Ei-iE

In a powerful address at the Education International 10th World Congress, Susan Hopgood, President of Education International, highlighted the urgent need to fully fund public education and support the teaching profession in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking to twelve hundred unionists from over 150 countries, Hopgood emphasized the critical role of educators and their unions to address the unprecedented challenges faced by the education sector.

The impact of COVID-19 on education

Reflecting on the last congress held in Bangkok in 2019, Hopgood noted the significant disruptions caused by the pandemic. “We faced the crisis of 1.6 billion learners directly affected by the largest disruption of education systems in history,” she said. The pandemic exacerbated existing issues, including a global teacher shortage of 44 million and declining national education budgets.

A global education crisis

Hopgood painted a stark picture of the current state of education, citing UNESCO’s statistics that 98 million children are out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa. Economic hardships and gender discrimination have reversed early 21st-century gains in girls’ education. “Today, hundreds of millions remain excluded from education,” she stated, underscoring the need for immediate action.

Historic recommendations for change

In response to these challenges, UN Secretary General António Guterres established a High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession. The “historic” panel’s recommendations, released earlier this year, call for long-term funding for well-qualified teachers, competitive salaries, and the end of precarious employment. They also support collective bargaining and social dialogue to place teachers at the heart of decision-making.

“The UN put the teaching profession front and centre as the critical element in addressing the education crisis,” Hopgood remarked. “This is a strong recognition and respect for the teaching profession, again, made possible because of our campaigning on a global scale.”

The policies at the heart of EI’s advocacy on critical issues like the teacher shortage, education financing, collective bargaining and other forms of social dialogue, education technology, refugees, child labour and more have been set as an active agenda for coordinated international action that matches our own, Hopgood added.

The role of unions in shaping the future

Hopgood emphasized the importance of unions in advocating for educational reforms. “Our status is in turn a challenge for us to engage more intensively in policy and political decision-making,” she said. She called for collective action to defend the common good and advance a vision of education that promotes human rights, sustainability, and democracy: “The education crisis is no less a global crisis of the commons; testing both the ability of governments through the public sector to maintain and advance the public good and the capacity of the people to hold those governments democratically accountable for their actions.”

Addressing economic inequality

Highlighting the economic challenges faced by many countries, Hopgood criticized the lack of political will to support public education. “Some 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt interest payments than on education or health,” she noted. She called for accountability from governments and corporations to ensure adequate funding for education.

She reminded that, “in 2023, it was reported that education system resources had fallen in 65 percent of low- and middle-income countries and 33 percent of upper-middle and high-income countries since the start of the pandemic.

She was also adamant that “clearing the path forward from here is very clearly union work. You will hear more about what is being done and what we can all do through EI’s Go Public! Fund Education campaign to make governments accountable for ending the teacher shortage and funding quality public education.”

The climate crisis and education

Hopgood also addressed the impact of climate change on education, citing the World Meteorological Organization’s warning of an 80 percent chance of breaching 1.5°C of warming in the next five years. She stressed the need for education systems that promote scientific literacy and environmental stewardship.

She also underlined that a study in 2023 of the world’s 500 biggest companies by market value found that just 22 percent are aligned with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, while the rest have done almost nothing in the past five years to cut pollution. The study said large companies are either more likely to contribute to extreme levels of warming or are not disclosing their greenhouse gas emissions at all.

Citing UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres who likened fossil fuel companies to a sort of mafia, calling them the “godfathers of the climate crisis,” raking in record profits and feasting off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies, she insisted that “blazing the path forward is union work, some of it underway in EI’s Teach for the Planet campaign. And the public is with us. A recent survey by Gallup of 130,000 people in 125 countries found that 89 percent want stronger climate action by governments. Businesses that operate free of regulation and impinge on the public good need to be held accountable.”

The promise and perils of technology

While acknowledging the potential of technology to democratize education, Hopgood warned against unregulated and untested educational technologies. “Education technology solutions that are teacher-free are always designed for other people’s children,” she cautioned, advocating for responsible and equitable deployment of technology in education.

She said there is a reality about technology that cannot be ignored: “The tech industry is again doing what it is designed to do; its’ one role – to maximize profits.”

However, the role of education unionists is very different: “We need to think about maximising education systems for the benefit of our students. Our position is straightforward: Education technology that is designed responsibly and deployed equitably, focused on complementing and enhancing the role of educators in guiding and inspiring learners can be a profound component of education systems.”

A call for global solidarity

In closing, Hopgood called for global solidarity among educators and unions. “Through our unions, we define the notion of quality public education and the essential conditions of society to make it available to every student everywhere,” she declared. She urged the assembly to continue their efforts in advancing education and defending democracy.

