education for all. And because it is there, in the kindergarten, the classroom, the lecture hall, that we create the well-rounded, well-informed, and resilient global citizens we need to secure the future of entire nations.
Anyone who makes a speech has to decide whether to talk about the bad news or the good news. More often than not, the solution is to rely on a mixture of the two. Today is a little different. I’m afraid to say that there is far too much bad news, with very little good news to add to the mix. And I’m angry. Angry that the bad continues to far outweigh the good, and that we are just not doing what needs to be done.
There are two major challenges: neither of them new. Access to education, and the quality of education on offer. How can we create the global citizens we need when so many of the world’s children and young people still miss out on education, and when those in school often leave without the skills they need to function in our rapidly changing world?
One glance at the bad news confirms that the statistics are grim. From the global to local level, education is in crisis. Earlier this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres summed it up: “Given the stakes, the world cannot afford to short-change education, but by nearly every measure, that is exactly what we are doing.”
At the global level: around one in six adults on our planet cannot read or write, and twice as many women as men are illiterate (six-hundred million women versus three hundred million men). But male or female, ninety-nine percent of those who lack these vital skills are in the world’s developing countries.
Around one hundred and fifteen million children aged six to eleven – that’s one in every five – are not in school. Of those who are in the classroom, one in every four drops out before they have had five years of basic education. This means that they are likely to spend the rest of their lives non-numerate and functionally illiterate. There are three regions where all of these problems are most severe: South Asia, Africa, and right here in the Middle East.
This region, in particular, has endured the unprecedented disruption and near collapse of education in recent decades. Like children across the world, the children of the Middle East lost many months of education triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shone a bright light into the deep and pre-existing fault-lines in education. Who was most likely to be left behind? The children who were already the most marginalized. The children who had no access to the Internet, to a laptop or electricity. The children who had to find work to prop up the families plunged into poverty. For many, learning simply stopped.
But the Middle East faces even more extreme challenges that are piling up – layer upon layer – to deprive children and young people of the education that is their fundamental right. Above all: violence. As a result, classrooms in Gaza that should be full of children learning new skills are full of families with nowhere else to go. Schools that should be places of safety and shelter have even been destroyed. Their actual function, their original purpose, has been all but forgotten, despite the courageous efforts of the United Nations. What kind of citizens can be created – what level of education is even possible – in what can only be described as hell?
Recent years have seen the uprooting of millions of people, both within and across the region’s borders. Lebanon was already hosting the largest number of refugees in the world per capita. And now, with the latest crisis, it seems that almost everyone is on the move, trying to find a safe haven. Educational resources have been stretched far beyond breaking point.
I am acutely aware of the profound impact this is having on the life and work of everyone at AUB, with half of your students displaced, and almost one-third of your faculty and staff either displaced or caring for displaced family members in their own homes. My admiration for the persistence and commitment of AUB faculty, staff and students in the face of these challenges grows deeper each day.
The many other challenges to education here in Lebanon include economic collapse -- exacerbated by the pandemic – and the Beirut Port explosion of 2020. The falling value of the Lebanese lira, falling salaries, rising prices … I’m dismayed to see that all of these are fuelling a brain drain of your country’s brightest and best, including its teachers. These challenges are working in combination to undermine Lebanon’s once proud reputation for excellence in education, and may be widening the gap between better-off Lebanese children who go to private schools, refugee children who may be lucky enough to have support from the UN and other agencies, and ordinary Lebanese children who may have no such educational ‘safety nets’.
The physical destruction of schools, the loss of schools as they are re-purposed to provide shelter, the collapse of state-funded education in the face of one crisis after another – all of these demand an urgent and unprecedented response.
They are the most glaring and catastrophic examples of education in crisis. Yet, bad as they are, they are still only part of the picture.
Even in relatively good times, there is a global learning crisis. And even in relatively wealthy countries, many education systems are failing to equip students with the skills they need, from green and digital knowledge to conflict resolution and critical thinking, to meet the needs of today’s labour markets. As these markets shift, and as technology evolves at an astonishing and accelerating speed, education systems are all too often failing to keep up.
Parents across the Middle East, for example, are losing faith in their state-funded education systems – a signal that education is not delivering. Spurred by a valid desire for a quality education for their children, those who can afford it are turning away from traditional public schools, and turning towards private schools that offer smaller class sizes, well-trained and rewarded teachers, and cutting-edge facilities. They just want their children to have an inspiring, engaging and relevant education in a school that is well-equipped and safe. It’s a pattern that is being seen worldwide, as parents stop waiting for state-funded education to improve. Who can blame them for wanting a good quality education for their child today?
