Non-negotiable skills for Global Citizen Ed for Sustainable Development
By Esther E. Gottlieb
In the area of AI what skills would education need to develop for global development and sustainable development? The research we did with the Task- Force on AI and Education at the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University shows that while AI can expand digital capabilities and accelerate access to information, but education must not lose sight of the human capacities that remain fundamental to learning and the future of global citizenship. Learning from case studies Iyengar, Gottlieb and Medon (2026) list ten non-negotiable skills in education with AI. Skills for learning with AI, showing how to advance a balanced approach to AI—one that addresses policy challenges, strengthens cultural and sustainable futures, ensuring that students, faculty, and administration, remain in control of the technologies that meant to support the SDGs. At a webinar (July 22, 2026) organized by Center for Sustainable Development I was asked:
“Do you think that there will be a temporality to the list of non-negotiable skills? or do you predict the list will get longer or shorter?”
The report published by of the Think Tank FII, lists the following 10 non-negotiable skills:
Critical Thinking – Question sources, weigh evidence, and reach your own conclusions instead of trusting authority or AI.
Ethical Reasoning & Moral Courage – Weigh competing values and not to act under social or personal pressure.
Empathy – Understand others' experiences through interpersonal relationships.
Creative Thinking – Make unexpected connections and imagine what hasn’t existed before.
Communication & Persuasion – Express ideas clearly and adapt to an audience through human interaction.
Resilience – Tolerate failure and navigate ambiguity when there's no clear answer.
Self-Knowledge & Metacognition – Recognize your own biases and correct your thinking over time.
Collaboration–Work through conflict and build consensus with people, not just agreeable tools.
Civic Literacy– Understand power and institutions to participate responsibly in community life.
Intellectual Humility– Stay comfortable not knowing and keep the will to unlearn and relearn.
Temporality of the list of “non-negotiable skills”
Temporality — yes, but it operates on two different levels, and items age at different rates: headings on our list are close to timeless. Ethical reasoning, empathy, intellectual humility — these aren't contingent on labor markets or technology; they're closer to "what it means to function well as a human among other humans," and that hasn't changed much across centuries, therefore I would say those hold up for a long time as headings.
The definitions for Communication & Persuasion, Resilience, Collaboration, and Civic Literacy already define themselves in relation to AI, even though the heading doesn't say so. "Through human interaction," "not just agreeable tools," "when there's no clear answer" — these phrases only make sense as emphases because there's now an agreeable, pattern-completing alternative with AI available. Fifteen years ago, nobody needed to specify that sustainable development communication should happen "through human interaction" — what else would it be? these four items are non-negotiable in substance, but the specific way they are worded is a 2026 artifact, written in implicit contrast to AI. That's exactly the kind of content that will need rewording (not replacing) as the contrast between global citizenship education and AI shifts— For example, once AI agents behave less like "agreeable tools" and more like something with friction and disagreement built in, we will have to rename that skill.
Civic Literacy is a mostly culturally bound skill when it comes to sustainable development, and most likely needs to be updated in context—within the actual structure of local power, and that structure is moving faster than the other skills right now (algorithmic governance, platform power, etc.).
Longer or shorter?
For a list built this way — one line, one clean verb phrase, one contrast point — I'd predict it stays close to ten, maybe compresses to eight or nine, rather than growing. A few reasons:
Self-Knowledge & Metacognition and Intellectual Humility are already circling the same territory (both are about accurate self-assessment and willingness to be wrong). As pressure mounts to keep such lists usable, these two might merge.
Resilience and Collaboration both really encode "how you function when things aren't clean and easy" — one solo action, one social action. They could stay separate, but I'd watch them get pulled closer together in framing global citizen’s education.
New entries are more likely to show up as sub-bullets under existing headings than as new top-level skills, because our headings are already pitched at a high enough level of abstraction to absorb new specifics. If some new AI-driven failure mode emerges in the next few years, it more plausibly becomes a bullet under Critical Thinking or Ethical Reasoning than a new category.
So, my net prediction is stable-to-slightly-shorter at the heading level, with real change happening in the wording underneath — particularly in the four items that are currently defined in implicit opposition to AI.
Dr. Esther E. Gottlieb, Ph. D., an International Education Specialist, joined Comparative and International Education during the heyday of “development education”. She has experience training teachers at Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv. For over a decade, she was senior advisor for international affairs at Ohio State University, teaching, researching internationalization, Area Studies Centers’ education outreach, and program evaluation. Her published work includes Identity Conflicts: Can Violence be Regulated? (with J. Craig Jenkins) and Education and Social Change in Korea (with Don Adams); “The Academic Research-Teaching Nexus in Advanced Industrialized Countries,” and “The Discursive Construction of Knowledge: The Case of Radical Education Discourse.” Her historical and theoretical explorations of reforms and their implementation have led her to follow the development of AI in education settings.