She went on mentioning the words of Maria Ressa, the Filipina journalist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against dictatorship and the weaponization of disinformation who addressed the last EI Congress in 2019: “The end goal of disinformation is chaos and the breaking down of trust. If you don’t have the right information, you can’t act. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all these, you can’t have shared reality, the rule of law, and democracy to deal with things like climate change.”

She continued: “I would add one more thing: without teachers and their unions, you can’t have any of this, truth, trust, or democracy. it's one thing to have knowledge, it's another thing to have wisdom and pedagogy and the ability to apply it ethically and morally to the benefit of many. The experience of education is more than just the delivery of content. Educational settings are where we build societies, and we build democracies. As individuals, we are underpaid and overworked and, yes, often overwhelmed, but through our unions and our allies we are never outnumbered. Through our unions, we define the notion of quality public education and the essential conditions of society to make it available to every student everywhere. Through our unions, we are elevating our profession into the ranks of leadership for the critical fights ahead of us.”

“At this intersection, there is no choice. Our direction is set. The world counts on us. We cannot be stopped. We will not be stopped,” Hopgood confidently concluded.

Over the next days, delegates will continue to work towards growing their unions, elevating their professions and defending democracy.

Opening Remarks of Susan Hopgood, President, Education International

EI Tenth World Congress | Buenos Aires, July 29, 2024

Thank you for that introduction, David.

To the delegates, EI officers and Executive Board, our hosting member organisations, honourable government officials, colleagues and friends. Welcome to the Tenth World Congress of Education International.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional inhabitants of this land we are meeting on today and pay my respects to their elders both past and present and to extend that respect to all First Nations Peoples here today.

Colleagues, what a beautiful view I have from here. Twelve hundred unionists from more than 150 countries, from every region in the world.

It's been a delight to be walking these halls, attending pre-Congress events, catching up with so many of you, familiar faces, and new faces. I look forward to meeting many more of you for the first time in the coming days.

The last time we were together, in Bangkok in 2019, before Covid, we vowed to Lead Our Profession in the early hopeful years of the Sustainable Development Goals.

We had come to that point in time by mobilising ourselves in a global campaign to make sure the SDGs included free, quality public education for every student everywhere. Our organisations and millions of members joined together in a two-year global campaign to make it the biggest campaign in EI history.

When the Covid pandemic hit, we were at a crossroads with no clearly defined path forward. Educators, where we could, did not wait for broken systems to issue instructions. We asserted ourselves in collaborative ways. As we faced the crisis of 1.6 billion learners directly affected by the largest disruption of education systems in history, waiting and watching was not a choice. We took the lead.

We did our best to hold steady, but when Covid was over, the severity of the education crisis in its wake was clear.

With a teacher shortage of 44 million, and national education budgets in freefall, any small hope that the breathtaking ambitions of the United Nations education goal could be realized was all but gone; victim to what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called “a hammer blow” by the pandemic.

Today, hundreds of millions remain excluded from education. Millions more don’t have learning opportunities because of inadequate environments, untrained personnel, and a lack of educational resources.

According to UNESCO, 98 million children are out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa. Even some of the hopeful gains in the early 21st century for girls’ attendance at school have been reversed by economic hardship and legacy gender discrimination.

These harsh realities moved Secretary General Guterres toward a bold effort to transform education by establishing a High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession.

The recommendations of the Panel, released earlier this year, are historic.

Clearly your work, the work of EI, its Secretariat and member organisations has been very specifically recognised by the UN as vitally important to transforming education. The policies at the heart of EI’s advocacy on critical issues like the teacher shortage, education financing, collective bargaining and other forms of social dialogue, education technology, refugees, child labour and more have been set as an active agenda for coordinated international action that matches our own.

In brief, the Panel concluded that long-term funding for well-qualified and well-supported teachers is an investment in the quality and sustainability of education systems.

Ensuring competitive salaries for teachers, attracting and retaining quality educators, addressing the overwhelming workloads facing teachers, were all held to be priorities.

There was a clear call to end precarious employment in all its forms, support collective bargaining and social dialogue to place teachers at the heart of decision-making, and give them an active role in strengthening education systems.

Raising the status of the teaching profession and ensuring that every child has access to a qualified teacher was deemed crucial, as was a re-evaluation of the roles played by International Financing Institutions that have undermined teaching and learning by demanding countries constrain their public sector wage investments.

The UN put the teaching profession front and centre as the critical element in addressing the education crisis.

This is a strong recognition and respect for the teaching profession, again, made possible because of our campaigning on a global scale.

