Education for Human Flourishing

The ​​Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is currently facilitating a series of policy dialogues with five countries under the High Performing Systems for Tomorrow initiative of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The dialogues propose that in exploring the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for education, education should support human flourishing.

Led by project director Yuri Belfali and guided by an international expert panel, the OECD now plans to link this work on PISA to other OECD projects on social and emotional skills and future-oriented teaching and learning. This project is part of the knowledge mobilisation and policy dialogue activities in PISA and although the work will focus on secondary-school learners, implications for subsequent life stages will be developed at conceptual level. Audiences will include education system policy-makers (both politicians and administrators) from countries around the world; learners; teachers and institutional leaders; employers and parents. The project would also create links to other international organisations such as UNESCO, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. The project will examine and develop six hypotheses:

1. Global, societal, interpersonal, and intra-personal factors, accelerated by the emergence of AI, suggest that education should be re-conceptualised to enable human flourishing.
2. In an AI world, education for human flourishing should equip people to lead meaningful and worthwhile lives, oriented toward the future and drawing on adaptive expertise, ethical decision-making, and aesthetic perception.
3. Learning environments should support the development of cognition and motivation, as well as nurture capacities for collaboration and connecting disparate concepts.
4. Teaching should balance guided, active, and experiential learning strategies, underpinned by appropriate education technologies, to steer the development of the whole child.
5. Education systems should therefore ensure that all people are fully prepared to lead meaningful, worthwhile lives, oriented toward the future and drawing on adaptive expertise and ethical decision-making and aesthetic perception.
6. Assessment should measure the extent to which (a) all learners are developing the capacities to lead meaningful, worthwhile lives and (b) education systems are developing the capacities to support them.