This week, this Persian Gulf country is staging the first World Innovation Summit for Education, a flashy conference that aims to become an annual fixture for the world’s education elite.
The lofty idea behind the conference, known as WISE, is that this wealthy emirate will become the place where the world’s most powerful and prominent educators will confront the planet’s most pressing educational challenges.
But what the discussions taking place in the lavish meeting halls and corridors of Doha’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel seem to have exposed is just how difficult it is to have a focused international conversation about something as broad and varied as global education.
The Qatar Foundation, whose mission is to make the country a leader in education research and innovation, paid for nearly 1,000 educators to fly here from all over the world to participate in discussions about some of the big ideas of global education: pluralism, sustainability, and innovation.
But in many of the conference’s plenary and breakout sessions, it was a challenge for moderators to find the kind of middle ground that would allow a meaningful discussion to begin among panel members drawn from institutions at different levels of education and in different corners of the world.
At one point during a plenary session on pluralism on Monday afternoon, for example, the moderator, Mike Baker, a British journalist, apologized for having to pull the French-astronaut-turned-museum-president Claudie Haigneré “back down to earth” as her scheduled 10-minute speech about the need to “transcend science, literature, natural history, and the humanities” entered its 18th minute.
Preceding Ms. Haigneré's speech in this wide-ranging discussion were a talk from Ruth Dreifuss, who is chancellor of the United Nations’ University for Peace and a former president of the Swiss Confederation, about the way “common schools” bridge cultural barriers in Switzerland; a presentation from Allan E. Goodman, president and chief executive of the New York-based Institute of International Education, about the importance of international mobility in education; and a philosophical argument of the universal nature of the human desire to learn, by Georges Haddad, director of the division of higher education at Unesco.
One member of the audience, who didn’t want to be named, described the session as “an opportunity for anybody to say anything about anything they want, so long as it has something to do about education.”
Yet while many conference participants complained that the formal discussions could have been more focused on tangible issues, the corridors were filled with educators from across the world who were thrilled to have the opportunity to connect with others from such a wide-reaching educational network.
Russel Jones, an American academic who advises the start-up Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, in Abu Dhabi, said WISE had the potential to become an alternate, more effective global forum for education, than any of those provided by Unesco.
“Unesco doesn’t do a particularly good job in any application,” Mr. Jones said. “But here you’ve got a whole flock of people in a very dynamic way where we can discuss our best practices and solutions to our big problems.”
In an interview, Abdulla Al-Thani, vice president of education for the Qatar Foundation, emphasized that because this is the first WISE summit, organizers had to make an educated guess about the sort of conversations that would take place. Next year’s summit, he said, would be focused by the feedback from this year’s participants.
“We only put forward the ingredients and the venue for the summit. Now we want to hear from the players, to help us shape these discussions for next year,” Mr. Al-Thani said. “We would like to have more people coming to us to say, ‘We want to participate.’”
To be sure, WISE has brought the kind of flash and dazzle the decidedly unglamorous education set is unused to. At the gala dinner on Tuesday evening, a thousand education policy wonks and university presidents donned their finest formal wear for a meal of “fjord salmon and caviar,” followed by a special concert by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. The evening’s surprise guest was none other than Carla Bruni Sarkozy, the pop star turned first lady of France.
