Answer to Question #208588 in English for Emmanuel Egbuagha

Question

Write an essay in which you:

1. describe the sustainable development goal of education.

2. explain why this goal is so important and central to achieving the other goals.

3. discuss the barriers to education that could delay the achievement of this goal.

Include references to your answers

Answer 1

Education enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty. Over the past decade, major progress was made towards increasing access to education and school enrollment rates at all levels, particularly for girls. Nevertheless, about 260 million children were still out of school in 2018 — nearly one-fifth of the global population in that age group. And more than half of all children and adolescents worldwide are not meeting minimum proficiency standards in reading and mathematics. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, a majority of countries announced the temporary closure of schools, impacting more than 91 percent of students worldwide. By April 2020, close to 1.6 billion children and youth were out of school. And nearly 369 million children who rely on school meals needed to look to other sources for daily nutrition. Never before have so many children been out of school at the same time, disrupting learning and upending lives, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized. The global pandemic has far-reaching consequences that may jeopardize hard-won gains made in improving global education.

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) covers the goals of education in the 2030 Agenda. SDG 4 is aimed at achieving equal as well as inclusive quality education to every member of the society. There is a clear path and outline that was made in November of 2015 to guide governments as well as partners on the turning of their commitments into actions. The arm of the United Nations that is responsible for the coordination of the international community in the achievement of the goals through monitoring, partnerships as well as capacity developments is UNESCO.

This sustainable development goal of education is very important since all the other goals of the 2030 Agenda require empowerment from education. This empowerment is in terms of skills, knowledge as well as values that aid in dignity living as well as contributions to community development.

The major challenge inhibiting achievement of this is poverty. There are at least 262 million children as well as youth who are not attending school as a result of poverty. About 75 million adults are also poor resulting in further poverty as well as marginalization. Other factors inhibiting education include cultural and racial segregation as well as lack of good infrastructure. If these are effectively done away with, the sustainable development goals of 2030 will become reality.

References. 

Wiek, A., Bernstein, M. J., Foley, R. W., Cohen, M., Forrest, N., Kuzdas, C., ... & Keeler, L. W. (2015). Operationalizing competencies in higher education for sustainable development. In Routledge handbook of higher education for sustainable development (pp. 265-284). Routledge.

Arbuthnott, K. D. (2009). Education for sustainable development beyond attitude change. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Velazquez, L. E., Munguia, N. E., & Romo, M. A. (1999). Education for sustainable development: the engineer of the 21st century. European Journal of Engineering Education, 24(4), 359-370.

Hoveskog, M., Halila, F., Mattsson, M., Upward, A., & Karlsson, N. (2018). Education for Sustainable Development: Business modeling for flourishing. Journal of Cleaner Production, 172, 4383-4396.

Svanström, M., Lozano‐García, F. J., & Rowe, D. (2008). Learning outcomes for sustainable development in higher education. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education.