The world Innovation Summit for Education. WISE, has set itself the task of getting all children in the world to school by the year 2015, part of its “millennium goals”
However, there are those in Doha who believe that without a joint effort, universal education will be difficult achieve within that time, such as French Education Minister Luc Chatel, who said:
“The WISE summit is very important because it allows us to compare points of view, to define our strategies, and discuss this ambitious goal. It’s true that it will be difficult, I believe that each country must contribute at a national level.”
Also at the summit, Freda Wolfeden, of Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa (TESSA), spoke of how even poorer communities can achieve a lot of education improvement themselves:
“The answer there is to empower people in local communities to take ownership of education themselves. We have some fantastic examples from India, where people have been able to set up schools in their own communities or here at WISE we heard about the BRAC initiatives.”
Also while talking on one hand of increasing basic literacy among children, at the same time they are talking already of education 2.0, meaning the place of technology in education.
Martin F. De Angelis is President of “Voices of the Americas” and believes that technology will play a new and interesting role in the years to come:
“5 or 10 years ago, we used to see technology as a distraction.” He said “We considered it to be against traditional education. Now the thinking has completely changed, and we see that this crisis could be an opportunity rather than something negative. Pupils have to stop learning things by rote and learn to look things up for themselves.
Over the course of 3 days, 1300 professionals along with 30 students from five continents took part in debates and workshops, all geared towards finding out about the future of education.