Anchoring the Era-Defining Issues of Educational Transformation, Mapping the Vision of Education 2050—The Official Release of Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050
date：2025-09-01 15:24author：adminsource：Smart Learning Instituteviews：
The Global Smart Education Conference 2025 (GSE2025) kicked off in Beijing on the morning of August 18 (GMT+8). At the conference, Prof. HUANG Ronghuai, Co-Dean of Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University (SLIBNU) and UNESCO Chair on AI in Education, unveiled a groundbreaking achievement: Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050. This monograph, published by Educational Science Publishing House Limited and selected as a project under the National Publication Foundation, serves as the cornerstone of the “Smart Education Development Series.” It encapsulates over a decade of theoretical insights and practical experience from the SLIBNU team led by Prof. HUANG Ronghuai, who has pioneered advancements in the field of smart education. While addressing the core challenges of educational transformation, the work also responds to shared global concerns in educational development.
Release of Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050
Answering the Call of Our Times: A New Vision for Education in 2050
As the wave of technology sweeps across the globe and global challenges call for educational innovation, UNESCO launched the Futures of Education initiative in 2019, aiming to catalyze global dialogue and collective imagination on how education should evolve. This marked the starting point for the international community to envision a longer-term future of education beyond the Education 2030 Agenda. In 2021, UNESCO released the report titled Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education, which further clarifies the core concerns of educational development in the future: innovating teaching methods, opening up curriculum systems, transforming the role of teachers, reshaping school structures, and ensuring lifelong learning. This report lays out a systematic and value-oriented blueprint for the educational vision leading up to 2050. The 2022 United Nations Transforming Education Summit further emphasized that reimagining education systems requires the torch of long-term vision and the sails of bold action.
Prof. HUANG Ronghuai’s Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050 was born during this critical turning point in global educational transformation. With “2050” as its temporal coordinate, it engages in a profound dialogue with the international community on the future of education. Neither indulging in vague long-term visions nor limiting itself to superficial responses to the present, it instead invites peers worldwide to address a central question through rigorous reflection: How can smart education become a shared global vision for Education 2050?
Prof. HUANG Ronghuai’s Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050 was born during this critical turning point in global educational transformation. With “2050” as its temporal coordinate, it engages in a profound dialogue with the international community on the future of education. Neither indulging in vague long-term visions nor limiting itself to superficial responses to the present, it instead invites peers worldwide to address a central question through rigorous reflection: How can smart education become a shared global vision for Education 2050?
Addressing Contemporary Dilemmas: The Connotation of and Breakthroughs in Smart Education
At present, the traditional educational model is increasingly disconnected from the technological logic of the intelligent era, giving rise to a global crisis for learning. Yet this very crisis has compelled the education system to undergo a “self-awakening”—shifting from passively responding to external shocks to proactively embracing technological dividends, thereby becoming an endogenous force in the transformation of our times. The book offers an in-depth interpretation that smart education is by no means a mere accumulation of technologies, nor a gradual extension of traditional educational logic. Rather, it represents the “ideal” paradigm for educational reform and development in the intelligent era, serving as the target form of the digital transformation of education. Its core connotation can be analyzed from three dimensions:
“Wisdom” stems from teachers, and the soul of smart education lies in the “wisdom” of educators. It transcends the mere transmission of knowledge, emphasizing that teachers, grounded in humanistic care and empowered by technological tools, shall genuinely implement student-centered teaching. This approach guides students to learn critical thinking amidst complexities and nurtures creativity in diverse contexts, ultimately returning education to its essence of “cultivating people.”
“Capability” lies in the environment, and an educational environment constructed by intelligent technology is a crucial support for smart education. Such an environment is an “organic ecosystem” that can perceive learners’ needs and dynamically adapt to their learning pace, providing the foundational conditions for upholding educational inclusivity and equity. It ensures that the “possibilities” of education are no longer constrained by time, space, or resources.
“Change” lies in form, as the future of education will be reshaped by smart education. It is this vision of systemic leap that empowers smart education to potentially resolve the long-standing “Educational Trinity”—the tension between achieving high-quality, large-scale, and personalized learning.
The book points out that when intelligent technology precisely meets the needs of learners, when teachers evolve from “knowledge transmitters” to “learning designers,” and when knowledge systems break disciplinary barriers to embrace openness and integration, education can achieve an organic unity of high-quality and personalized learning on a large scale. This paves a clear and feasible pathway toward Education 2050.
“Wisdom” stems from teachers, and the soul of smart education lies in the “wisdom” of educators. It transcends the mere transmission of knowledge, emphasizing that teachers, grounded in humanistic care and empowered by technological tools, shall genuinely implement student-centered teaching. This approach guides students to learn critical thinking amidst complexities and nurtures creativity in diverse contexts, ultimately returning education to its essence of “cultivating people.”
“Capability” lies in the environment, and an educational environment constructed by intelligent technology is a crucial support for smart education. Such an environment is an “organic ecosystem” that can perceive learners’ needs and dynamically adapt to their learning pace, providing the foundational conditions for upholding educational inclusivity and equity. It ensures that the “possibilities” of education are no longer constrained by time, space, or resources.
“Change” lies in form, as the future of education will be reshaped by smart education. It is this vision of systemic leap that empowers smart education to potentially resolve the long-standing “Educational Trinity”—the tension between achieving high-quality, large-scale, and personalized learning.