In our fourth decade as a federation, we have built a combination of expertise and reputation to be a force not only for education but for the values of human rights, sustainability, and democracy around the world. We know we have a significant role in building the sustainable world we want and the world needs.

But colleagues, our status is in turn a challenge for us to engage more intensively in policy and political decision-making with our eyes wide open.

We see the world as it is, war, climate change, economic downturn, attacks on democracy, increased autocracies, and more. The education crisis isn’t occurring in a vacuum. Progress must be fought for in the most challenging period of our lifetimes and earned against opponents with far greater resources than we have.

At this new crossroads, where the direction the world takes to address the education crisis will be set, we are called upon to defend the common good, advance our vision in concert and coalition with allies, and play an outsize role in guaranteeing the future of knowledge and the fate of truth and fact.

The education crisis is no less a global crisis of the commons; testing both the ability of governments through the public sector to maintain and advance the public good and the capacity of the people to hold those governments democratically accountable for their actions.

Secretary General Guterres noted these elements very specifically as critical to transforming education. He said that at a time of rampant misinformation, climate denial and attacks on human rights, there is a critical need for education systems that QUOTE “distinguish fact from conspiracy, instill respect for science, and celebrate humanity in all its diversity” ENDQUOTE.

We need to be fully aware of the challenge we have taken on to move education systems and ministries and even entire nations onto a path of accountability.

It begins by telling the truth, which is fundamental to education and democracy, and the foundation of our profession. We believe, the path forward globally starts by clearly understanding public resources.

The lack of commitment by governments to adequately support the common good, including education, health, other public services, is too familiar. And it’s not about the lack of money or resources, it's about the lack of political will.

Some 3.3 billion people – almost half of humanity – live in countries that spend more on debt interest payments than on education or health. In many cases, the loans are contingent on starving spending on the public sector, including workers’ pay.

Here in Argentina, our host country, the extremist executive curries favour with international financial institutions by threatening the economic security of millions, while driving up poverty and attempting to drive out and destroy the union movement.

To our colleagues in Argentina in this room and around this nation – Solidarity Brothers and Sisters. Let me assure you, we are shoulder to shoulder with you. The attacks on you are attacks on all of us.

Across the world, billions of dollars in uncollected taxes prevent responsible investment in the public good. According to studies by the Tax Justice Network, over the next 10 years, countries are on course to lose nearly five trillion dollars to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals sheltering their tax debts.

Tax havens, profit shifting, asset hiding, and underreporting directly affect essential public services and make inequality worse.

There’s also a fundamental erosion of public trust as wealthy individuals and corporations not paying their fair share of taxes face little or no accountability.

It is certainly not news to you that the resources necessary for the public sector to meet the fundamental needs of the people are declining. But the numbers remain especially discouraging when it comes to education.

In 2023, it was reported that education system resources had fallen in 65 percent of low- and middle-income countries and 33 percent of upper-middle and high-income countries since the start of the pandemic.

Colleagues, clearing the path forward from here is very clearly union work. You will hear more about what is being done and what we can all do through EI’s Go Public! Fund Education campaign to make governments accountable for ending the teacher shortage and funding quality public education.

Our current economic system is managed for the few, with the true costs landing unfairly on the backs of working people. Exposing corporate welfare and greed and demanding accountability from government is essential for the resources needed for quality education, including teacher pay.

More broadly, businesses and enterprises should also be held accountable for the social and ecological costs of their actions. Industries extract resources and generate pollution, often with questionable labour practices, but society as a whole is left to deal with the environmental damage, health problems, and social unrest.

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization said there is an 80 percent chance the planet will breach 1.5C in warming above pre-industrial times in at least one of the next five calendar years. Remember, governments agreed in the 2015 Paris climate pact to restrain the global temperatures rise to avoid catastrophic heatwaves, floods, droughts, and other impacts.

Recall also the disparate effects of the climate crisis on vulnerable populations that have been dealing with this for years.

Twenty years ago, in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, an Oxfam report found that surviving men outnumbered women by almost 3 to one in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India. Education Cannot Wait reports that over the past 10 years, an estimated 42 million crisis-affected children in Sub-Saharan Africa have faced climate shocks amplified by climate change. In 2023, Cyclone Freddy destroyed approximately 1,500 classrooms, disrupting learning for half a million students, and forcing 1.4 million people on the move across six countries.

The questions are, where is the money and where are the resources?

Because, colleagues, there is always money, there are always resources. My own country of Australia, for example, spends more on fossil fuel subsidies than on education.

