The fourth global goal is to ensure equitable quality education worldwide once the SDGs are due in 2030. While reaching this goal includes overcoming numerous challenges, the global community is on a good path to improving learning opportunities around the world and enabling a large part of humanity to enjoy high standards of eduction.
Video Transcript
The fourth Sustainable Development Goal is concerned with “ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.”
Quality education is key in ensuring that the next generations have the tools to improve their conditions and to meet the sustainability goals by 2030.
The perhaps obvious targets of SDG 4 are to increase the participation rate of children and young people in all stages of education. SDG 4 aims to increase access to early childhood development care, like preschool or daycare, so that children are prepared to enter primary school. Once in primary school, it is ideal that children stay in education for as long as possible, meaning that one should hope to see a high retention rate from kindergarten to the end of primary school, and from primary school to the end of secondary school.
SDG 4 also hopes to encourage adults to continue their education into university, or vocational or technical schools, to hone their skills, whatever they may be, so that they can better fulfill their societal role; increasing the proportion of adults that have some form or tertiary education will also help increase the skill level. A more humble goal, but one that is no easier to achieve, the UN hopes to have every adult literate by 2030. Hopefully, education can come to be an equalizing factor and reduce disadvantages worldwide.
It should go without saying that all of the aims are to apply to both boys and girls equally, although it shall require considerably more work to improve the conditions of girls’ education. To this day, girls are still denied access to education in parts of the world like Nigeria and Pakistan, who account for a combined 8 million of the 30 million girls out of school worldwide.
Another aim of SDG 4 is just to make education more accessible in general for everyone regardless of gender, socio-economic background, and especially accessible for those that are the most vulnerable, like indeginous peoples and those with disabilities.
To accomplish these goals, the UN has considered what steps need to be taken. First and foremost, the global community needs to act to “build and upgrade education facilities that are child, disability and gender sensitive and provide safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all,” meaning that schools should be easily accessible, have electricity and access to educational resources as well as running water and sanitary facilities.
These well-equipped schools should also be managed by equally well-prepared teachers, which means organising more and better teacher training programs, especially in least developed countries.
A final way of supporting pupils in need would be to increase the number of scholarships awarded to students, particularly those from least developed countries with a focus on those studying STEM subjects and working towards sustainability.
Really, the most important goal that all of SDG 4 is striving towards is a humanity that is educated on daily sustainability, human rights, gender equality, notions of non-violence, as well as what it means to be a global citizen. As with many of the SDGs, efforts need to be more concentrated if we can even hope to meet the goals. 260 million school-aged children are still not regularly in the classroom and over 600 million children fail to meet minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Illiteracy is still quite high, and there is still a noticeable discrepancy in the quality of facilities and education in places like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa as compared to the more developed countries.
Even so, with a decade still ahead, there is still a chance that our goals for education may be realised.