Has the OECD Changed Its Mind About Education? A New Conversation Begins
In this blog post, Iveta Silova, Hikaru Komatsu and Jeremy Rappleye analyse a recent OECD report signals an important shift in the organisation’s conceptualisation of the purpose of education, and call for the OECD’s influential education assessment tool, PISA, to reflect this change.
For more than two decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has been one of the most influential forces in global education. Through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it has shaped how governments think about school quality, student achievement, and educational success. PISA scores have become shorthand for national competitiveness, and education itself has often been framed as an engine of economic growth.
That is why we were surprised by the OECD’s recent report Agency in the Anthropocene.
Rather than asking how education can strengthen economies, the report asks how education might help societies respond to planetary crises. It places environmental sustainability at the centre of its vision, calls for profound social transformation, and—perhaps most surprisingly—questions the worldview that has long underpinned modern education itself.
This is no small shift. For decades, critics have argued that the OECD’s educational vision reinforced the very assumptions driving today’s ecological crises: endless economic growth, human exceptionalism, and the idea that more education naturally leads to better development. The new report signals that the organisation is beginning to grapple with these critiques.
Three changes stand out.
- The environment is no longer a side issue
Earlier OECD frameworks acknowledged environmental sustainability, but largely treated it as one challenge among many. In Agency in the Anthropocene, the environmental crisis becomes the starting point. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation are presented not as isolated policy problems but as defining conditions of the twenty-first century that education must address.
- The report questions business as usual
The report goes further than simply encouraging students to recycle or learn more environmental science. It recognises that today’s environmental crises are rooted in broader social and economic systems and explicitly acknowledges that capitalism’s pursuit of continuous economic growth has contributed to ecological degradation. It even points to youth climate movements as examples of the kind of civic agency needed for socio-ecological transformation. For an organisation long associated with measuring education’s contribution to economic competitiveness, this is a striking departure.
- The deepest change is about worldview
Perhaps the most significant shift is also the least obvious. The report argues that sustainability is not simply about acquiring more knowledge. Instead, it calls for a transformation in how students understand their relationship with the living world. Rather than seeing humans as separate from nature, it encourages an understanding of interdependence—one in which humans are part of ecosystems rather than standing above them. Indigenous perspectives, relationality, and ecological connectedness are no longer presented as peripheral ideas but as important resources for rethinking education itself. This is arguably the first time the OECD has openly challenged the worldview inherited from the Western Enlightenment that has shaped modern schooling for generations.
But one important piece is still missing
The report’s most ambitious idea is also the one it leaves largely.
At the heart of the OECD’s new vision lies a profound claim: education must help students move from seeing themselves as separate from nature to recognising themselves as part of an interconnected, more-than-human world. Yet this transformation remains largely invisible within the assessment framework itself. PISA continues to measure what students know, how hopeful they feel, and what actions they report taking, but not the worldview shift the report identifies as fundamental.
The irony is that this is not a methodological impossibility. Researchers have spent decades developing and refining measures of nature connectedness and ecological worldviews, including the Connectedness to Nature ScaleNature Relatedness Scale Inclusion of Nature in Self Scale. The tools already exist. If the OECD is serious about placing worldviews at the centre of education for the Anthropocene, then they should also become part of what we seek to cultivate, understand, and assess. Otherwise, the deepest transformation the report envisions risks remaining the one dimension education never learns to see.
Why this matters
Whether or not one agrees with every aspect of the OECD’s vision, the report marks an important moment in global education policy. One of the world’s most influential education organisations is no longer speaking only about achievement, skills, and economic growth. It is beginning to ask deeper questions about humanity’s place within the living world and about the role education might play in cultivating more sustainable ways of being.
It is too early to know whether this represents a genuine transformation or the beginning of a longer institutional journey. But one thing is already clear: the conversation has changed. Questions that once sat largely at the margins of global education policy—about worldviews, interdependence, and humanity’s relationship with the more-than-human world—are now entering the mainstream.
What happens next will matter not only for the future of PISA, but for how we imagine the future of education itself. The OECD has asked important questions. Now it is our turn to deepen them and to imagine what comes next. Whether you are an educator, a researcher, a student, or simply someone who cares about the world future generations will inherit, your voice belongs in this conversation. We invite you to join it.
Authors
Iveta Silova is Professor and Associate Dean of Global Engagement at Arizona State University’s College for Teaching and Learning Innovation and a Senior Global Futures Scientist. Her research explores how education can help reimagine more relational, regenerative, and ecologically grounded planetary futures.
Hikaru Komatsu is a Professor in the Faculty of Social Studies at Doshisha University. His research lies at the intersection of human-nature relations and sustainability, examining how educational practices and institutions can foster an ontology—a way of being in the world—that helps us live decently on a shared planet.
Jeremy Rappleye is Professor at The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education and current Director of the Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC). His work seeks to create the basis for mutual learning in the field of education, and a richer transdisciplinary discussion between philosophy, social science, and practice in the context of the sustainability imperative.
Further reading
Komatsu, H., Rappleye, J., & Silova, I. (2026). The OECD’s shift towards environmental sustainability: Assessing the Agency in the Anthropocene report. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2026.2675300
OECD. (2023). Agency in the Anthropocene: Supporting document to the PISA 2025 Science Framework. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/agency-in-the-anthropocene_8d3b6cfa-en.html