In Search of a Twenty-First Century Education Renaissance after a Global Pandemic

The COVID-19 Pandemic renewed interest on the question of what goals should be pursued by schools in a world rapidly changing and uncertain. As education leaders developed strategies to continue to educate during the Pandemic, through alternative education arrangements necessitated by the closure of schools, the question of re-prioritizing curriculum became essential. In addition, the anticipated disruptions and impacts that the Pandemic would cause brought the question of what capacities matter to the fore. This chapter reviews the history of mass education and examines the role of the United Nations and other international organizations advocating for schools to educate the whole child and to cultivate the breath of skills essential to advance individual freedoms and social improvement. The chapter makes the case that the aspiration to cultivate a broad range of competencies is not only necessary to meet the growing demands of civic and economic participation, but also critical to close opportunity gaps. The development of a science of implementation of system level reform to educate the whole child is fundamental to close the growing gap between more ambitious aspirations for schools and the learning opportunities that most children experience and that are at the root of their low levels of knowledge and skills as demonstrated in international comparative assessments. Implementation strategies need to take into account the stage of institutional development of the education system, and align the components and sequence of the reform to the existing capacities and structures, while using the reform to help the system advance towards more complex forms of organization that enable it to achieve more ambitious goals. The chapter makes the case for examining the implementation of large scale reforms in countries at varied stages of educational development in order to overcome the limitations of the current knowledge base that relies excessively on the study of a narrow range of countries at similar levels of development, many of them with stagnant or declining performance of their students in international assessments of knowledge and skills. Effective implementation requires also coherence across the various levels of governance of the education system and good communication and collaboration across a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Such communication can be facilitated by a good theory of mind of how others view reform. A reform can be viewed through five alternative frameworks: cultural, psychological, professional, institutional and political, or through a combination of those, and each reform is based on elements reflecting one or several of those frames. Understanding these frames, can help better understand how others view change, thus facilitating communication and the development of a shared theory of change. The chapter concludes describing the methods of this study and introducing the six large scale reforms examined in the book.