The United Nations has been called a talking shop, a toothless tiger and an anachronism, yet in its 81st year, it remains an imperfect answer to an impossible world. Born from the ashes of one war and tested in the shadow of many since, the UN remains committed to the ideals that informed its creation, central among them is the conviction that education is not a privilege, but a right belonging to every person.
Over the decades, the UN has written that principle into treaties, built institutions around it and tied it to global development targets. Education, as former Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it, “is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.” Treaties have given it legitimacy, global goals have created urgency, and the tireless work of agencies such as UNESCO and UNICEF in refugee camps, war zones and remote villages has kept education within reach of children through poverty, conflict, humanitarian crisis and natural disasters.
“Education has always received high priority in the UN system,” said Ambassador TS Tirumurti, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN from 2020 to 2022 and President of the Security Council in August 2021.”The UN General Assembly created the mandate of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict in 1996. In 1999, the UNSC formally placed the issue on its agenda.”
That commitment rests on a long line of agreements, from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which recognised education as a fundamental right, to UNESCO’s Convention against Discrimination in Education in 1960 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The Education for All movement and, later, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 expanded the global commitment to include both access to schooling and the quality of learning. Between 2000 and 2024, 327 million more students enrolled in primary and secondary schools worldwide, bringing total enrolment to 1.4 billion.
Enrolment, though, a flattering statistic, doesn't tell the full story. In 2015, SDG 4 committed countries to more than filling classrooms. By 2030, every child was to receive an inclusive, equitable and quality education, with the chance to keep learning throughout life. Its targets were wide in scope, from free primary and secondary schooling to early childhood learning, vocational training, literacy and better-qualified teachers. Eleven years on, ambition has outpaced achievement. An estimated 273 million children, adolescents and young people were out of school in 2024, a figure that has risen for seven consecutive years. With four years left to meet the goal, the gap between what the world promised and what millions of youth face remains considerable.
Much of the distance between promise and progress is, in part, a consequence of the UN’s own design; commitments made in New York must still be delivered in national capitals, by governments with their own budgets, priorities and politics, and it is in that passage from consensus to action that many pledges lose their force. “The United Nations General Assembly is a universal forum which approves resolutions on a variety of issues, but [they] are not enforceable,” Tirumurti said. “Therefore, while UNGA resolutions are an important indication of what member states agree on, translating into action depends entirely on the respective governments and their willingness and capacity.”
A nation’s commitment at the UN is ultimately measured in currency, through public spending. Speaking at the World Summit for Social Development, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on governments to “dedicate a minimum of 15 per cent of domestic revenue” to education, and at least 4 per cent of GDP. “Education is not a cost to be contained. It’s a strategic and necessary investment in every society’s future,” he said.
Yet one in four countries meets neither of the UN-backed benchmarks, which ask governments to spend 4 to 6 per cent of their GDP, or 15 to 20 per cent of public expenditure, on education. India, too, remains short of its own target, with a parliamentary standing committee noting in June that public spending on education stood at about 4.12 per cent of GDP in 2021–22, against the 6 per cent set out in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The budget is only one part of the strain on the global education system. In much of the world, the classroom has become one of the first casualties of war and extreme weather. Attacks on education reached record levels across 2024 and 2025, and in Gaza, Sudan and Somalia, millions of children have seen years of schooling lost to conflict. UNESCO estimates that a further 13 million children in war zones are missing from official out-of-school figures altogether.
The climate crisis has compounded the damage, as per UNICEF, in 2024, extreme weather disrupted learning for at least 242 million students across 85 countries, with heatwaves alone affecting 171 million. “While humanitarian aid deals with some of the basic and immediate needs of the population in distress, the long-term prospect of protecting the population is a far more complex issue,” Tirumurti said, “which involves both the reconstruction of the physical infrastructure and putting in place institutional structures by empowering the national authorities.”
Rebuilding those structures will largely fall to the generation now coming of age amid these crises, and it may be better prepared for the task than many expect. A UN Foundation survey conducted this September found adults aged 18 to 34 to be the most hopeful of any age group about the world’s future, and nearly nine in ten respondents agreed that even the most powerful nations need international partnerships.
Tirumurti sees in this generation the means, and the will, to effect change. “The younger generation should take advantage of the huge disruptions to the global order, whether geopolitical or economic or technology, and strive to build something better and more meaningful,” he said. “They have more tools at their command, especially technology, than ever before to effect change.” The task, he added, is to avoid the mistakes of the past, whether in making the planet unsustainable or in letting technologies such as AI “dehumanise humans and disrupt lives.” “Fortunately, the younger generation are not willing to accept stereotypes of the past and they are ready to express their views,” he concludes.
