24 January 2026

 

Kind Attention:

Alysha Alva and Can Remzi Ergen

Hosts of UNICEF’s celebration of the International Day of Education

World’s Largest Online Lesson Plan

Cc:

Johannes Wedenig – UNICEF Representative, South Africa

Malcolm Plant – World Link Coalition

 

Dear Alysha and Can,

 

Thank you for inviting The Humane Education Trust to attend the World’s Largest Online

Lesson Plan in celebration of the International Day of Education. Your chosen theme –

“What does HOPE look like and what does HOPE feel like?” – was deeply compelling.       I wasparticularly struck by the phrase in your video: “HOPE is a call to what is yet to be.”

 

Please accept our sincere congratulations on the success of the event. From 14-year-old Livvy in China, whose hope was to save Africa’s rhino from being hunted for its horn, to 13-year-old Abeera in India, whose hope was for leaders to halt “the bloodshed, violence, and industrialisation,” we witnessed raw and earnest HOPE expressed through the voices of

children who will inherit our beautiful and fragile planet.

 

Can’s reminder that HOPE is an action was especially meaningful. In that spirit, may we

respectfully suggest that the World’s Largest Lesson Plan for 2027 be centred on the recent

clarification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child through General Comment No. 26, paragraph 35.

 

GC26 paragraph 35 states that:

“Children must be protected from all forms of physical and psychological violence, whether

in their home or in society, and from exposure to violence, such as domestic violence or

violence inflicted on animals.”

 

As we understand it, UNICEF’s mandate is precisely to protect children from violence. We

now know that exposure to any form of violence erodes the innate empathy with which all

children are born. GC26 paragraph 35 explicitly seeks to safeguard that very empathy –

without which civilisation itself could not have evolved.

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