Towards the Recovery of Education: Reaching for 2030 and Comparative and International Education

Overview & Synopsis

The aim of this paper is to reflect on what the changing context brought about by the Pandemic mean and can mean for the repositioning and reinvigoration of Comparative and International Education in 2023. The paper commences with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Incheon Declaration, as the vision humanity has set for itself for 2030. The paper then maps out the gap between the reality of education globally in 2015, when the goals were set, and the vision for 2030. The intervention of the COVID-19 Pandemic increased that gap. This paper argues that at the same time the Pandemic brought with it an opportunity to redesign education in the world, benefitting from the opportunities offered by technology. The paper further argues that in effecting such a redesign of education in the world, the scholarly field of Comparative and International Education has a pivotal role to play to -- to connect to the theme of this book and of the conference of which this volume is the proceedings of papers presented -- to use education experiences of the Pandemic and post-Pandemic times, to learn to not only recover education to its pre-Pandemic state, but to ensure the recovery has enough momentum to move beyond the pre-Pandemic level, surging towards the goals set for 2030, i.e. building new better education systems. [For the complete Volume 21 proceedings, see ED629259.]