At the 2025 Yidan Prize Conference, our panel gathered around a question: How can education meet a world of shifting populations, deepening polycrises, and widening divides?

There’s no single solution. Instead, the conversation highlighted emerging futures shaped by context, rooted in care, and guided by a shared sense of purpose.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Quoting him was panelist Professor Wolfgang Lutz — one of the world’s leading demographers. Wolfgang has spent his career connecting the dots between education and long-term global change. “I try to bring together what educators do — individual learning, the methods, and the outcomes,” he explained. “And look at what it means at the population level.”

His research shows that increasing education, especially among girls and women, leads to lower fertility rates, improved health outcomes, and better ability to adapt in the face of social and environmental pressures.

Nowhere is this work more urgent than in parts of Africa, where the question of who receives an education is linked not only to individual opportunity but also to public health, social stability, and climate resilience. Expanding girls’ education, Wolfgang argued, is not simply a policy goal. It’s a generational investment with the power to shift demographic and ecological trajectories for decades to come.

And yet, education’s relationship to sustainability is complex

As moderator Professor Iveta Silova noted, “Countries with more education often have a worse impact on climate change.” But while education often leads to higher incomes and higher consumption as a result, it’s not actually education that causes emissions. More educated people at the same income level, Wolfgang explained, tend to make greener choices, suggesting that education can support more sustainable behavior.

In practice, the effects of education are so closely connected that it’s hard — if not impossible — to detach its benefits from its environmental costs. Education, therefore, is not simply a solution or a problem: it’s a force that must be approached with care, asking not only what it enables but also what it amplifies and at what cost.

If we want education to contribute to sustainable futures, we need to foster long-term solutions to our collective well-being and the planet’s health. That means embedding education into the foundations of global sustainability planning — where knowledge is a shared and generative resource.

This is where panelist Professor Kwame Akyeampong’s critique of international development models pushes the conversation further, challenging us to consider the structures of power that decide whose knowledge counts, whose futures are prioritized, and whose voices remain marginalized.

For too long, global education reform has been a one-way delivery system instead of a partnership

That’s because these reforms often overlook the knowledge, priorities, and lived experiences of the communities they aim to serve. Kwame has spent decades working to undo this logic. “My concern,” he warns, “is that we are going to hit 2030 and not meet the targets we set for ourselves. Doing more of the same things will not help.”

Kwame calls for a shift toward inclusive development as a radical overhaul: from intervention to relationship, from targets to trust, from impact to interdependence. In his view, teachers, children, and communities are co-authors of their own futures. Moving beyond deficit narratives that frame African children and teachers as lacking capacity, he draws attention to the knowledge and resources already present in those communities.

Through his research on accelerated learning programs in Ethiopia, Liberia, and Ghana, Kwame shares a model that is deeply connected to the community by drawing on local languages, material environments, and children’s lived realities.

Inspired by the African philosophy of Ubuntu, these programs help students feel valued and in control of their learning while supporting academic and personal growth. They show that when education is based on relationships and real-life context, it becomes a catalyst for transformation.

“If children aren’t learning, what is the point of school?”

This poignant question from panelist Dr Rukmini Banerji shows her own emphasis on relationship, context, and care. Her decades of experience with Pratham Education Foundation in India have redefined how we understand foundational learning. Pratham begins with a simple yet radical premise: learning starts with what children already know and where they are. And Rukmini’s approach rejects the idea of a one-size-fits-all reform.

“We realized that people didn’t see the problem because they didn’t know how to look. So we began with the simplest of questions: Can this child read? Can the child do basic math?” The answers were startling and transformative. Pratham’s ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ model came from this starting point — grouping children by their current level of learning, not their age. It focuses on interactive, playful, and locally relevant ways of teaching. Her work shows that when children learn in familiar environments — using household tools to grasp mathematical concepts or telling stories rooted in their own lives — the outcomes are more effective and last longer.

“Learning has to feel real,” Rukmini noted. “It has to connect with the world the child lives in: the sky, the water, the people around them.”

This is more than a pedogogical change — it’s also a philosophical one. Pratham’s work builds foundations but beyond that the aim is to  prepare learners not just for exams but for life. To navigate uncertainty, shape local futures, and build a sense of self that is grounded in place, language, and connection.

Are we ready to meet the futures of education?

These three powerful ways to think about education open up new possibilities. Each perspective complicates and enriches the others. Together, they challenge the idea that education must choose between scale, justice, or relevance. Instead, they suggest a bigger shift: seeing education as something based on relationships, combining different fields, and being closely connected to the environment, local communities, and care.

The goal isn’t to turn all these different ideas into one answer, but to keep them in balance and at the center of an ongoing conversation — so that the futures of education stay open, diverse, and full of possibility.

——
Professor Iveta Silova
Associate Dean and Professor of Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University 

Professor Kwame Akyeampong
Member, Advisory Committee, Yidan Prize
Professor of International Education and Development, The Open University, UK

Dr Rukmini Banerji
2021 Yidan Prize for Education Development Laureate;
CEO, Pratham Education Foundation 

Professor Wolfgang Lutz
2024 Yidan Prize for Education Research Laureate;
Distinguished Emeritus Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis