This is the transcript for our “Disrupt. Rethink. Include” podcast episode with Ayman Qwaider and Ingrid Lewis.
Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
[Opening music]
Ayman
What is the point of encouraging greater youth voice in education if you’re not willing to facilitate and to protect these youth, to have a platform to speak out about colonisation, greed and genocide.
[Music]
Ingrid
Hello, welcome to this podcast episode from Enabling Education Network. I’m Ingrid Lewis, EENET’s Managing Director, and I’m joined by Ayman Qwaida, who manages our Arabic Language and Middle East Network.
Ayman
Hi Ingrid, good morning.
Ingrid
So we’re here because we wanted to do something to mark the International Day of Education on the 24th of January. A few weeks ago I was looking online for a theme for this year’s International Day. I wanted to get some inspiration for what EENET could focus its messages on. There didn’t seem to be an exact theme, but UNESCO’s concentrating its activities on, quote, “the power of youth in co-creating education”
So this got me excited initially because, you know, for nearly 30 years, EENET’s done a lot of work to promote and guide the involvement of children and young people in action research for education. So my first reaction was, hey, cool, we’ve got plenty to say about this and we can promote all our own materials and resources on this topic.
And then because EENET sort of exists to challenge the status quo. We always say we’re here to swim upstream. I then realised that I didn’t really want us to just share the same old NGO self-promotion messages that circulate on these kinds of international days.
So as Ayman and I were starting to think about our messages, I realised that we needed to dig a bit deeper. We needed to go beyond that surface message of, “hey, let’s give kids a voice”. So we started to think about, well, will anyone else be using this International Day to talk about those really pernicious underlying reasons why children are not being heard in education? So that’s what we’re going to focus on today.
But before we dive into that, let’s step sideways for a minute, Ayman. And can you tell us a little bit about this recent encounter we had with a media company?
Ayman
Yes, of course. Yes. Thanks, Ingrid. So basically, we were recently approached by this media slash PR company that works with charities, helping them to place campaigns on radio and television. And they felt that we might have something meaningful, powerful to say around the International Day of Education.
We had an initial conversation with them and unsurprisingly, quickly realised that it wasn’t just, it wasn’t something that we could afford. But the cost was not the only issue here. In truth, we were not keen on engaging with the mass media at all.
And we knew that if we spoke honestly, we would likely be using words and ideas such as colonialism, indoctrination, manipulation, corporate greed, genocide, scholasticide, apartheid, among many others. And we tried to imagine how those messages might be treated once filtered through the mainstream media lenses, particularly in a pre-recorded interview. We would not feel that we could trust a mass media to represent our views accurately or fairly.
Ingrid
Okay. Yeah. So that kind of sums up why we decided we would just do our own podcast. So we might not be very slick compared to the what the media company would do. And maybe not many people will hear this, but at least we’re going to be in control of the narrative.
So let’s start with a quick look at the topic, or what UNESCO is putting forward as a topic for the International Day, which is the power of youth in co-creating education.
When it comes to education, the people most affected by the decisions are learners, and they are so often ignored. Educators and decision makers, they’re routinely telling learners, telling children what is right for them, like where they should learn what they should learn, how they should learn, when they should learn. You know, we’re always telling children and young people what they should do in education.
We’ve got children that are sort of in education systems that were designed decades ago, centuries ago, and they’ve not had much modernization since really.
Ayman
For sure, if we took a snapshot of society in 1926 and compare it with the snapshot in 2026, the two are massively different. But putting 1926 schools next to 2026 schools, not that much has changed.
Ingrid
And there are lots of reasons why education systems have kind of stayed in this time warp. And I think one of the reasons why education hasn’t moved on as much as society is because education is not being designed by the learners whose lives and whose futures are depending on that education.
You know, we’re having education systems that are dictated by people in power, people who are a lot older, people who’ve got a vested interest in maintaining that familiarity. They’re doing what they know and what they feel comfortable with, not what really needs to happen in the system.
Ayman
No, absolutely. I totally agree. And it’s not just only the lack of modernization that that is holding back education. It is being actively undermined by our political leaders. And if you look at examples from Gaza to Sudan to Haiti to other contexts where the political leaders choose not to uphold the right to education and continue to engage in many different aspects that undermine the right to education.
