11ᵗʰ Tokyo Tech Liberal Arts Mini Symposium

In September 2000, after numerous United Nations (UN) conferences, world leaders came together with the resolve to reduce extreme poverty. This lead to the creation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

The MDG targeted 8 goals were met after a 15 years period. And the final MDG report showed that it was the most successful anti-poverty movement in history. Thus, in September 2015, a different - but yet similar - undertake was formed: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). It consists of 17 goals, with the second goal of the MDG (Achieve universal primary education) becoming the 4th goal in the SDG, namely: Quality education.

In fact, with the MDG promoting universal primary education, developing countries experienced a boom in the construction of primary schools. However, the teaching body did not follow suit. As a result, classes were often overloaded and teachers were lacking training. Also, the social environment undertook vast changes from 2000 to 2015.

In 2000, most information technologies were considered luxury while in later years they became more common. As a result, the teaching methods also had to incorporate such technologies.

So it was necessary for the new endeavour, the SDG, to care about the quality of the teachings. Therefore “Teacher training” is an important concept to achieve the goals targeted.