The SDG era is closing soon. On the eve of the UN General Debate, we’re shifting the question from whether education must change to what the world’s learners must now be prepared for.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic no longer describe the floor of what a young person needs to know in order to participate fully in civic and economic life. Information ecosystems reward manipulation, and AI is becoming the default environment for work and learning rather than a supplemental tool. And the hardest problems ahead—climate, health, migration, governance—will not yield to single-discipline thinking. The capabilities that matter most now are civic, digital, scientific, and systems-level, but the institutions that teach them have not caught up yet.
The Education Futures Forum opens Day One of Diplomatic Courier’s UNGA 81 Dialogues, convening policymakers, EdTech founders, youth voices, and multilateral leaders over a working lunch to define the New Foundational Literacies that younger generations will need to navigate and lead our world, as well as what it will take to finance and deliver them at scale.
What to Expect
- Private Signal Salon: Invitation-only rooftop working lunch.
- Lightning Talks: Four back-to-back sessions exploring:
- The Foundations We Cannot Afford to Lose | Dr. Asyia Kazmi
- The Oldest New Literacy: Building Systems Thinking for Complex Futures | Jane Mann
- AI-Powered Learning: Teach Them to Think. Then Let Them Build. | Dr. Vicki Phillips
- The Generation You’ve Been Speaking For | Zoya Kalinsky
- Roundtable Dialogue: Facilitated discussion converting the talks into actionable signals.
- Education Statement of Signals: Developed together, read aloud, and captured live for the creation of an UNGA 81 Signal Brief to be published and distributed at Davos 2027.
Who Is in the Room
- Senior Officials: Leaders setting national learning agendas.
- Founders & Investors: Builders of the tools reshaping how learning happens.
- Multilateral Leaders: UN agency and development bank officials carrying education mandates.
- Philanthropic Funders: Foundations financing the transition to new literacies.
Part of a Larger Architecture
This Forum is the New York node of Diplomatic Courier’s 2026 Signal Salon series on human capability. In Washington, DC, we introduced the New Foundational Literacies framework and the Acceleration Readiness Index on the margins of the IMF–World Bank Spring Meetings. During the G7 Summit in June, our Paris Signal Salon explored how we can build readiness and who pays the cost if we fail to. In New York, we query what the world will commit to next.
The 20th century built infrastructure for industrial economies. The 21st must build infrastructure for human capability. At our UNGA 81 Dialogues, the education conversation stops diagnosing and starts committing.
