How we can better ensure learning throughout life?

 

Building upon the discussions of the aforementioned section, Section 2 explores how we can better ensure learning opportunities throughout life. The sub-sections examine early childhood, secondary and tertiary education (including TVET), as well as youth and adult literacy and the broader concept of lifelong learning. When the right to education was initially conceived and developed, the traditional levels of a formal education system – primary, secondary and tertiary – were understandably at the forefront of legislators’ minds. Education was largely equated to schooling. Even at the development of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the start of the 21st century, the principal education goal (MDG 2) focused exclusively on achieving universal primary education. In the intervening years, there has been a major shift in our understanding and definition of education. By the time that the SDGs were drafted in 2015, SDG 4 outlined as its mission statement to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’, creating a paradigm shift to place education within a lifelong learning perspective. The right to education has therefore taken a wider and more inclusive view, both by broadening our conception around what education is – learning throughout life, rather than formal schooling –, and around who it is for: people of all ages, not only children and young people, while also recognizing that schoolchildren learn outside of the school walls, in family, society and/or through multi-media and cyberspace. In other words, education is extended and enriched ‘in all times and spaces’ (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021). The key premise is that opportunities as to formal, non-formal, informal and flexible learning pathways over a lifetime can have a truly transformative potential for individuals and special importance for vulnerable groups who may not have access to or have flourished in a traditional school environment.