A study last year of the world’s 500 biggest companies by market value found that just 22 percent are aligned with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming, while the rest have done almost nothing in the past five years to cut pollution. The study said large companies are either more likely to contribute to extreme levels of warming or are not disclosing their greenhouse gas emissions at all.

One thing that is clearly being disclosed and proudly, is the skyrocketing profits that fossil fuel corporations in the US, EU and Australia have taken as the planet superheats.

The Secretary General has likened fossil fuel companies to a sort of mafia. He called them the “godfathers of the climate crisis,” raking in record profits and feasting off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies. He said news and tech media that take advertising money from this cabal are enabling “planetary destruction.”

Again colleagues, blazing the path forward is union work, some of it underway in EI’s Teach for the Planet campaign. And the public is with us. A recent survey by Gallup of 130,000 people in 125 countries found that 89 percent want stronger climate action by governments. Businesses that operate free of regulation and impinge on the public good need to be held accountable.

Lack of accountability is not a distant political issue, it’s in many of our classrooms today in the form of education technology and artificial intelligence that are moving toward stages of adoption and adaptation across the globe.

AI tools are in many of our classrooms right now. Teachers aren’t waiting on rules or policies from paralysed governments, and neither are students. If the early days of Covid offer any guidance – and I think they should – most teachers are very hard at work, adapting the tools they can find, sharing what works with their colleagues and navigating the various forms of introduction to their students.

The prospects are exciting. Technology could be used to democratise access to learning, the tools of future-ready competency like AI could expand access to education beyond traditional classrooms, give learners new access to tools and resources and credentialing, and open a new era in collaboration and personalised learning.

But there is a reality about technology that cannot be ignored.

Right now, in the mostly pre-AI world at scale, education technology remains largely untested, unregulated, and unproven. School systems in many of our nations – with no input from teachers – have sent tens of billions of dollars to technology companies, even though technology company advocates themselves have expressed alarm about the evidence-free foundation of their businesses.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence don’t change this reality. Tech companies are moving as fast as they can to integrate AI into the information mainstream, adding AI functionality to a variety of consumer products and spending billions to compete with each other.

The tech industry is again doing what it is designed to do; its’ one role – to maximize profits.

Of course, that’s very different than our role. We need to think about maximising education systems for the benefit of our students. Our position is straightforward: Education technology that is designed responsibly and deployed equitably, focused on complementing and enhancing the role of educators in guiding and inspiring learners can be a profound component of education systems.

But in practice and in policy, this cannot be left to technology companies any more than we leave public health decisions to tobacco companies or climate policies to the “godfathers” Secretary General Guterres described – the fossil fuel cartels.

This is our responsibility. This is union work.

We need to demand responsive governments and regulation with teeth, we need a robust public sector with expertise.

We need a way to tell if information is true and images are real. More than accountability, we need culpability for the algorithms of social media that grow hate, shame, and dysphoric behaviours, specifically those calibrated to target young people and especially our girls.

We need platforms to be put on notice that elevating and spreading hate and misinformation gets them fined, sanctioned, and even shut down.

Instead, the tech insiders are racing ahead. One set of executives led a very public resignation from a leading AI company just a few months ago, saying it fostered, QUOTE “a culture of recklessness and secrecy.” ENDQUOTE.

What are these whistle-blowers asking for? Said one: “There needs to be some sort of democratically accountable, transparent governance structure in charge of this process.”

Again, accountability. Demanding that government legislate, regulate, and prosecute to protect the public good.

Because the divide that is coming with these new tools is not just a digital divide. It’s economic, it's social, it's racial, it's historical. Some nations will provide the means for teachers to be in on the design stage of these tools, to work with parents and students on boundaries, using them effectively.

Other countries might instead have chatbots in front of classes and the discussions will not be about design and efficacy, they will be about mitigating impact.

Instead of relationships that involve teachers, maybe it will be transactions involving machines? Maybe the machines can be programmed to smile.

We know one thing – education technology solutions that are teacher-free are always designed for other people’s children. The humans behind these schemes would never subject their own children to such scenarios.

We can work on the guardrails and guidelines, and we have, but if technology is something that is done to us as citizens and not with us and on behalf of us, then the decisions will be made by money and markets.

This clearly is union work, right now in 2024 and urgently in this decade.

Of course, 2024 is a critical year for another, perhaps more obvious reason. It’s a year when countries that represent half the world’s population and 60 percent of global GDP hold elections. At the halfway point in the year, right-wing forces have made strong showings at the polls.

Already, more than 70 percent of the world lives under some aspect of autocratic rule. Though representative democracy remains a favorite system of governance around the globe, its appeal is slipping, according to a survey of 24 democratic countries released last month.

This is not mere apathy.