Education itself can’t wait: for wars to be over; for governments to function; for budgets to grow; for the ‘right time’. Because that ‘right time’ will never come until we have a good quality education for all. This is too important to leave to the politicians, and yet we see it being weaponized for political ends – a battleground in the culture wars that are raging around the world, as seen clearly in my own country.
What I find so frustrating is that, as I mentioned, the challenges to education are not exactly breaking news! They have been with us for decades. Equally, the solutions are well-known and proven. So why aren’t we doing it?
Because it is not seen as a global crisis. We can’t make progress until we treat this as a crisis like climate change, like conflict, like the COVID-19 pandemic and more. Because without a good education for all, nothing will ever really change.
So let’s step away from the bad news for a moment, and look at this from a more positive angle. What do we get in return for prioritizing a quality education for every child? Economist Amartya Sen has said that it equips us with the essential and individual power to reflect, make choices, and steer towards a better life.
Education builds a sense of global citizenship – and that is crucial for global problem-solving. The ideal classroom is more than a collection of desks and books, it is also a place where we develop our sense of shared values, and learn to navigate early conflicts. It is where we hone our skills in critical thinking – a skill that becomes more important with each passing day, in an era of misinformation, political populism and the lazy, easy answers that are offered as solutions to complicated, nuanced issues.
As we have long known, education is one of the most powerful ways to reduce poverty and inequality and build the foundations for sustainable and equitable growth. The education of girls, in particular, has been proven time and again to generate one of the highest economic returns. A quality education builds competencies for the future – for a new, clean, sustainable and equitable world economy. And to put it simply, it will be easier to tackle other pressing global challenges if everyone on this planet is well-educated.
So where do we go from here? Earlier this year, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres set out four priorities for education, and I agree with each and every one of them.
Close the access gap. Wherever students are, and no matter who they are, they all deserve – and have an absolute right to – a good quality education. Whatever is happening around them, they have the right to a good quality education. No matter who is in power, they have the right – you guessed it – to a good quality education. Rights are not ‘flexible’ or ‘optional’ they do not change with circumstances, location, gender, religion or class.
Start a revolution within education systems. That means rethinking what students are learning — with a strong focus on quality, on critical thinking and problem-solving skills, as well as skills in green and digital technology. It is time to shift the focus from testing and rote-learning to practical, 21st century, real-life skills. It is also time to create new structures and approaches to support lifelong learning, so that those who have missed out have every chance to catch up, and so that learning never has to end. Let me add here that this revolution must strengthen education at every level: from pre-schooling to primary, and from secondary to higher education. Because access, literacy and numeracy should be the floor, not the ceiling – the starting point for our ambitions, not the end goal.
More respect and support for the women and men on the front lines of education – its teachers. It doesn’t matter who you are, rich or poor, you need a great teacher. Yet there are too few of them – in fact, we need forty-four million more of them worldwide. And millions of teachers lack the support, tools and training they need. Just think how important teachers have been in our own lives. We can all name one who has shaped us, inspired us. Picture that person for a second … who else, outside your own family, has had such an influence on you? Don’t they deserve a seismic shift in the way we treat them, from their salaries to their training and their working conditions?
And close the financing gap. Whatever the final price tag, it pales into insignificance when set against the insane cost of failure. Leaders must meet, and where possible, exceed the international benchmark of dedicating fifteen per cent of their domestic revenue and four per cent of their GDP to education. The poorest countries can’t do this alone, so donors must step up. The global financial architecture must be reshaped to give developing countries access to education finance.
So how do we get there? To put it simply: solidarity. Solidarity that spans every level, from the global to the local. Solidarity: across communities, spanning teachers, parents and students. The very notion of solidarity is something that has to be rebuilt in a world that is now characterized and even driven by division, and this is an increasingly uphill battle, but a battle that must be won.
I’d like to end by sharing something with you: something that sums up why it must be won. These words appeared on a poster at the entrance to a university in South Africa. They read as follows:
“Destroying any nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or the use of long-range missiles … it only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in examinations by the students.”
The poster then sets out the dire consequences:
“Patients die at the hands of such doctors …
Buildings collapse at the hands of such engineers …
Money is lost at the hands of such economists and accountants …
Humanity dies at the hands of such religious scholars …
Justice is lost at the hands of such judges …”
It concludes very simply by saying: “The collapse of education is the collapse of the nation.”
Thank you.
Thanks, Carol Bellamy for your remarks at AUB and your concluding quotation: “Destroying any nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or the use of long-range missiles … it only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in examinations by the students.” So well said.
ReplyDeleteThank you Carol! There is still hope to make a difference in this crisis !
ReplyDeleteSandra Haji-Ahmed
Well said. Education: simple yet complex. It seems when Education is under threat people revert to the basics which are often too simplistic to fully address the issues at hand. And Education like any other offering gets better and worse as economic divides increase across nations and regions. Love the final paragraph.
ReplyDelete