Transforming education: towards an inclusive and anti-racist system

The interview with Marina Gay shares UNESCO’s perspective, in line with Catesco’s goal of disseminating UNESCO’s values and programs within Catalan society.

To do so, she refers to two key documents recently published by UNESCO’s Section for Global Citizenship and Peace Education: “Addressing Hate Speech through Education: A Guide for Policy Makers” (UNESCO, 2023) and “Unmasking Racism: Guidelines for Educational Materials” (UNESCO, 2024).

What educational strategies do you consider most effective for preventing racism and promoting equity from an early age?

UNESCO advocates for education to foster a deep understanding of diversity and mutual respect through fair and equitable learning environments. This is essential to prevent the spread of hate speech and combat all forms of discrimination, including racism, which violates human rights—both individual and collective—and undermines social cohesion. The key strategies outlined in these reference documents include:

• Incorporating values and practices into education to cultivate respectful global and digital citizens through a holistic approach (cognitive, socio-emotional, and attitudinal), both in teacher training and among students.

• Strengthening teacher training on addressing racism and discrimination in the classroom by providing tools to manage diversity and implement inclusive pedagogical practices.

• Reviewing and updating curricula and educational materials to ensure they are culturally respectful, address hate speech, and promote the right to freedom of expression. This includes ensuring that textbooks and other educational resources do not perpetuate racist stereotypes.

• Incorporating media and information literacy, enabling students to critically analyze information, identify hate speech, and recognize discriminatory or xenophobic narratives.

• Promoting the creation of inclusive, safe, and respectful learning environments that value cultural diversity and encourage the participation of all students, preventing racist attitudes.

On a more specific level, UNESCO places great emphasis on addressing hate speech in the classroom as content in itself. This includes teaching its history, exploring its origins, forms, effects, and consequences, and framing it within a broader historical and contemporary context. Additionally, this approach involves identifying its defining elements: students must be able to decode cultural messages, stereotypes, and coded signals used to spread hate in both traditional and new social media. The goal is to help students and teachers become aware of harmful discourse and confront their own biases, prejudices, and feelings of hatred.

This means, among other things, facilitating uncomfortable conversations about social inequality and exploitation within a society, addressing issues related to power and privilege, and exploring strategies to improve social inclusion and diversity at all levels.

At this stage, according to UNESCO, socio-emotional learning is key: recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses, managing stress and negative emotions, developing problem-solving skills, and cultivating self-confidence and a positive self-concept are advantages when confronting hate speech or racism. On the other hand, recognizing the strengths of others, collaborating in problem-solving, empathizing with different social and cultural contexts, and advocating for the rights of others are competencies that help prevent these issues.

In this regard, UNESCO reaffirms once again its fundamental educational paradigm: the need to approach education from a comprehensive perspective, integrating the four pillars of learning from the Delors Report (UNESCO, 1996) into all educational practices: learning to be, learning to know, learning to do, and learning to live together. This is why UNESCO emphasizes a cross-cutting approach to learning, especially by incorporating the socio-emotional dimension, which engages our values and beliefs, helps us manage emotions and relationships, and ultimately predisposes us to act accordingly.

Can you share a recent example of a Catesco project that has made a difference in this field?

At Catesco, we promote UNESCO’s values and programs within Catalan society, particularly in the field of education. In this regard, UNESCO’s latest global education report, Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education (UNESCO, 2021), calls for a transformation of educational systems so that they can effectively respond to the challenges of today’s and future societies. It envisions education as a fundamental human right and a cornerstone for peace and sustainable development. Contributing to this call to reimagine the role of education today is one of Catesco’s strategic priorities. That is why we promote actions and programs in various areas, including global citizenship education, social dialogue on the role of education in today’s world, and democratic and human rights education as a driving force for educational change.

In this vein, on December 10, we held a session of the Master Class Against Racism and Discrimination in Barcelona, a UNESCO program that was carried out in collaboration with Catesco. This session took place as part of UNESCO’s World Forum Against Racism and Discrimination in Barcelona, where we addressed two major issues connecting racism and education:

1. How can racial healing be approached among young people?

2. What is the link between school segregation—such as the one experienced in Catalonia—and the entrenchment of structural racism in our society?

At Catesco, we sought to highlight school segregation as a systemic form of racism and discrimination against children and young people, primarily from migrant families and low-income backgrounds. This discrimination not only hinders their academic success but also reinforces social and urban segregation, creating barriers between communities and fostering prejudice, misinformation, rumors, and ultimately, hatred.

This phenomenon is widespread across the so-called developed world and challenges the pillar of learning to live together, which UNESCO’s global education report Learning: The Treasure Within (UNESCO, 1996)—better known as the Delors Report—identified as one of the four fundamental pillars of education, alongside learning to be, learning to know, and learning to do.

Additionally, the event featured contributions from the We Are Family Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation, which approached social justice from a different perspective: racial healing. This perspective focuses on building relationships and connections to expand the circles of engagement necessary to overcome racial hierarchy and, in turn, create the political will required for meaningful and sustainable policy change (Giacobbe, 2024).

