"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today." - Malcolm X
Malcolm X said this in 1964. It has never been more practical. Or more urgent.
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping which skills are valuable, how quickly they expire, and who gets left behind. The question is no longer whether change is coming. It is whether we are keeping up with it.
I was 20 before I spoke a word of English. Today I lead international teams at Google and YouTube. That distance wasn't covered by a degree. It was built through continuous learning.
Formal education opened my first door. But it was everything that came after. Skills built, adapted, and sometimes completely relearned. That stopped me from being left behind as my industry changed around me. This is where lifelong learning becomes essential, not as an aspiration, but as a practical necessity.
We see this consistently in the data. Research shows that adults who continue learning see measurable improvements in earnings, career progression, health, and wellbeing. Learning is not just enriching. It is protective.
And yet there is an uncomfortable pattern hiding in plain sight. According to the Learning and Work Institute's Adult Participation in Learning Survey, the likelihood of participating in learning declines by 4% with every additional year of age. The moment we most need to keep developing is often the moment we begin to slow down, and the latest data shows adult participation has fallen sharply, with just one in five adults currently learning in any form.
That has real consequences. For individuals: skills becoming outdated, opportunities narrowing, confidence eroding. For organisations: capability gaps that are harder to close. For society: deepening inequality between those who continue to adapt and those who do not. Doing nothing is not neutral. It has a cost.
This is why the WEA matters more than ever. WEA was founded on a belief that was radical in 1903: that education belongs to everyone. More than a century later, that mission remains unfinished.
Today, WEA delivers hundreds of courses designed to meet people wherever they are in life, not wherever the system expects them to be.
An ESOL class for someone finding their voice in a new country. A confidence-building course that can be the difference between someone returning to work or not. A digital skills class that can be the difference between participating in today's economy or being left behind by it.
As Vice-Chair of the People Committee at WEA, I see both the impact of this important work and the scale of the opportunity. Because the risk is not that people cannot learn. It is that they stop.
The passport Malcolm X described does not expire. But it does need renewing, repeatedly, and deliberately.
