16 October, 15:00
Speaker: Dan Wagner, Professor and UNESCO Chair, University of Pennsylvania
Global Public Seminar in Comparative and International Education
UN SDG4 has helped to focus international and national attention on improving the quality of education—and on learning. This has led to substantial increases in attention to, and international development assistance towards, the improvement of educational quality worldwide.
This has led many policymakers to focus on what is often described as a “learning crisis.” The UN goals are mainly normative – they tend to emphasize averages across nations, with relatively limited attention to variations within countries and to the groups performing at the low end of the distribution. If one focuses on what some call those at the “bottom of the pyramid” – in low-income countries, we find that there is actually at “a crisis within this learning crisis.” For many decades, there has been a nearly unchanging pattern of children and youth at the bottom quintile or two quintiles (depending on the country) where intergenerational change in learning has remained largely static. This is especially the case for marginalized communities that encounter significant disadvantages in learning outcomes and life-long trajectories.
Recently, there is increasing attention being paid to the growing gap between the rich and the poor in learning. To help all children learn requires great attention to policies that specifically focus on marginalized populations. The present paper is based on recent research based on my 2018 book “Learning as Development: Rethinking International Education in a Changing World”, a second edition of which is now in production.