Nelson Mandela said that education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world. What does it mean from the point of view of a sustainable future?
Koulutuksen merkitys kestävässä kehityksessä
Photo: Hanna Ruusulampi, Opetushallitus

Author: Kati Anttalainen, Senior Specialist, Ministry of Education and Culture, Secretariat for International Relations

The international community has widely recognised that education, science, research and innovation are at the heart of sustainability. Education is a precondition for reducing poverty, for working life skills and for sustainable economic growth. It promotes equality, equity, wellbeing and democracy. Especially in developing countries, investing in the education of girls and in sexual and regenerative health improves women's position and prevents child marriages, teenage pregnancies and even child deaths.

Education plays an essential role in the prevention of climate change and global extinction of species through a circular economy, clean technology and energy solutions or, for example, more sustainable consumption habits and food production that reduces soil impoverishment. By increasing livelihood opportunities, it is possible to reduce conflicts and displacement and prevent violent radicalisation. Critical thinking and literacy protect individuals, communities and entire social systems from hate speech, influencing of opinions and conspiracy theories. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen how media literacy can even save lives. Education also secures trust in science and institutions. It supports democracy and social cohesion.

It is indeed difficult to find any goal in the 2030 Agenda that would not require the competence and human capital secured by education.

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Vihreäsävyinen pikkutyttö pitkillä leteillä

We have witnessed an unprecedented progress in access to education in the past few decades. Globally, more than 90 per cent of children of basic education age go to school. However, almost 60 million children still do not have access to basic education. Almost one in five children and young people between 6 and 17 years of age in the world do not go to school. The number is difficult to comprehend – 258 million! These figures are revealed by the Global Education Monitoring Report (2020) published annually by UNESCO, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

However, the global crisis of learning is better reflected by the fact that school does not produce learning outcomes. This is because the better accessibility of education is not reflected in its quality. UNESCO revealed the extent of the phenomenon in 2017: more than one half of children and young people of primary and secondary school age, in other words 617 million, do not learn the basic reading, writing and calculation skills whether they go to school or not.

COVID-19 pandemic deepening inequality

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to deepen the crisis of education. According to UNESCO, more than 90 per cent of all learners in the world had to study remotely at some point of the pandemic. In January 2021, almost one year after the outbreak of the epidemic, the education system was completely closed in more than 30 countries. United Nations General-Secretary António Guterres has therefore warned us about a transgenerational catastrophe if the learners at risk of dropping out cannot be brought back to the learning pathway and the learning gaps caused by the crisis cannot be reduced.  This requires political commitment and resources. Only approximately one half of the world's population has access to the internet, and even distance learning based on TV and radio broadcasts has not reached everyone during the crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the gaps caused by inequalities in many ways.

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Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world. 

– Nelson Mandela

The role of education was understood at the global level in connection with World War II at the latest. UNESCO originated from the gatherings of the ministers of education of the Allied countries in London during the war between 1942 and 1945. The ministers of education understood that education as an institution had been used to incite suspicion and hatred between nations and groups of people. Education therefore had to play a central role in building an understanding between nations and a peaceful future. Even 75 years later, the understanding of civilisation in the UNESCO Constitution is still valid:

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

War against nature?

According to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the human race is waging war against nature. The Secretary-General describes this as a suicide mission as, when destroying nature, man will always unavoidably hurt himself. Making peace with nature is the most important task of our century. Our existence in entirely dependent on ecosystems, which are collapsing in front of our eyes, however. According to the World Meteorological Organization WMO, the climate has already warmed by 1.2 degrees from pre-industrial times, and we are heading towards global warming of 3–5 degrees by the end of the century. The decade that just ended (2011–2020) was the warmest in the measurement history, and temperature records have been broken as many as six times since 2015.
The impacts of the climate crisis are already visible, and more actions are needed not only to prevent climate change but also to adapt to it. The permanent ice cover is shrinking, permafrost is melting and the sea level is rising. Forest fires, drought, floods and violent storms are becoming more frequent. The climate crisis affects the prospects for livelihood and forces millions of people to leave their homes. Poor countries and vulnerable groups will suffer the most.

The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic showed us very concretely the interdependency of the world that we live in. As people continuously clear more living space for themselves, interaction with the wild nature increases. This increases the risk of encountering viruses to which humans have low immunity. According to the international nature panel IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), mammals and birds are hosts to approximately 1.7 million viruses that have not yet been discovered. Even up to one half of them may infect people. We should therefore not expect COVID-19 to be the last pandemic.

The Preamble of the 2030 Agenda reminds us of the scale of global challenges:

“We can be the first generation to succeed in ending poverty; just as we may be the last to have a chance of saving the planet.”
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Vihreäsävyinen lentävä kirja, jonka nokkana ja runkona on lyijykynä

To succeed in humanity's survival struggle, we must commit ourselves to and direct resources to concrete actions. We urgently need to learn to live in a new way, not only for our own sake, but also because it is our duty to future generations.

In particular, we must not ignore the concerns young people have over climate and the prerequisites for life on the earth. Young people’s frustration with the slow pace of climate actions is probably reflected by the results of a survey conducted by the University of Oxford (2020), according to which more than one half of young Europeans believe that authoritarian states are better equipped to respond to the climate crisis than democracies. If anything, this should raise concerns in decision-makers.

To be able to influence the climate crisis themselves, young people need a broad understanding of the world's sustainability challenges, their complex interdependencies and, above all, of means of influencing the developments. Apart from knowledge and skills, we need values, attitudes and a will to carry out concrete sustainability actions. A sustainable future must be a task shared by the whole learning community. According to the global 2030 Agenda roadmap for education for sustainable development published by UNESCO (2020), the school culture of educational institutions must ensure that we “learn what we live and live what we learn”.

Finland as a pioneer

Finland has potential to take more extensive action than our size would merit in solving not only the global learning crisis, but also the climate crisis. After all, the Finnish school system is renowned worldwide. Our teachers are highly educated and the whole society values education as an investment in the future. Education policy is built in the long term by promoting equity and equality.

Sustainability in turn is in many ways integrated into all levels of Finnish education, starting from the national core curricula and qualification requirements. Higher education institutions have committed themselves to promoting sustainable development, thanks to which efforts are made to strengthen sustainable development competence in all degrees. Universities increasingly allocate research to solving global sustainability challenges, while universities of applied sciences commit themselves to becoming carbon-neutral by 2030.

This all helps to support Finland's ambitious goal of reaching carbon neutrality among the first countries in 2035.
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