Our Thematic Focus
Education today must focus on equipping students to thrive in a rapidly transforming world.
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A consistent priority of the conference is to inspire teaching that is future-focused and research-informed. We strive to nurture a professional dialogue that is neither bound by tradition nor distracted by passing educational trends but rather constantly embracing thoughtful change and innovation.
Rather than introducing a new theme each year, our conference follows a multi-year methodology, nurturing on going professional conversation and open inquiry into an evolving set of featured issues centered on the premise that ‘education today must focus on equipping students to thrive in a rapidly transforming world.’
A review of the current news headlines underscores, more starkly than ever, the urgent need for intentional, future-oriented reflection on the purpose of education. The impact of technology and artificial intelligence is the headlining topic of current educational discourse. However, we have intentionally chosen not to foreground this theme solely, not because we underestimate its importance, but to recognize the profound shifts occurring across various domains—environmental, technological, demographic, socio-political, and economic. These changes collectively indicate a landscape of significant disruption and transformation, all of which will have impact in our students’ lifetimes.
Thriving must occur at four interdependent levels, each of which is vital and cannot be ignored. These levels and nested featured issues can be seen as standalone themes, but they are also very much in conversation with each other as corollaries, complementary, or in opposition/juxtaposition with each other.
The framework aims to highlight the essential interconnectedness of our world. The goal is not solely for students to acquire useful skills and knowledge but rather to learn to live in new and improved ways, empowering students with the agency to take control of the future, adeptly address its challenges, and hopefully shape it according to their aspirations.
Global
Addressing global challenges and fostering a sense of global citizenship and responsibility for our planet.
From Environmental Sustainability to Regeneration
Facing growing environmental and social crises, it becomes increasingly clear that sustainability education, which emphasizes preserving existing systems and minimizing harm, is no longer enough. The imperative now is to shift towards education focused on regeneration, promoting the active restoration and revitalisation of natural and social ecosystems. By focusing on healing and enhancing our environment, we empower learners to become agents of positive change, capable of reversing past damages and fostering a healthier, more vibrant planet.
Global Competence
While many see the intensification of global competition as grounds for doubling down on some form of ‘global competence’ as a competitive advantage and way to ‘succeed’, our perspective differs. The most pressing global learning challenge is a human and social issue: preparing learners to inquire rather than assume by actively listening, engaging in dialogue, and collaborating across cultural and political boundaries. Thriving in this century rests on the degree to which interdependence and cooperation are recognised and achieved.
Societal
Building thriving communities and economies
Educating for Wisdom
In a recent interview talking about AI and the way it will shape the future, Yuval Noah Harari said something that caught our attention: “Today, nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in twenty years.” We agree that the world is going to look a lot different twenty years from now and that the explosion of AI will significantly impact the specific skills students need to thrive in their careers, but we disagree that we don’t know or can’t know what to teach. To say that no one has any idea what to teach young people today is to say that education is primarily about helping students know what to do instead of who to be. Education is about learning how to think, forming a vision for how we should live together as communities, and fostering virtues that make productive and wise people like curiosity, patience, courage, justice, integrity, humility, resilience, and gratitude.
Versatility
To address the range of monumental challenges that lie ahead, education must equip learners with a complex, interdisciplinary understanding of the world by developing both expertise and transfer. This implies the need for curriculum that is both broad and deep, nurturing versatility. Learners will need increasing, sophisticated exposure to STEM complemented by sensibilities derived from the study of arts, social sciences and humanities. An emphasis on versatility expands the goals of education beyond skill development for maintaining job security, aiming to educate learners to be adaptable, resilient, and resourceful in the face of constant change and to secure personal and community thriving.
Interpersonal
Building strong, empathetic relationships and effective communication skills in a technology-saturated world
Empathy and Belonging
Recent research confirms what intuition might have suggested: good relationships keep us healthier and happier, so developing them must rank high on our list of learning goals. The paradox is that, in an age where young people are connected as never before in history—benefiting from thick and diverse social networks and intercultural exposure—there are legitimate concerns about the quality of these interpersonal connections. Authentic intimacy and belonging can be cultivated, but the challenges are increasingly complex as we need to empathise across more and more boundaries. This is especially challenging in contexts where face-to-face interactions are limited, and disinformation is specifically designed to create division. We cannot assume empathy is a given; it must be actively nurtured as a learning priority.
Constructive Disagreement
Schools have an obligation to embrace viewpoint diversity and cultivate constructive disagreement, through skills and values such as curiosity, humility, respectful dialogue, charitable listening, and appeals to evidence and reason. These practices are especially important for our learners, who deserve to be well-prepared for university and the workplace, with people that represent an array of political and philosophical views, religions, life experiences, personalities, neurodivergence, and cultural backgrounds. Constructive disagreement is not consistent with trying to scare others into silence, and it’s not about staying quiet or making careless compromise to avoid conflict. Instead, constructive disagreement demonstrates respect and involves careful interrogation of ideas, including our own.
Intrapersonal
Developing self-awareness, resilience, purpose, and the ability to adapt and grow personally
Identity and Personal Purpose
Some of the emotional challenge of being an adolescent is of course intrinsic to the human experience. However, young people now face new and unknown challenges that make the task of developing a secure sense of self even more complex. These challenges include an epidemic of loneliness, disconnection from nature and anxiety about environment destruction impacting mental and spiritual well-being, hyperconnectivity and a lack of silence, and uncertainty about the future of work and its implications for one's sense of self and purpose. In response, there is a critical need for experiences that nourish the inner life of learners, helping them understand their capabilities and strengths, empowering them with agency to shape the future, nurturing the development of a meaningful life purpose, and finding peace in a noisy, distracted world.
Personal Learning
When algorithms tailor content recommendations on platforms like Netflix, Apple Music, TikTok, and Instagram, young people increasingly expect a similar level of customization in other experiences, including in the classroom. The power of AI to drive personalization holds the promise of advancing education. It can help us better align with the habits and attention spans of digital natives, more effectively implement insights—long-known but difficult to imagine at scale—from educational research on motivation, identity, agency, and purpose, and make learning more intuitive and efficient. This push of ‘personalisation’ as an explicit goal of the first wave of AI tools hitting education also raises essential questions about balancing technology’s ability to customize learning experience while maintaining the human element that personal, human connections bring to education–the prospect of algorithm-driven personalised education divorced from a personal education.
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