Education for All: Opening speech

Your Majesties
Mr President
Excellencies
Ladies and Gentlemen

Last year, with good assistance from Queen Rania and her office, we were able to organize a dignity day in Jordan. A dignity day is a conversation with youth about dignity. They get to define dignity with their own words and we encourage them to tell stories of dignity from their own lives.

A girl in the class I was assigned to told us that when she was in primary school, she had a teacher that was visually impaired. This was an ambitious student so she was a bit annoyed at her teacher. She wasn’t able to use the black board and she wasn’t able to catch students who were sending notes etc. In short she thought she would be better off with another teacher. Years later when she was in junior high school she read in the paper that her old teacher was the first ever visually impaired person in Jordan to earn a PhD. That made the girl very proud on the teacher’s behalf. And she was proud that this had been her teacher. She felt that the teacher’s victory also became her own victory.

I have been fortunate enough to visit schools in all parts of Norway and in many countries around the world. Everywhere I go, students express how important learning is to them. This seems to be a universal acknowledgement – across borders and cultures, age groups and genders.

So why is education important?
In addition to the basic value of gaining knowledge, school is a place for developing sound values, for fighting inequality, poverty, and a place to confront our prejudice. Schooling is also a powerful tool to prevent conflict, promote gender equality – and a key factor in forming sustainable societies. In other words: It gives people the opportunity to lead more dignified lives.

Education, empowerment and dignity are strongly linked. This became even clearer to me when I visited Mongolia last month together with the United Nations Development Program. There I met with a group of children who went to school in a ger, a traditional Mongolian tent. The school was located on Ulaanbaatar’s largest waste disposal site, and was especially set up for children who live and work on the site.

These children live under extreme conditions. The teachers told me that they had spent months earning their trust, and encouraging them to come to school for a couple of hours every day. This was not because they lacked the will to learn, but rather because they needed confidence in their own worth and in whether the school would treat them with respect.

A school in a tent on a garbage dump may not be optimal, but it was evident that no matter how spartan and inadequate the premises, this school was giving the children a much needed rest from the hard life outside – in addition to hopes for a normal childhood and for the future.

“A dignified life means an opportunity to fulfil one’s potential.” This applies both to the pupils on a waste disposal site in Mongolia, to youth in Norway and the girl in Jordan.

I would like to use this opportunity to thank all of you who are working so hard to offer every girl and boy high quality schooling. I hope that this conference will bring us closer to achieving our ambition.