Education Q&A with UNESCO's Irina Bokova | Big Think

We do believe at UNESCO and I personally am very much committed to girls' education and women's empowerment. I do believe in the first place that education is one of the best investments in order to achieve sustainability in any development, but particularly girls. Because in many parts of the world, girls are a synonym with poverty in the rural areas. Girls are the marginalized communities in the communities.

There are still a lot of stereotypes, and because poverty has sometimes a women's face, investing in girls' education — and we have a lot of data, a lot of research in this particular area — improves communities' standard of living, eradicates poverty, and has a particularly important and positive impact on health. We know that educated women who have passed through primary education are caring better for their children, for their families, and also for the environment.

Investing in girls' education is also one of the main, I would say, objectives of education for all, which is the second millennium development goal. And without achieving gender parity in primary education and also moving to secondary education, we cannot achieve also what nowadays is considered one of the objectives of the international community: to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2030.

And why do we speak now about girls' education? Because still inequalities are there. Only 58 percent of the countries have achieved gender parity in primary education, and only 38 percent have gender parity in secondary education. When girls are in school— and our appeal is: let's keep girls in school. They marry late, they get pregnant late. When they're in school, they're much more protected, you know, not to get contaminated with some diseases. And they're also less protected — I would say protected against violence.

Keeping girls in school after primary education is the best investment in our development. Well, I believe that in terms of education it's a value in any society. Education is, I would say, also a cultural event in many societies. Although we know that stereotypes sometimes put girls in marginalized populations at a disadvantage, we believe that if we unite around education, religious leaders traditionally are there in many communities.

Of course, having a very focused public policies and government commitments and making education a true value for families, we will then achieve also sustainability in all our development efforts. We don't believe that there is juxtaposition between cultural values and educational values. We do believe that if we put it right, if we unite around this idea of education being one of the best investments for having healthy families, for having healthy communities, for having, also, I would say, a better living, education is a better living also for these communities and these families.

Then we can convince also everybody and unite around achieving this important goal of access to quality education and lifelong learning for all. I think the strategy to get children into school on one side — and we have already done it — is to put education on the global political agenda. In the United Nations, we have now the education first initiative of the secretary general, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, who is the first one to put education with such a commitment and such a responsibility on the agenda of the United Nations.

We have to have, in the post-2015 agenda on sustainable development, a very strong goal, sustainable goal, which is achieving free access to quality education and lifelong learning for all. And then, of course, we have to have a very strong commitment from governments, from civil society, from the private sector also to reach the marginalized.

We cannot continue business as usual because if we want to eradicate extreme poverty, if we have to move with the agenda of sustainability, if we want to tackle the problems of climate change, if we also want to, in some cases, achieve the paradigm of development — to it, I would say, a developmental aspect to all the issues about economic development — to have the three legs of sustainable development: the economic, the social, and the environmental.

We cannot do that separately from education. So I believe if we integrate education in these strategies of sustainable development, then we will be successful. I think the teaching and learning are shifting. Nowadays, we speak not just about education. We're speaking about learning. And this shift in our thinking about learning is very much linked also to the new technologies. It's very much linked to a new, very different environment that we're living through, where there is a broad access to information through the new communication technologies, which provides a lot of opportunities also for high quality of teaching and of learning.

So on one side, we have to breach the digital divide. This is the question about access to online information. It is about broadband. We're working there through the Broadband Commission in order to promote broadband and connectivity in those parts of the world where we still see this digital divide preventing many communities, people, young people, and others from this access.

On the other side, we have to admit that the new technology—the technologies overall—it's not the name in itself. It is a means to achieving this learning. And it is about also the content. It is about what kind of global citizens we want to create nowadays through the process of schooling and learning. And this is about values. This is about understanding about the others. This is about, I would say, what kind of young people come out of schools.

We don't want to have out of schools some kind of robots. We want to have young people who have skills but also who are culturally literate. Young people who understand about the others. Young people who know what is at stake nowadays, who are with values about human rights, about human dignity, about communities, and about the others.

So we call it within the global education first initiative; we have put the third main objective of this initiative: global citizenship, education for global citizenship. And I think this is a time to speak about it. It is about education for sustainable development. We are having a major global forum later this year in November in Nagoya, Japan, which is a forum about education for sustainable development.

So the stakes are very high nowadays, with all the challenges that we have. And we want that the oldest, I would say, global learning and education is about global citizenship and that young people know what is at stake.