Resilient Agile Education for Lifelong Learning Post-Pandemic to Meet the United Nations Sustainability Goals

Abstract

The World Health Organization officially classified COVID-19 as a pandemic in early March 2020. Extraordinary security measures, health restrictions, and social isolation left hardly any aspect of daily life untouched. One area that underwent major changes was education, whose cornerstones and foundations were challenged as schools and universities around the world were forced to close their doors to prevent the spread of the virus. In this article, the reasons resilience and agility are critical to achieving social justice, human rights, and the United Nations Sustainability goals (SDG) in the post-pandemic era are studied. It is also argued that the role of education needs to be redesigned to be resilient and agile and to ensure lifelong learning. In addition, a post-pandemic quality agenda is the focus of the article. Some of the emerging quality dimensions are empathy, satisfaction, well-being, the social dimensions of learning, and their impact at the nano, micro, meso, and macro levels. This article was prepared as part of a systematic literature review based mainly on official reports from organizations working in this field worldwide. The author selected examples from ongoing discourse and debate about the challenges in this field in addition to examples from the author’s research, experiences, and perspectives. In summary, questions regarding educational landscapes may be the same, but in the context of post-pandemic and resilient agile education for lifelong learning to meet the SDGs and the new social contract for education, the answers to the questions of why, who, when, what, and at what levels will be different. It is time not just to talk, but to act. Each of us can and must commit to the new social contract. It is time to collectively reimagine our futures to include the ecosystem of education in all learning environments, i.e., formal, non-formal, and informal, and to value resilient, agile, seamless, and rhizomatic learning in the context of lifelong learning.