Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

of employment, in many cases despite continued or accelerated growth. This is
particularly so across Asia, where even wealthier economies adopt a minimalist
approach to public welfare, tying livelihoods and entitlements overwhelmingly to
employment, and employment to success in an intense one-off competition for
educational credentials.
The greatest damage
done by jobless growth,
or growth that yields
only insecure and lowstatus
employment,
is to the sense of
self-worth that work
imparts
The greatest damage done by jobless growth, or
growth that yields only insecure and low-status
employment, is to the sense of self-worth that
work imparts. Continuity of work also imparts selfidentity,
the feeling that ‘this is what I do best;
this is who I am.’ When it is reduced to a series
of short-lived jobs or tasks, work ceases to play
this identity-giving role. Individuals may then feel
impelled to seek meaning elsewhere — potentially
in ultra-nationalism or other ideologies that blame
their predicament on a dehumanised outgroup:
foreigners, minorities, migrant workers, ‘modern’ working women, etc. These
and similar struggles often find in violence a visceral affirmation of their ‘truth’.
They attract youth, offering them a cause to identify with, and an opportunity to
overcome isolation and alienation.
Peace education therefore involves far more than preaching the evils of violence
and the virtues of brotherly love; it challenges us to ensure that schooling
acknowledges and engages the related moral, civic and economic crises that we
face. SDG 4.7 offers us a perspective to redesign curriculum as an exercise in what
Schwab (1969), responding to perceptions of widespread youth alienation and
pedagogical dysfunction in 1960s America, called the art of the ‘practical’. It rests
on the insight that strictly regimented minds tend to respond poorly to crises,
grasping at the kind of simplistic, black-and-white visions that lead to conflict
and its all-too-familiar refrains: death to the enemy! unmask the saboteurs! Only
when citizens are possessed of minds that are open and trained in the exercise
of their critical faculties, and of the freedom and confidence to use them, can
we hope that the public will truly register the depth and complexity of the crisis
posed by ecological destruction and violent conflict. This is why critical inquiry
and imagination are crucial in equipping future generations with the intellectual
and emotional capacity for dealing with the challenges that face us.
At the same time, as emphasised throughout this report, critical inquiry, curiosity
and imagination are more than useful ‘skills’ or ‘competencies’ useful for
particular purposes — even worthy ones like tackling climate change or preserving
peace. They are qualities intrinsic to education in its fullest sense. Without them,
schooling degenerates into a profoundly alienating, dehumanising exercise. SDG
4.7 is typically treated as addressing specifically ‘the social, humanistic and moral
purposes of education’ (UNESCO, 2016e, p. 288), implicitly regarded as peripheral
to the main business of SDG 4: education’s role in developing human resources
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Conclusions and Ways Forward