On the 29th of November 2023, the OTP Fáy Foundation and the Equilibrium Institute held a joint conference on the education of the future, entitled “Future skills – future education“.
The aim of the conference was to give an insight into how technological development and globalisation are changing the labour market expectations, based on presentations by foreign and domestic experts. In this context, we presented how the purpose of education and learning may change in the future, and what development trends and transformations can be expected in education in Hungary and in the world.
“The experience of the past decades shows that two factors can make a middle-income country stand out: finding oil or investing in education. The first is not an option for us, so the second way remains. Education is therefore not an end, but a means to become one of the richest countries” — said Tamás Boros, Executive Director of our think tank, in his introductory presentation.
In his presentation, Mr Boros stressed the following points:
- We are all different and have different values, but we all agree on two things: one is that a long and healthy life is better than a short and disease-ridden one; the other is that we would rather live in prosperity than in poverty. And to live a long life in relative wealth, education is the key.
- We are giving up a quarter of our students: a quarter of Hungarian students underperform in PISA tests and leave school functionally illiterate. As analysts, we see these students as having been abandoned by the country.
- In contrast, the ones we give plenty of opportunities to are the graduates. The over-education of graduates is a pernicious myth: if you look at wages, this is the second best place in the whole of the European Union to go to university.
The important message of his presentation was that the surest way to make a good living is through university: a degree is worth more than anything else in the life of an individual and a country.
“We should not only compete in the number of Nobel Prize winners per capita, but also in the number of graduates per capita” — concluded our Executive Director.
The event was attended by Prof. Auli Toom, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Helsinki and President of the Finnish Association for Educational Research; Michael Stevenson, OECD Senior Advisor for Education; Pál Bíró, CEO of Google Hungary; Péter Halácsy, co-founder of Prezi and Budapest School; Dr. Ilona Södervik, Associate Professor of Digital Education at the University of Helsinki; Ildikó Csejtei, CEO of the OTP Fáy Foundation and Tamás Boros, Executive Director of the Equilibrium Institute.
