The Most Important New Literacy?: Overcoming Seemingly Impossible Obstacles to Make ‘Education for All’ and Related UNESCO Goals and Policies a Reality in the 21st Century

Abstract

Aspirations to achieve UNESCO’s millennium goals by 2015 increasingly seem to many people as an ever remote possibility and even an impossible or utopian dream. With reference to the particular policy commitment of ‘Education For All’, this paper will explore two related questions. Firstly, it poses the question of whether UNESCO is projection of goals such as education for all by 2015 or indeed any date is really an impossible notion? Secondly, if we accept the proposition that a dramatic change in the global human condition should be and can be possible in practice and not just as utopian projection, then what is needed to overcome negative self-fulfilling prophecies of failure to achieve the ‘right direction’ of knowledge and action? In response to these two questions, the paper pursues a thought experiment which in practice as well as in principle refuses to accept the inevitability of the present reality that there is an ever-widening knowledge as well as economic gap between modern, rich and developed countries and traditional, poor and developing societies.