The session was inspiring and enriching, featuring powerful testimonies from individuals and representatives of organizations, including young people from around the world and groups fighting against segregation in various European countries. This Master Class allowed us to address racism and education from a global perspective while also zooming in on the reality in Catalonia, where segregation has long been a key challenge in educational policy. However, its deep connection to structural racism is still not fully acknowledged.

What structural changes does the education system need to be truly inclusive?

As in any approach to structural change in the system, it must be done by acting on several levels and on several aspects at the same time, taking into account that the change in some factors will inevitably alter the effect on the others. 
 

Thus addressing curricula and study plans (eliminating racial bias, stereotypes and exclusionary narratives, or promoting AMI to identify and combat hate speech and misinformation), teacher training (incorporating socio-emotional learning in training to manage diversity and prevent racism, or adopting conflict management tools and debate controversial topics in the classroom), improve institutional resilience against racism and hate speech (with clear protocols in schools, with a transversal inclusion approach), or generating alliances with the educational community and other sectors in order to prevent the entry of these phenomena into the classroom (especially incorporating minority groups or at risk of exclusion in the making of educational decisions), are some of these factors to be addressed that UNESCO indicates as priorities.

Additionally, however, it also emphasizes the need to improve access and educational equity as one of the pillars for the education system to be more inclusive. In this sense, it points, again, to the challenge of reducing school segregation as one of the priorities in this area, especially with policies to support students from vulnerable contexts and eliminating socio-economic barriers to education, ensuring that factors such as culture or social origin do not affect learning opportunities.
 

At the outset, however, the most important thing to do, according to UNESCO itself, is precisely to put the issue on the table, to publicly and collectively recognize that the education system suffers from serious biases and generates significant discrimination due to structural racism. And from there prioritize the issue so that everyone can deal with it from the role they play within the system (administration, teachers, students, inspection, global justice entities, families...).

What challenges do anti-racism education programs face, and how can they be overcome?

The UNESCO itself identifies the main barriers or challenges that anti-racism education faces in various areas.

Regarding institutional or educational policy challenges, UNESCO highlights that in many contexts, educational policies do not prioritize the fight against racism, and there is a lack of allocated resources or legislative support. Additionally, there is growing social pressure from certain reactionary and/or populist sectors, which promote xenophobic and discriminatory attitudes, such as far-right groups or parties.

Within the education system itself, school segregation remains one of the most significant factors perpetuating structural racism, social division, and discrimination. Moreover, there are resistances within the professional sectordue to a lack of specific training and a sense of insecurity or inability to address discriminatory situations.

Furthermore, in our current social context, there is still a lack of awareness about the need to combat racism and hate speech as a priority—they remain somewhat "normalized." As a result, some communities and families may perceive anti-racist education as a threat to their values or beliefs, leading to skepticism toward inclusion programs. Additionally, hate speech and racism are widespread in the media and social networks, significantly influencing public opinion.

Lastly, the lack of resources and financial support for inclusion programs is both a cause and a consequence of these barriers, as UNESCO points out.

How can schools collaborate with NGOs to foster a more inclusive educational environment?

UNESCO, in its latest global education report Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education(2021), clearly establishes that in order to guarantee the right to education, everyone must be able to enjoy and enhance the educational opportunities available throughout life and across various social and cultural spaces. This includes connecting natural, built, and virtual learning spaces and making the most of everyone's potential. Therefore, collaboration between educational institutions and their environment becomes an essential condition for ensuring educational equity.

In my view, this goal of collaborating with the environment is already quite widespread and established. It's hard to find a school today that refuses to collaborate with other institutions and organizations in its surroundings to improve its educational offerings. However, there is still room for progress in orienting this collaboration toward an unequivocal purpose of improving both educational quality and equity. In other words, the relationship with external entities should not only provide access to specialized content (such as inviting an organization to conduct a workshop or lecture on digital safety, comprehensive sexual education, or a visit to an interactive science exhibition in a city museum) but should also promote equity and an inclusive perspective of education, fostering a sense of civic, ethical, and global social justice among all students, starting with respect for human rights.

In this sense, global justice education can play a key role in promoting inclusive education, as it integrates the various perspectives needed to address the UNESCO principle of "a deep understanding of diversity and mutual respect." In this line, the resource Educar per a futurs alternatius. Guia d'Educació per la Justícia Global by Lafede.cat (2020) breaks down these perspectives in detail: the democratic and human rights approach, the economic justice approach, the feminist perspective, the peace and non-violence approach, the critical interculturality perspective, and the environmental justice approach. The guide also includes various proposals on how to implement this global justice education, which can be inspirational when building this collaboration with educational institutions.

Ultimately, organizations focused on global justice education are undoubtedly essential allies when it comes to collaborating with educational institutions toward fully inclusive education, especially regarding the challenge we are discussing of incorporating an anti-racist perspective.