The motivation to vote and efforts to organise to hold governments accountable require an important degree of faith that voting counts, that institutions are sound, and that mobilisation of the public can change the course of official actions.

Most of us for many years now have taken on the hard work of building and enabling of legislation and law. Now we face an active disabling of institutions, not only denial of history and science, but the active crippling and corruption of legal systems including the courts.

Our opponents are active and technology companies are at their side, making it easier than ever to make and spread disinformation. From climate denial to vaccine bashing to body-shaming and normalisation of fascists, this amplification of fear and anger and the stoking of hatred and dehumanisation of certain groups is a profit model, a feature, not a bug.

The World Economic Forum’s 2024 risks report stated, “A wave of artificial intelligence-driven misinformation and disinformation that could influence key looming elections poses the biggest short-term threat to the global economy.”

The report said politics could be disrupted by the spread of false information, potentially leading to riots, strikes and crackdowns on dissent from governments, testing even the most robust democracies and strengthening the hands of leaders with authoritarian leanings.

Many of you know Maria Ressa, who addressed us in Bangkok in 2019. She is the Filipina journalist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work against dictatorship and the weaponization of disinformation supercharged by platforms such as Facebook. She said recently that the end goal of disinformation is chaos and the breaking down of trust. If you don’t have the right information, you can’t act.

Without facts, she said, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all these, you can’t have shared reality, the rule of law, and democracy to deal with things like climate change.

I would add one more thing: without teachers and their unions, you can’t have any of this, truth, trust, or democracy.

it's one thing to have knowledge, it's another thing to have wisdom and pedagogy and the ability to apply it ethically and morally to the benefit of many. The experience of education is more than just the delivery of content.

Educational settings are where we build societies, and we build democracies …

… the place where different viewpoints are heard, and scientific methods are learned and developed …

… the place where people of different religions and identities can come together, and their rights can be respected.

Education is the weaving together of a fact-based narrative about who we are and more importantly, who we want to be. It is intrinsically inclusive, defined by its fundamental contribution to the common good and its role in creating equity.

But none of this is inevitable. And no part of society is untouched by its own legacy, including our profession and our unions. Often, legacy behaviours and policies must be overcome for us to move forward.

I began teaching and joined the union at a time of blatant discrimination. Superannuation was denied to me when I married, because married women were ineligible to belong to the fund.

My principal once asked me when I applied for a position with more responsibilities – was I planning on having a baby. The message was clear and common: ‘We're not going to waste our time giving you a position if you're going to go off and have a baby.’

Today sexism and racism and other forms of discrimination are often not so obvious. But they of course exist in our profession as in all others.

But let’s put this in context. Consider what my predecessors faced. EI’s founding President Mary Hatwood Futrell was forbidden by law to teach white students and prevented by male leaders from even speaking in union meetings. Thulas Nxesi from South Africa was a student activist, expelled from school frequently for organising against the dehumanising policies of apartheid.

Race and gender discrimination is still a scourge of many hearts and institutions. Equity and inclusion are rarely given. They are fought for and won and then fought for again.

Education International’s own quadrennial survey on Gender Equality & Equity within educational unions shows real progress made, including strong gains in membership diversity and the growing use of gender equality policies.

But at the same time, the report notes minimal progress in achieving gender parity in the leadership ranks of many unions.

Our steps forward down the path of equity bring us continually to a crossroads and new challenges, new decisions; to keep on the same path or seek a new direction.

I went to university to be a teacher more than a half-century ago. Shortly after, I was invited to join a committee of my union, a committee dealing with women’s issues.

I didn’t come to our profession for the purpose of joining my union. But I did. Mary Futrell didn’t become a high-school business teacher and join her union to integrate public schools in her state in the US, but she and her colleagues did just that. None of you chose your profession so that you could participate in World Congress and help mount a global campaign to grow our unions, elevate the profession and defend democracy.

But here you are, hundreds of you, from around the world, advancing that work.

We came to teach. We came to work in education. We came to do our jobs. But through our unions, we came to a crossroads both personal and professional and we chose a path to confront challenges, including those much bigger than ourselves.

As individuals, we are underpaid and overworked and, yes, often overwhelmed, but through our unions and our allies we are never outnumbered.

Through our unions, we define the notion of quality public education and the essential conditions of society to make it available to every student everywhere.

Through our unions, we are elevating our profession into the ranks of leadership for the critical fights ahead of us.

Our 373 member organisations in 180 countries and territories, representing 32 million members are at yet another crossroads.

At this intersection, there is no choice.

Our direction is set.

The world counts on us.

We cannot be stopped.

We will not be stopped.

Thank you.