Future of education

 

We have passed the midpoint of UN Sustainable Development Goals facing a stark reality, the world is falling short of meeting most of the goals by 2030. SDG4 is all about ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all. And yet with the current trends, only six in ten young people will be finishing secondary school in 2030. 

Geopolitical tensions and conflicts contribute significantly to this setback, affecting a quarter of the global population. Such conflicts disrupt education for an entire generation. In this context, education becomes not just a personal transformational tool but a key for sustainable peacebuilding and breaking cycles of inequality. UNESCO research indicates that global poverty could be cut in half if every young person completed secondary school.

I have devoted the past decade to fighting educational inequality and one thing continues to baffle me. In our many interventions to improve equity in education, we miss out on the value of the most important person - the learner. We consider them passive beneficiaries and do not realize what an important role they play as part of the solution.

Walk into any classroom and I can assure you that there will be students who will be ready to help others who didn’t fully understand the concept being taught. There will be a tradition of handing down notes and advice from the older students to the younger. There will be peer tutoring initiatives, study groups, and mentorship sessions covering everything from academic topics to life skills. Across generations, these practices persist. Young people are adaptive, they’re resilient and they build solutions when the system doesn't serve them. 

I started Notes, a student’s notes blog, at 16. It has transformed into a community-powered learning platform that has reached the lives of five million in over 190 countries. In this year alone, over 800,000 new students and educators used it.

We are laser focused on ensuring that every young person has an even playing field when they enter high-stakes exams. And our approach centers on empowering the learner.

Our open personalized learning platform allows any student to benefit from free, high-quality resources that align precisely with the curriculum they are completing at school or independently. But it is unique in that every single resource, from notes and videos to quizzes, is created by a high-achieving student and is peer-reviewed. The result is that 91 percent of our learners are more confident entering exams.