The “Evolution of Teacher Training: International Cooperation and Integration” conference was held on October 24-25 in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. It was jointly organized by the Belarusian State Pedagogical University and the Dialogue Eurasia Platform (DAP).
We must invest in education to have a better future. A country’s development largely rests on the importance it attaches to education.
Pyotr Dmitrievich, rector of Belarusian State Pedagogical University
Seventy academics from Turkey, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland attended the event. The speakers underscored the importance of preparing future teachers for their chosen profession, notably by providing adequate funding and by helping teachers develop strong moral values.
Pyotr Dmitrievich, the rector of the Belarusian State Pedagogical University, called for an increase in funds allocated to technology and teacher training. “If we fail to support the profession of teaching with sufficient facilities, we will hardly find any student to be ready for working in this field,” he explained. “Teachers should not go through financial hardships and they should be able to focus solely on their profession.”
Dmitrievich also discussed the importance of education for society as a whole. “We must invest in education to have a better future,” he argued. “A country’s development largely rests on the importance it attaches to education.”
Part of that importance involves moral values, according to DAP President Sezer Cakmak. He indicated that the purpose of education goes beyond raising academically successful individuals. “Universities and schools must also seek to endow their students with basic human values and ensure that they make these values the guiding principles of their lives,” he said. “Teachers are the safeguards of our future. So we must not only equip them with due knowledge, skills, and positive behaviors, but also raise them as good, morally-upright, and well-educated human beings having balanced, healthy, and enhanced personalities and characters.”
To that end, Cakmak said that DAP supports various investments in education because the organization believes that teachers are the “engineers who will build the future.” He added that the kind of conferences like the one held over the past two days would make positive contributions to pedagogical education in both Belarus and Turkey.
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