In this third millennium, the world is changing rapidly in ways that affect our own, other species, and the entire planet. This situation calls for new ways of thinking, learning, and teaching if humanity–and, indeed, the world–is to survive and thrive.
The present environmental crisis is accompanied by social crises involving oppression, division and war. Meanwhile, education has not adequately responded to the problems of our world, and one of its most important functions, that of helping to develop thoughtful builders of society, is in decline. Indeed, education may even help to create new problems, rooted in an indifference to grave matters of the world, through supposedly politically neutral managerialism, neoliberal globalization, and datafication, including instrumentalization and commercialization. In short, many forms of education need to be completely re-imagined.
Recognising these pressing needs, an international group of educators convened a conference in 2019 in Dharamsala, India, which led to a book Humanizing Education in the 3rd Millennium (Springer, 2022). This event inspired subsequent dialogues across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, Latin America and Oceania. This led to a Global Declaration, entitled Educating Humanity in the Third Millennium. The Declaration identifies key challenges, sets out principles, and suggests imaginative possibilities for education. Its primary concern is the exploration of human responsibility for life including peoples, societies, Nature, and all species on our planet. The Declaration – which calls for nothing less than a new sense of becoming human, rooted in friendship, compassion, and ethics, collectivity, solidarity, democracy, and criticality – has been supported by people, institutions, and prominent figures across the globe.
To explore the themes and principles set out in the Declaration, an international conference entitled Global Forum 2025 will take place on 13-15 February 2025 at Azim Premji University (Bangalore, India). This conference will bring together educators, academics, researchers, practitioners and students to explore a reimagining of formal and informal education and to build a community in that quest.
Diversity of voice and perspective will be an important principle of the Forum, which will have several streams including: Plenary Sessions, Parallel Sections, Roundtable Sessions, Discussion Groups, Workshops, Poster Sessions.In order to honor linguistic diversity, the Global Forum welcomes those who speak Hindi, Kannada, Spanish, French, Arabic, and English. To ensure a thorough review of proposals, while proposals can be submitted in these languages, we ask that an English translation accompanies each submission. The organizers of the Global Forum 2025 recognize the inherent challenges of holding a multilingual convening. Aligned with the mission of the Declaration and the Form, we are working to facilitate as many languages as possible, for the proposal and at the Form itself. The intention is to promote the multiplicity of perspectives that often flow when multiple languages are represented in one space.