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Kenisha Arora could feel the magic in the air on stage at a recent United Nations meeting in Paris, where a global youth contingent pressed world leaders to invest more in education.
It could have been the fact that Ivorian band Magic System had just played the song of the same name, but the medical student from Mississauga, Ont., nevertheless felt the determination of young people from around the world pushing to turn their requests into firm commitments from world leaders and then concrete action.
“There are so many inequities in the world, there are so many things that break my heart, but I really have hope that it is us human beings who can change what this world looks like,” 19-year-old Arora said.
Temporary school closures earlier in the pandemic meant the vast majority of the world’s children — more than 1.6 billion of them — lost access to learning at some point, including hundreds of millions who relied on school for necessities like meals, speakers at the political forum said. Those who stayed away from school the longest were also the least likely to go back.
Speakers at the pre-summit of education ministers and top civil officials in Paris from June 28-30 called for a transformation of education systems to place students' needs at their core. The UN forum hopes to get national governments back on track to meet 2030's Sustainable Development Goal No. 4 — quality education, which it says anchors all 17 goals to leave no one behind.
To deliver on that, the forum wants governments to allocate at least four to six per cent of their gross domestic product, or 15 to 20 per cent of public expenditure, as an investment in education, with wealthier nations expected to contribute to the cost in low-income countries.
While Canadian students were impacted by the pandemic, Arora said learners in other countries faced steeper challenges. Her contemporaries from Sierra Leone, Kenya and Malawi brought up concerns about access to education during the pandemic, she said, “not even overcoming digital learning but even just getting access to education itself.”
Once everyone has access to education, she said the next big global goal is making education relevant to the challenges of today so young people can get to work solving the world’s problems. Better education would include helping “young people address climate action and transform climate literacy into climate action, and (work out) what does that look like,” Arora said.
For Canada, there is a need for more professional development for teachers so they’re equipped to provide students with skills for the jobs of tomorrow, the Western University medical student said, and to reduce the gaps that make post-secondary education unattainable for some people.
As UNESCO’s youth representative for North America and Europe, Arora is also the lone youth voice at the UN's high-level steering committee on education. She describes it as “quite a journey” for a young person to get a seat at the table with the president of the World Bank, executive directors of UNICEF and UNESCO, and heads of state.
She will be working with the Canadian government in the lead-up to the heads of state meeting in New York, hosting online consultations for youth to share their views on how to shape the future of education and what transformation of learning might mean.
The summit on transforming education, which will take place during the UN's 77th General Assembly, aims to mobilize political ambition to revitalize education following two years of pandemic-related disruption and reimagine it for the future.
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
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