If you’ve been keeping up on your UN news, or following BORGEN for the past few weeks, chances are you’re aware of the escalating importance of the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s). Last year Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-Moon tasked a High Level Panel (HLP) of international heads of state and development experts to begin drafting the next set of world goals after our current MDG’s expire in 2014. High on the agenda remains preservation of human rights, especially those of women and girls, global health and of course poverty. Global education is going to re-emphasized as well according to the Panel, specifically as it relates to setting a world standard for education among all the member states.
The Brookings Institute collaborated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) to form the Learning Metrics Task Force last summer. Since then, it has been assembling key data on universal learning goals to incorporate into the post-2015 MDG’s. In a recently released report entitled, “Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Know,” the task force has recommended that there be seven key focus areas for education in the future:
- Physical well-being
- Social and emotional
- Culture and the arts
- Literacy and communication
- Learning approaches and cognition
- Numeracy and mathematics
- Science and technology
These priorities were established after a working group of 37 education experts and a global consultation with other experts representing over 500 countries. Later this week, the Learning Metrics Task Force will be meeting in Dubai to iron out the last details of their plan to implement these goals and incorporate them in to the future MDG’s.
–Morgan Forde
Source: The Brookings Institute
Photo: Brookings