The Debates on Education are an initiative of the Jaume Bofill Foundation and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, geared to the promotion of social debate on the future of education. [+]
Abstract
Since 1934, UNESCO's International Bureau of Education has organised the International Conference on Education (ICE), a worldwide forum to establish dialogue between education ministers, though it also includes researchers, practitioners and representatives of intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations. The 47th ICE took place in Geneva from September 8 to 11 2004 under the title "Quality education for all young people: Challenges, trends and priorities", and its definitive aim was to study the ways to reform education, and secondary education in particular, and to adapt it to the individual and collective needs of the young and the socio-economic realities of the 21st century.
In its conclusions, the ministers of education present set out ten challenges for the future, which are based, above all, on the fact that more than half of the world's population is under 25 years of age, which means it is the future generations that will have to improve the quality of education - a factor that cannot be addressed on a national level only, instead having to be addressed on a global level. These challenges include improving aspects such as innovation, quality, basic support for the family, gender equality or broadcasting of the democratic culture in order to achieve competencies for life in the future.
KeywordsEducation, the young, UNESCO, quality
She graduated in Education Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Leipzig (Germany).
She subsequently became a lecturer of the History of Education at the University of Buenos Aires and took part in a range of academic activities in different countries, especially Africa and Latin America.
From 1984 to 1992, she was Educational Coordinator of the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO) and, in 1994, was made Director-General of Educational Research in the Argentine Ministry of Education.
She published a number of books, articles and essays on education, in particular, <i>Rehaciendo escuelas: hacia un nuevo paradigma educativo en la educación latinoamericana</i> (Santillana, 1999), which received the Andrés Bello Award for the best essay on education.
She was director of UNESCO's International Bureau of Education in Geneva and her activities were focused above all on the relations between educational development and social development on a global level, and, more particularly, in contents and methods for living together and curricular development in conditions of poverty and social conflict. She was also editor of the UNESCO's <i>Prospects</i> journal, which is published in the six official languages of the United Nations.
She died on June 1 2005.
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