So for example, the education systems have always been weaponised by those in power to greater or lesser extent, dictating what subject should be taught and what angle the narrative should take.
Ingrid
Yeah. And this idea that the powerful elite are controlling education in a way that means that when we talk about giving children a voice in education, it’s a token gesture in so many ways.
In the UK, the history of social inequality here, it reminds us that we’ve had a system for centuries where it was easier to control the masses if you teach them enough to be productive, you teach them enough that they can help contribute to the wealth of the wealthy, but don’t teach them so much that they want to overthrow that system.
It’s frustrating because in recent decades, we have seen some progress. We’ve had the movements, research and so on, highlighting the role of women and people of colour in history, in science, and sort of trying to move us away from those white male dominated textbooks. We felt like there was a sense of hope that children might finally be getting a slightly more accurate or a nuanced picture of the world, at least starting to question textbooks a bit more. And now it feels like we’re going backwards again.
Ayman
No, absolutely. Yep. I think it’s totally backwards with the diversity, equity, inclusion being openly undermined and demonised by the right-wing politicians and groups. We’ve got a narrow education narrative dictated by the powerful elites.
Their priorities are not to build an education system that questions and investigates and strives to better the life of their country’s citizens. They want only to strengthen their own power and wealth and expand their own empires, both in metaphorical business sense and colonial territorial sense as well. And if anyone’s following the news recently, would this be demonstrated easily.
Right now, it seems like education is increasingly being used by state not just to manipulate and suppress their own people, but people in other states too. Gaza and Palestine is one example where multiple world states are not just silent and complicit in the genocide. They are actively supporting Israel to commit scholasticide. This is not an accident.
We’ve got states that actually, or politicians that nowadays prioritise to compromise their values and compromise their stance on upholding the right to education. And just for simply gaining political power, economic power, or basically they just can’t compromise their ideological, kind of perspective to uphold the right to education.
Ingrid
So human rights are just an inconvenience now. They’re getting in the way of power. They’re getting in the way of money. They’re getting in the way of politicians’ ideologies.
Ayman
Oh, absolutely.
Ingrid
I mean, thinking about human rights, there’s such a determination at the moment to undermine the right to education. It’s not an accident. It feels determined. International Days of Education, it feels like they’re becoming meaningless. Those who are engaging in these international days, you know, we’re fiddling around the edges of the problem.
I mean, what is the point of an organisation saying, let’s give children a bit more voice in their school council, for example, if that organisation also then refuses to loudly condemn actions of the states that are totally destroying education systems? You know, what’s the point of saying, “Let’s give kids a voice” but we’re not going to actually have a voice on the destruction of their entire education system and the political system that’s undermining that education system.
Ayman
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I totally agree. And I think it’s always important, I think, to give platform and provide spaces for youth to voice out their educational realities and their voices and facilitate that that voice.
However, it has to be put in that larger framework that potentially the right education and their voice is being abused and their voice being muted due to greed, due to colonisation, due to genocide, due to the state sponsored abuse of their right to education.
So I think this is really important to acknowledge the background and the framework through which we kind of give voice for young people. So yeah, as you said, what is the point of encouraging greater youth voice in education if you’re not willing to facilitate and to protect these youth, to have a platform to speak out about colonisation and greed, genocide, etc.
Ingrid
Yeah, and increasingly environmental destruction as well. How many organisations that are now going to take the International Day and use that as their opportunity to tell everybody about their work on youth voice. How many of them are going to be forefronting, like you say, colonialism, but also environmental destruction and the destruction that political greed or economic greed is having on the environment, which is destroying their education system?
Ayman
So what are you saying, Ingrid, here is that the International Day of Education is a waste of time. What? What are we gonna do here?
Ingrid
Yeah, maybe yes and no. EENET really wants to see children and young people having a proper role in designing their own education system. So an international day, which if it’s focused on youth voice, you know, it draws attention to those important issues.
But the things that are really stopping children from having voice are much deeper, they’re much more challenging. And most organisations, will they be conveying those things on this international day? Will they be taking opportunity to really push boundaries?
You know, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to consult children and young people. There’s plenty of tools, plenty of experience on how to do that. We can always improve how we do it, but it’s not that we don’t know how to do that. That’s not the main problem.
Ayman
No, absolutely. Yeah, I think the main problem is that we have too many education systems being fundamentally undermined by powerful elites, powerful structure, who put their own power, greed, and kind of imperial ambition ahead of the need of every child and ahead of the right of education for children and young people.
