This article examines how the distinction between complicated and complex education systems contributes to our understanding of global governance and how "soft power" concerned with gender is used in international development organisations' responses to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, the global goal for education. Four global…

Within citizenship education, literacy is often promoted in a narrow functional sense of skills for civic engagement or is used synonymously with "knowledge" to refer to an awareness-raising process around rights. Through an analysis of evolving models of citizenship, this article moves beyond literacy "for" citizenship to…

Distance education (DE) has a unique potential to ensure continuity of education in extraordinary circumstances such as pandemics and earthquakes, in addition to its advantages such as flexibility in terms of time and space and self-paced learning options. Institutional support provided for instructors engaged in DE programmes is one of the…

The authoritative ideas of what education should be like under the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) are constructed through discourse among key actors of the "international education community" at large. This article presents the evolution of international education discourse, comparing the periods before and after September…

Fifty years after UNESCO's publication of "Learning to be: The world of education today and tomorrow," the author of this article provides an assessment of this seminal report, commonly known as "the Faure report". He characterises the educational vision of the report as humanistic and democratic and highlights its emphasis on…

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched by the United Nations in 2015, established ambitious targets to be achieved by 2030, including in education. SDG 4, which focuses on ensuring "inclusive and equitable quality education and promot[ing] lifelong learning opportunities for all", attracted attention from the adult education…

Through their collaborative practices of quantification and standardisation in large-scale comparative literacy and numeracy surveys, international organisations (IOs) are both constituting new realities and being reconstituted themselves. This article aims to substantiate how the dominance of global measurement regimes has had profound…

The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled "The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene," was released by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2020. It marks an important step forward as a high-profile publication trying to radically re-think the challenge of sustainable development and revisit…

It is rare in contemporary times to encounter international education policy reports that inspire hope and excitement for the future, such as we are offered in the 1972 report of the International Commission on the Development of Education set up by UNESCO in 1971 and chaired by Edgar Faure. "Learning to be: The world of education today and…

When the Faure report was published in 1972, the Soviet Union already had a robust and holistic cradle-to-grave, lifewide, lifelong education (LLE) system in place. Parts of this system and some of its ideology were reflected in the Faure report, thanks in large part to the contribution of one of the commissioners and authors, Arthur Petrovsky,…

Accelerated learning programmes (ALPs) provide a fast-track second-chance opportunity to complete formal education, enabling disadvantaged children and youth to catch up with their peers. In 2005, after a preliminary pilot phase, the Government of Iraq, in partnership with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) implemented an ALP initially in…

Among the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the fourth one is about ensuring "inclusive and equitable quality education" and promoting "lifelong learning opportunities for all". This goal (SDG 4) is subdivided into 10 targets, the sixth of which concerns youth and adult literacy and numeracy. This article…

The International Commission on the Development of Education set up by UNESCO in 1971 was chaired by Edgar Faure. The conceptualisation of a new social contract in his work between the 1960s and 1970s had a strong influence on the final report prepared by this commission. Published in 1972, Learning to be: "The world of education today and…

This article, which draws on a review of primary and secondary literature, examines the role of a human rights-based approach to adult learning and education (ALE) in the context of the global Education 2030 agenda, which is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) launched in 2015 by the United Nations. Whereas the Millennium…

Understandings of "literacy" broadened after the United Nations Development Decade of the 1960s. The corresponding research into the benefits of literacy also widened its focus beyond economic growth. The effects of adult literacy and its correlates appeared diffuse with the rise of New Literacy Studies, and the scholarship on…