The book points out that when intelligent technology precisely meets the needs of learners, when teachers evolve from “knowledge transmitters” to “learning designers,” and when knowledge systems break disciplinary barriers to embrace openness and integration, education can achieve an organic unity of high-quality and personalized learning on a large scale. This paves a clear and feasible pathway toward Education 2050.
Co-Building Academic Discourse: From Theoretical Exploration to Global Collaboration
XI Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, pointed out the need to build an independent knowledge system of Chinese philosophy and social sciences with distinctive concepts and original theories from various disciplines, and apply and implement them in teaching practices. This statement charts a course for advancing the innovation of indigenous theoretical frameworks in education and fostering international academic collaboration. This book is a vivid embodiment of this concept. The book systematically documents the BNU team’s decade-long efforts in theoretical co-construction and international collaboration: In 2014, they founded the Springer journal named Smart Learning Environments, establishing a high-level platform for global academic exchange. In 2016, they initiated the US-China Smart Education Conference, which was upgraded to the Global Smart Education Conference in 2020, creating an educational dialogue mechanism that gathers worldwide wisdom. In recent years, BNU has launched the Joint Project on Rethinking and Redesigning National Smart Education Strategy with international authoritative institutions such as the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (UNESCO IITE), and promoted the establishment of the Global Smart Education Network (GSENet). Through transnational and cross-disciplinary collaborative research and theoretical co-creation, it has gradually built an academic discourse system for smart education that integrates Chinese characteristics with a global perspective.
The book emphasizes that smart education possesses performative and constructive features. The performative features represent a shared vision of future learning and its goals, while the constructive features identify the practical pathways and enabling conditions necessary to realize this vision. While deeply rooted in China’s reality, this system also actively integrates into the global discourse network of smart education, which helps achieve a leap from theoretical exploration to global collaboration, showcasing the mutual enrichment of Chinese wisdom and global experience.
The book emphasizes that smart education possesses performative and constructive features. The performative features represent a shared vision of future learning and its goals, while the constructive features identify the practical pathways and enabling conditions necessary to realize this vision. While deeply rooted in China’s reality, this system also actively integrates into the global discourse network of smart education, which helps achieve a leap from theoretical exploration to global collaboration, showcasing the mutual enrichment of Chinese wisdom and global experience.
Contribute China’s Proposal: From a Leading Country in Education to Global Governance
In January 2024, the 2024-2035 Master Plan on Building China into a Leading Country in Education was officially issued, which explicitly proposes to accelerate the advancement of educational digitalization and demonstrates China’s firm strategic resolve to align with the trends of the times and drive educational modernization through technology. Against the backdrop of the global movement toward Education 2050, in response to the future education visions proposed by international organizations such as UNESCO, China is leveraging smart education as a pivotal driver for systemic transformation. The nation is evolving from its domestic agenda of building a leading country in education to actively assuming the role of a participant in global education governance.
Grounded in serving the national strategy of building a leading country in education, the book elucidates the strategic position of smart education in the restructuring of the education system for the new era. It systematically outlines an open, collaborative, and dynamically evolving educational ecosystem, and proposes a systematic and practical pathway guided by institutional innovation, driven by technological empowerment, and oriented by the principles of inclusivity and equity. While providing a theoretical framework and action guide for China’s own education transformation, the book also contributes a systematic solution with Chinese characteristics and universal applicability to the development of global education. China is exploring globally referential pathways for smart education from local practices and actively addressing the global educational agenda of “inclusion, equity, quality, and lifelong learning.” As emphasized in the book, the future of education lies in the fusion of humanistic spirit and technological power, which can help us jointly advance toward a new paradigm of smart education that is accessible to all and built through collective participation and sharing. This is precisely the key contribution of China’s transition from educational modernization to global education governance.
The release of Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050 received enthusiastic responses at the Global Smart Education Conference 2025. Participants agreed that it is both an action blueprint outlining the future and an invitation extended to the world. We sincerely invite researchers, educators, policymakers, and all sectors of society who, guided by a shared vision, driven by collaborative efforts, and directed toward common goals, to jointly transform the blueprint of smart education from paper into reality. Let’s turn the Education 2050 into a force that truly nourishes every life and advances human civilization.
Grounded in serving the national strategy of building a leading country in education, the book elucidates the strategic position of smart education in the restructuring of the education system for the new era. It systematically outlines an open, collaborative, and dynamically evolving educational ecosystem, and proposes a systematic and practical pathway guided by institutional innovation, driven by technological empowerment, and oriented by the principles of inclusivity and equity. While providing a theoretical framework and action guide for China’s own education transformation, the book also contributes a systematic solution with Chinese characteristics and universal applicability to the development of global education. China is exploring globally referential pathways for smart education from local practices and actively addressing the global educational agenda of “inclusion, equity, quality, and lifelong learning.” As emphasized in the book, the future of education lies in the fusion of humanistic spirit and technological power, which can help us jointly advance toward a new paradigm of smart education that is accessible to all and built through collective participation and sharing. This is precisely the key contribution of China’s transition from educational modernization to global education governance.
The release of Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050 received enthusiastic responses at the Global Smart Education Conference 2025. Participants agreed that it is both an action blueprint outlining the future and an invitation extended to the world. We sincerely invite researchers, educators, policymakers, and all sectors of society who, guided by a shared vision, driven by collaborative efforts, and directed toward common goals, to jointly transform the blueprint of smart education from paper into reality. Let’s turn the Education 2050 into a force that truly nourishes every life and advances human civilization.
Printed copies of Smart Education: Pathways toward Education 2050
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