International Day of Education 2025: Delivering on our promise

The global push to make schooling possible for a large number of children has been remarkably successful. Due to coordinated policy pressures, even some of the poorest countries of the world have found a way of carving out budget to make this happen, and as a result, school enrollment numbers have been encouraging.

Parents too have foregone income and labor contribution from their children in the hope that this would be their family’ s path out of poverty. This was a remarkable promise to humanity, one that raised hopes and aspirations globally. However, those who had long been working in this space knew that although we should laud this achievement, a bigger question awaited us post celebration:

What will children find once they arrive at school?

The answer, at least from the perspective of schools across the Global South, has been far less encouraging. We know that large numbers of children are not actually learning at school, and many parents are beginning to lose patience; they are being asked to forgo current gain for the promise of uncertain prospects. Children are being promised a better future, yet many are emerging without a discernable change in the possibilities ahead of them.

In response to this crisis, many turned their attention to investing in the quality of education. They focused on things like classroom sizes, teacher-to-student ratios, curriculum and teaching. These are critical investments, and yet an important component is missing from this conversation.

When we talked to children at schools, a key theme emerged across diverse contexts. Many children felt that they were being contained at school, their brain being numbed into rote learning under persistent threat of punishment and sanctions. They were denied opportunities to participate in decisions that mattered to them. They were denied creative outlets for self-expression. An emphasis on compliant behavior and passing tests failed to engage their imagination. Their school failed to inspire a belief in larger possibilities. For far too many, their experience of school was dehumanizing, and many framed this as violence against children.

On this global day to commemorate our collective aspirations for education, the Coalition for Good Schools calls for investment in preventing violence against children in and through schools. To deliver on our collective promise of a just and vibrant future for every child and their families, we need schools that not only focus on measurable learning outcomes such as numeracy and literacy – crucial as they are – but also on children’s experience of school.

We call on responses that aim to shift norms and transform the central structure of adult-child relationships, from one invested in controlling the child, to ones aimed at fostering the child’s development by curating a safe and dignified experience of school.