In 1996, UNESCO released the Delors Report “Learning: The Treasure Within” prepared by a commission of experts from various countries (educators, sociologists, political scientists, among others) led by Jacques Delors, which stated that students should learn to be, to do, to know, and to live together; and that education was a necessary utopia and an expression of love for children and adolescents, for whom the path to building a better future should be paved; We in the education sector felt inspired; we believed that a new era was dawning, in which all stakeholders—educational institutions, governments, international organizations, students, and teachers—would join forces to transform education into a driving force for human and social development.
However, we have witnessed how, throughout the 21st century, educational policies have ignored the human and humanizing content of this report and its valuable contributions, such as the assertion that these policies should be processes open to improvement that contribute to the development of the individual and relationships between people, building a better world and ensuring sustainable human development, among other serious and forceful statements.
It is impossible for those of us who are convinced that education has the power and the duty to transform the world to read this report without feeling a sense of nostalgia and asking ourselves: Why wasn’t it implemented? What happened to us?
Perhaps one of the reasons for ignoring the report’s content was the difficulty of assessing “knowing how to be and knowing how to live together” in every classroom, at all educational levels, and in the face of this, we preferred to focus on fostering doing and learning, even though being and living together are fundamental to life, and if we ignore them in school or university, we lose the opportunity for education to be the engine that drives substantial improvements in our societies. Tradition tells us that those exiled in Babylon were able to return to Zion after years of longing. Perhaps it is time to turn our gaze back to that moment when, with hope, we contemplated the dawn of a new era—one in which education would help us become better human beings, in which teachers would be true mentors, inspiring their students to learn, to be, to do, and to live together, fostering dialogue, creativity, critical thinking, patience, effort, and forgiveness; in which students, amidst their difficulties and limitations, would strive to acquire not only knowledge, but the keys to taking the best from previous generations and setting out to conquer new worlds; all of this supported by policies, organizations, institutions, and families. Perhaps it is a utopia, but humanity deserves to live in a better world than the one that was built by ignoring the Delors Report.