And I think it’s in a way it’s empowering for young people and children to know that your voice matters in a way that kind of tells off these political leaders. Yeah, because abusing the right education is wrong and it has to continue to be, you know, to be perceived as wrong.
Ingrid
Yeah, you’re right. I mean, giving young people a deep voice in the education system is what is needed. But it’s not just about the decisions about curriculum, about which subjects you want to learn, about how you want to learn. It’s making sure that children can have a voice in those really deep issues that affect the whole education system and how education is positioned in their society. It’s not just about having a voice on, “do you want to do maths on Tuesday or would you rather do art?”!
Ayman
No, absolutely. It’s the duty of non-state actors to bring these voices and these narratives and these experiences and formal recommendations to put a pressure on political leaders. How do we ensure, as non-state actors, that these young people have their voices acknowledged and impacting, not just about collecting these voices, write them in a report, and the report goes on the shelf. But this report has to be kind of the driving force and the tool to impact policies and to, you know, kind of change attitudes of these political leaders.
Ingrid
So, I mean, basically, I guess what we’re saying is that we want to see organisations that involve, engage in the International Day of Education, we want to see them being braver. We want to see them being bolder. We want environments that nurture young people, so that they can say “stop spending all of our money on bombs that kill us, stop spending all of our money on stealing land, stop dehumanising us, stop taking away the land from our communities”.
It’s those kind of messages that civil society needs to be getting brave enough to include in the International Day of Education, not just can we improve our teaching methods, can we improve our consultation methods?
Ayman
No, absolutely. I mean, all these teaching methods are important, however, it cannot be separated from the bigger picture of the factors that impacts the learning, the learning environment. Eventually it’s political.
Ingrid
So where does that leave us? NGOs are being stripped of funding or they’re finding it hard to find funding, and they’re getting more and more cautious about how they use that funding because if they upset their donors, they’ll lose funding. And what we’re suggesting is that they need to get louder, braver, bolder in the more political stuff.
How do we put those two together? The fact that they’ve got to get braver, but they’re actually getting less brave because the funding is getting cut.
Ayman
And yeah, exactly. And that’s what the current landscape shows us, you know, that there are organisations that are not able to speak up just for the sake of maintaining their status quo.
The paradoxical side of the story is that these organisations could be receiving funding from states that abuse the right education. And that does not provide this, you know, does not respect these young people and youth and children to continue their education in that bigger picture. And it’s an obvious situation, but it’s also a delicate situation for them to choose not to speak up and tiptoe their own kind of political advocacy messages when it comes to education.
Ingrid
So are we saying to people listening to this podcast, if you’re engaging with youth voice in relation to the International Day or beyond the International Day, do as much as you can to facilitate those voices to dig deeper into the issues that are affecting education, helping those youth to get a voice that says, we don’t like this political system, we don’t like this power system, we don’t like colonialism, or whatever.
Ayman
Yeah, yeah. I think one message would be, yes, for organisations to continue to provide a space and platform for young people and youth to amplify their voices, tell their stories, their experiences, because so many of these stories and narratives and experiences went unheard or untold.
And the second thing for policymakers, for institutions, please uphold this right to education in its holistic manner. Okay, and when I say by holistic manner is that how do we transform these voices, these experiences? Because once we hear them, once we have them, we have the obligation, morally duty, basically – this is how I personally perceive it – to uphold these voices and ensure it is present, it is impacting policies, and ensure it is amplified in spaces, and especially in spaces that are not comfortable for organisations, for political leaders.
They need to hear it. Not everything that they need to hear is always what they want to hear. It’s important for us to challenge the status quo, to challenge the mainstream narrative.
Ingrid
Thanks Ayman. That sounds like a good message to end on.
Let’s hope that on this International Day of Education and after it we see plenty of effort to support learners to have a voice on all aspects of education, especially on those issues that make decision-makers uncomfortable.
As always, EENET would love to share your stories and ideas on this, so do get in touch.
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If you would like to learn more about the work of Enabling Education Network, please visit our website: www.eenet.org.uk. If you would like to ask a question or share your own inclusive education ideas and experiences with our global network, please email: info@eenet.org.uk.
This podcast was edited by Dan Lewis for EENET.
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