Our Vision
The LearningPlanet Festival is a place to share, connect and celebrate. As Ibrahima Guimba Saidou states, "it is a matter of togetherness (...) We need to focus on converging, on pulling our resources together and working as one: it's really about having one team. We only have one planet, so we need to all focus on making this planet a better place to live”. To build convergence, to allow collective intelligence, we need to gather and discuss. This is the first raison d’être of the Festival: bringing more and more education pioneers together in the same space - whether physical or and/or virtual - to share experiences and ideas, to scale successful experiments and proven methods, to spread learnings and dreams beyond boundaries. Once connected, the changemakers are the backbone of a global ecosystem of support and collaboration between local players over the long term.
The Festival also has the ambitious aim of contributing to build a new understanding of what education is, one that is more collective and collaborative, and less competitive. The new narratives that are being shared at the LearningPlanet Festival provide a broader picture that expands learning to non-traditional disciplines, alternative methodologies and experimental approaches. Our common purpose is to transform initiatives into sustainable systems open and available for all. Olivier Bréchard sums it up: our vision is “to respond collectively to the complex issues raised by the transition, to support youth in their commitment and the education system in its transformation.”
Valerie Hannon asserts it bluntly: “We have recognised that we are wrecking our planet and that we cannot thrive if our planet does not. If we fry the planet, we are toasted.” Therefore, the goal of this radical transformation of education that drives us at the Festival and our 300+ partners around the world is peace, inclusivity, health and well-being for all, enforceable rights for the youth and sustainability for the planet.
Just over the weekend Almaaz and I were part of a model UN conference hosted by the LearningPlanet, it’s nice to interact with people from all over the world! Only possible due to LearningPlanet and Youth Council - Awesome experience
Karan Chakravarthy
LearningPlanet Festival 2022
“I love the fact that the Festival stayed true to its aim; it was truly a festival for everyone.”
A youth speaker at The Dais gamechanger awards Session
LearningPlanet Festival 2022
“It's easy for the things that we together are promoting (transformation of education, localization, situatedness, interconnections, relations) to become clichés, and your session did a great job avoiding this - through excellent speakers providing impressive examples in a deeply felt way. Thank you very much!”
Alexander Leicht
LearningPlanet Festival 2022
Read more about the Festival
Valerie Hannon
Co-Chair, Global Education Leaders Partnership
I think the learning planet idea is a really interesting and energizing one: it brings together some big ideas in a neat little nutshell. For me, what it brings into the frame is that when we used to talk about learning, it was very much on individual terms: being successful, getting a career, the idea of success was very individual and individuated. Sometimes, people would talk about prosperous societies by which they usually meant richer societies and I think, in the last five years, we've started to get closer in focus about the way we've been living our lives, how societies have been about consumerism, about extractive capitalism. We have recognized that we are wrecking our planet and that we cannot thrive if our planet does not. If we fry the planet, we are toasted.
The idea about learning now (and this is the subject of my recent book which is called Thrive) has to be seen not just at the individual level - getting qualifications, getting a better job - but thriving at four levels. Secondly, at the planetary level: our contribution to that thriving as societies and communities shall be as prosperous ones, indeed but with green economies, with sustainable economies, equitably, with social justice. Thirdly, thriving at the interpersonal level with relationships which are healthy and respectful and loving. Because that's what makes great lives. And then finally, thriving at the intra-personal level, within yourself as an individual.
These four levels of thriving are somehow caught in this idea of the learning planet and we need to find new ways of talking about these things that capture people's attention. The idea you are putting forth, of how we celebrate a learning planet, will go some way towards doing that.
I think it is really really essential that we start to create a different narrative around what education is, a different discourse that gives us a different set of goals.
François Taddei
The learning planet dream is to empower everyone to be able to learn. Not only to learn as individuals but also to learn as collective, and to learn as collective at all scales from the very local to the global. The learning planet is a dream where everyone will learn to care for oneself, others and the planet, and will learn to be able to change the ones look at the world and the perspective that we have, so that we can collectively tackle our most pressing challenges.
In Imagine, John Lennon tells us that he was a dreamer but he was not the only one: if you are convinced that you are a dreamer but that you are not the only one, what's limiting for your dream to come true is your ability to meet other dreamers so that collectively you could start turning your dream into a project and those projects into realities. If you have enough dreamers, those realities may scale; they may become a real change at a local scale, maybe even at a global scale! In order to know if you're the only dreamer or if there are co-dreamers around you, we may need a technology that will be a sort of GPS of our dreams. It will allow you to know where you are in “dream space” where you are in “physical space”, if there are people that are close to you both in “dream space” and “physical space” so that you could co-design your dreams with them. So that you could build together that collective that will turn those dreams into projects, utopias and realities.
In order to do that, the LearningPlanet team, and especially Jean-Marc Sevin, has developed a GPS of knowledge, a GPS of dreams. It is basically based on Wikipedia: it is an artificial intelligence that has read all of wikipedia and that can read all of the dreams that you would want to share. Then, it turns all those texts into vectors: in a virtual space, you can compute distances and therefore proximities. Therefore, you know that this dream is close to that dream, then maybe the two of you should talk together so that you could start working on your dream and turn it into a reality.
Ibrahima Guimba Saidou
Minister Special Advisor to President of Niger and CEO of National Agency for Information Society (ANSI)
All the problems related to Sustainable Development Goals do not belong to just one country or one continent. The “planet movement”, if I may call it that way, has to be comprehensive. We need to make sure that people who live in the most remote areas on the globe are reached; then those people can get the chance not only to be exposed and learn from what has been done elsewhere but also to contribute. It's a point of contact for us. In terms of scalability, connecting as many villages, as many communities as possible, is important; especially now in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. All those are going to help feed good data into the system so that whatever is going to be scaled up will be based on real data, coming from as many places as possible.
We need to focus on converging, on pulling our resources together and working as one: it's really about having one team. We only have one planet, so we need to all focus on making this planet a better place to live. How can we make sure that we have a good network of organizations that are doing great things individually; pulling this collective intelligence into a single platform, into a network where we can learn from one another, where we can leverage what all the players have done?
I would give you an example: recently we've been in touch with Guy Etienne at the College Catts Pressoir in Haïti who is doing a tremendous work; having my organization and his exchanging, learning from each other, is going to help us and jump much faster to the implementation phase, into also scaling up what we are doing just because of that cooperation.
That is what we can learn from each other: we basically have the same issues, so if we are able to bring organizations from the rest of the world on such a platform, I think it is much needed. It is probably something that we cannot afford not to do. It is about cooperation because no single organization can solve that problem. It is not a matter of money, it is not a matter of willingness, it is a matter of togetherness. Because sustainability issues are global, it has to be done collectively. When we talk about pulling our collective intelligence, that is what it means: let's go!
Pavel Luksha
Director, Global Education Futures
The idea of connecting grassroots and system players, creating a Middle ground, is absolutely necessary.
We need to identify the solutions that work in Middle ground. One of the aspects of these solutions is that they cannot be “one size fits all”: they have to be place-tuned. Thus, we need local groups working with specific cities, specific situations, and we need to create a learning ecosystem that is specific to that region.
But those local groups are working with a similar philosophy, a similar approach, and they leverage the global network, which can provide them with resources, methodologies and possibly funding.
What we need is a combination of local opportunities and a team that has a strong local identity, that is rooted in the place, and a global movement that supports it all the time.