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BRICS No Longer Debates How to Educate, but How to Connect the Talent of Its Countries
  • Carolina Gaviria Salazar
    journalist and communication strategist
While much of the educational debate in Latin America continues to revolve around coverage, school infrastructure, or assessment systems, one of the most influential geopolitical blocs on the planet has just placed a different conversation on the table.

From August 5 to 7, the city of Bhubaneswar, India, hosted the 13th Meeting of BRICS Education Ministers, one of the preparatory meetings for the XVIII BRICS Summit of Leaders, scheduled for September under the Indian presidency. More than a technical gathering, it was a political signal: education has ceased to be an exclusively national matter and has become a component of the bloc's international strategy.
This is no small detail. When a bloc like BRICS — which today represents nearly 49% of the world's population, around 40% of global GDP measured by purchasing power parity, and more than a quarter of international trade — decides to dedicate part of its political agenda to discussing education, it is worth asking what it is seeing that others have not yet seen.
The interesting thing is not that BRICS is talking about education. The interesting thing is what it is talking about when it talks about education.
For decades, education systems were designed to respond to the needs of each country. Doctors were trained to staff national hospitals, engineers to build local infrastructure, and lawyers to interpret their own laws. Today, that logic is beginning to feel insufficient.
Artificial intelligence, remote work, international scientific research, and global innovation chains are transforming the labour market much faster than university curricula are changing.
It is no longer enough to prepare professionals to practise in one city or even in one country. We must begin to question whether we are preparing them for a world where teams work across several continents, where qualifications must be recognised across different education systems, and where innovation increasingly depends on international collaboration.
The agenda of this meeting had as its main axes early childhood care and education, technical and vocational training, and the development of skills to respond to labour market transformations. This offers a clear clue as to how the geopolitics of knowledge is changing: the ministers did not only discuss improving the quality of universities or expanding educational coverage. They debated issues such as the mutual recognition of academic qualifications, the mobility of students and researchers, joint scientific research, the development of skills for the digital economy, the strengthening of entrepreneurship, and the construction of permanent cooperation mechanisms between the higher education institutions of member countries.
In other words, the ministers did not meet solely to talk about schools. They met to talk about the talent that will sustain the economies of the coming decades.
On the XVIII BRICS Summit of Leaders
The Indian presidency chose as its motto for BRICS 2026: "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." And it is worth pausing for a moment on those four words.
Resilience requires citizens capable of adapting; innovation needs researchers, scientists, and entrepreneurs; cooperation demands universities connected to one another; and sustainability requires critical thinking and scientific literacy.
In all cases, the starting point is the same: education.
What is Happening in Latin America?
Meanwhile, in Latin America, the educational debate continues along different paths. In Mexico, discussions around the admission process to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have revived an old question: are we still mainly assessing the ability to memorise information when the world demands very different skills? Colombian pedagogue Julián de Zubiría has insisted on this same concern for years. In an interview with BBC, he argued that schools should focus less on transmitting information and much more on teaching people to think, value, and act. The difference may seem subtle, but it completely changes the way we understand education.
Perhaps that is precisely the point where the conversations begin to converge. This coincides with what OECD Director for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, summarises: "Education is no longer about teaching something for life. It is about preparing people to learn throughout their lives."
Sources:
·         Government of India – Ministry of Education. 13th BRICS Education Ministers' Meeting, Bhubaneswar (August 5–7, 2026). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/pralhad-joshi-to-attend-13th-brics-education-ministers-meeting-in-bhubaneswar-heres-whats-on-the-agenda/articleshow/132885724
·         BRICS 2026 (Indian Presidency). Official Agenda of the XVIII BRICS Summit of Leaders (September 2026). https://www.brics2026.gov.in/
·         OECD. Education at a Glance (latest edition).
·         BBC News Mundo. (2026, August 3). El escándalo de los exámenes de la UNAM es una oportunidad para abandonar la escuela tradicional basada en la memoria. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c330rvm4xpzo

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