wenty years to the day after Diplomatic Courier launched its inaugural edition at the United Nations, the Education Futures Forum gathered at Signals House in New York. Its founder, Ana C. Rold, opened with a plain premise. Now that knowledge sits at everyone’s fingertips, education’s job has shifted from acquiring information to discernment, the ability to tell what is real from what is fake. Rold called education the best inoculation against a turbulent future that has already arrived. She framed the forum, the second in a series running to 2030, around a conclusion from the first: SDG 4 is the foundation on which every other goal depends.
Dr. Asyia Kazmi, CEO of WISE at Qatar Foundation, started with the floor beneath every other ambition. In high-income countries, nine in ten children can read a simple text by age ten; in low-income countries, nine in ten cannot. She rejected the familiar claim that fixing this is hopelessly slow and complex. Sobral, one of Brazil’s poorest municipalities, now has some of the country’s strongest reading outcomes, and India has made foundational learning a national priority. In Kazmi’s account, what works comes down to three things. The first is political will at every level, from ministries to individual schools. The second is teaching grounded in the science of reading. The third is disciplined implementation driven by data, such as the quick monthly assessments used in Uttar Pradesh. Without those basics, she warned, we are designing inequity into the age of AI.
Jane Mann, Chief Education Officer at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, told the story of her grandfather, a surgeon trained in the 1930s. When he reached his wartime posting, he found that his field hospital was literally a field, and he had to build triage, shifts, and even operating tables from nothing. No one had trained him for that, but his education had made him a systems thinker. Mann argued that systems thinking should be treated as a foundational literacy and developed inside existing subjects rather than added as a new one. Judging which connections matter, she said, depends on deep knowledge.
Dr. Vicki Phillips, CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, carried that point into the debate over AI. The technology can diminish human potential by carrying a student from a blank page to a finished product without any real thinking. It can also amplify that potential dramatically. “When answers become abundant, judgment becomes scarce,” she said. She worries about a new version of an old divide, in which some students use AI to invent and solve real problems while others meet it mainly through remediation. She urged leaders to design for human potential rather than technological capability, to put teachers and students at the center of the redesign, and to stop buying tools and start redesigning systems.
Zoya, a fifteen-year-old UN Youth Ambassador and founder of the United Youth Council, asked everyone under eighteen to raise a hand. Four people in the room did. Young people are often invited into rooms where their generation is discussed, she said, but being in the room is very different from having a role in the conversation. She asked whether adults have simply become very good at speaking about young people. The literacy she would add is understanding the world and how to contribute to it, learned through real responsibility.
Over lunch, each table was asked for a single signal, and the results ranged widely. One table warned of a two-tier system in which some learners use AI to judge and create while others use it only to automate. Another went darker, worrying that the erosion of the skills needed to question may not be accidental. A tablemate countered that the same moment offers a rare chance to redesign both human and technical systems. Rold reminded the room that signals are agnostic and that the work of World in 2050 is to help the future arrive well. Student reporters asked that young people be included from the beginning of any reform rather than consulted at the end.
The signals will be distilled into a report, and participants will be invited to critique it before it goes to policymakers. The next Signals House is planned for Davos.
Editorial note: This article was adapted from the Education Futures Forum at UNGA 81, an annual event hosted by Diplomatic Courier’s Signals House. The Statements of Signals from the Forum will inform new efforts, including a deeper Signal Brief to carry the work from UNGA 81 toward Davos 2027.
AI disclosure note: AI [Claude Opus 5.5] assisted in the distillation of transcripts from the event. These were used to outline the article before it was drafted by a human.
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The Foundations Under the New Foundational Literacies
Photo by Mason C. via Unsplash.
October 4, 2026
With answers now at everyone's fingertips, education leaders at UNGA 81 argued that the new literacies of the AI age depend on old foundations: children who can read, teachers who can redesign, and young people with a real role in shaping what comes next.
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wenty years to the day after Diplomatic Courier launched its inaugural edition at the United Nations, the Education Futures Forum gathered at Signals House in New York. Its founder, Ana C. Rold, opened with a plain premise. Now that knowledge sits at everyone’s fingertips, education’s job has shifted from acquiring information to discernment, the ability to tell what is real from what is fake. Rold called education the best inoculation against a turbulent future that has already arrived. She framed the forum, the second in a series running to 2030, around a conclusion from the first: SDG 4 is the foundation on which every other goal depends.
Dr. Asyia Kazmi, CEO of WISE at Qatar Foundation, started with the floor beneath every other ambition. In high-income countries, nine in ten children can read a simple text by age ten; in low-income countries, nine in ten cannot. She rejected the familiar claim that fixing this is hopelessly slow and complex. Sobral, one of Brazil’s poorest municipalities, now has some of the country’s strongest reading outcomes, and India has made foundational learning a national priority. In Kazmi’s account, what works comes down to three things. The first is political will at every level, from ministries to individual schools. The second is teaching grounded in the science of reading. The third is disciplined implementation driven by data, such as the quick monthly assessments used in Uttar Pradesh. Without those basics, she warned, we are designing inequity into the age of AI.
Jane Mann, Chief Education Officer at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, told the story of her grandfather, a surgeon trained in the 1930s. When he reached his wartime posting, he found that his field hospital was literally a field, and he had to build triage, shifts, and even operating tables from nothing. No one had trained him for that, but his education had made him a systems thinker. Mann argued that systems thinking should be treated as a foundational literacy and developed inside existing subjects rather than added as a new one. Judging which connections matter, she said, depends on deep knowledge.
Dr. Vicki Phillips, CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, carried that point into the debate over AI. The technology can diminish human potential by carrying a student from a blank page to a finished product without any real thinking. It can also amplify that potential dramatically. “When answers become abundant, judgment becomes scarce,” she said. She worries about a new version of an old divide, in which some students use AI to invent and solve real problems while others meet it mainly through remediation. She urged leaders to design for human potential rather than technological capability, to put teachers and students at the center of the redesign, and to stop buying tools and start redesigning systems.
Zoya, a fifteen-year-old UN Youth Ambassador and founder of the United Youth Council, asked everyone under eighteen to raise a hand. Four people in the room did. Young people are often invited into rooms where their generation is discussed, she said, but being in the room is very different from having a role in the conversation. She asked whether adults have simply become very good at speaking about young people. The literacy she would add is understanding the world and how to contribute to it, learned through real responsibility.
Over lunch, each table was asked for a single signal, and the results ranged widely. One table warned of a two-tier system in which some learners use AI to judge and create while others use it only to automate. Another went darker, worrying that the erosion of the skills needed to question may not be accidental. A tablemate countered that the same moment offers a rare chance to redesign both human and technical systems. Rold reminded the room that signals are agnostic and that the work of World in 2050 is to help the future arrive well. Student reporters asked that young people be included from the beginning of any reform rather than consulted at the end.
The signals will be distilled into a report, and participants will be invited to critique it before it goes to policymakers. The next Signals House is planned for Davos.
Editorial note: This article was adapted from the Education Futures Forum at UNGA 81, an annual event hosted by Diplomatic Courier’s Signals House. The Statements of Signals from the Forum will inform new efforts, including a deeper Signal Brief to carry the work from UNGA 81 toward Davos 2027.
AI disclosure note: AI [Claude Opus 5.5] assisted in the distillation of transcripts from the event. These were used to outline the article before it was drafted by a human.
