The International Seminar on "Education, citizenship and interethnic harmony: the interaction of society and the school" was held in Moscow on 29 November – 2 December 2016. The Seminar was organized by the Department of Education of Moscow and the Moscow Institute of Open Education with the support of the Russian National Commission for UNESCO, the Commission on Science and Education of the Council for Nationalities of the Moscow Government and the Public Chamber of Moscow. UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) was a partner of the event, along with the International Federation of Peace and Accord and the all-Russian association of schools participating in the project "UNESCO Associated Schools".
At the plenary session of the International Seminar, UNESCO IITE Officer-In-Charge prof. Alexander Khoroshilov presented the 2016 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report “Education for people and planet: Creating sustainable futures for all” recently released by UNESCO.
This is the first report of the new series dedicated to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on quality education, designed for the next 15 years and consistently evaluating the progress in the sphere of education with the implementation of the 2030 Global Agenda for Sustainable Development. The report concludes that the potential of education as the engine of the world development cannot be fully realized without significantly expanded school education coverage, guaranteeing opportunities for life-long education and including sustainable development issues in education systems. The thematic part of the report presents evidence and examples of practical measures and policies that clearly show possibilities of using education to enhance the work on the entire agenda of sustainable development. It also provides convincing arguments in favour of different forms of education, which are crucial for achieving such goals as poverty reduction, eradication of hunger, improving public health, promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women, sustainable agriculture, enhancing urban resilience and building more equitable and inclusive societies.
Participants of the International Seminar were more than 200 representatives of education authorities and educational organizations of Moscow and other 16 regions of Russia, as well as from Belarus, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, China, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Serbia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Finland, France and Estonia.
During the Seminar, participants exchanged their experiences and practical solutions in the field of civil unity and harmonization of interethnic relations by means of education, development of legal consciousness and preservation of the cultural identity of peoples. As a result of the Seminar, a number of proposals were elaborated, including a suggestion to continue the annual seminar of the series "Dialogue of civilizations and intercultural cooperation" with the expansion of its geography.