Education faces a critical turning point in both its content and approach. In a fast-changing world, a complex tension exists between governments, the private sector, and families regarding educational content, pedagogies, and what should be assessed – in brief, what a good education looks like and stands for. The selection or omission of subject knowledge – particularly in areas like climate science and sustainability – often reflects political positions. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence have heightened concerns about workforce automation and potential unemployment, with an increasing gap between what employers want and the skills employees have. These advances also lead us to question the very nature of learning and human nature itself.
These challenges raise fundamental questions about preparing students for a future marked by growing digital inequalities while addressing urgent sustainability challenges. Education has historically alternated between emphasising content knowledge and focusing on skills development. We argue that these elements must be integrated to combat misinformation and empower individual agency. A focus on academic educational outputs has led to bloated curricula that artificially separate learning into subjects and emphasise quantifiable academic skills and knowledge, undermining capabilities particularly needed to address societal crises and technological advancements, such as creativity and ethical reasoning. Thus, we need to rethink what and how we teach from a perspective of human nature and planetary needs rather than league tables, which privilege knowledge acquisition and industrial employment-focused skills.
This sub-theme examines how educational knowledge and life skills can be reimagined to support progress toward a sustainable future and human flourishing. Key questions include:
- How can we foster meaningful collaboration between educational stakeholders – including parents, students, investors, and governments – to develop an inclusive curriculum that effectively combines content and skills?
- Which learning processes best facilitate the integration of skills development with knowledge acquisition?
- How can experiential approaches like play-based and project-based learning develop student agency while preparing them for future challenges, many of which are as yet unknown?
- How should our growing understanding of neuroscience and neurodiversity inform the way we teach both knowledge and skills?
- How can local and global partnerships help to inform how we think about the future? How can we use these shared ideas about the future to inform pedagogy and curricula?
- In practice, how do we balance the need for evaluation data and the demand for results-oriented practices with the complexity of learning? How do we decide what to measure and when?
Sub theme convenors
 Amy Parker – Right to Play |
 Karem Roitman – The Open University |