Japan’s Former State Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Professor Kan Hiroshi Suzuki outlined Japan’s shift from SDGs to Sustainable Well-being Goals, arguing that education in the AI era must prioritise well-being, agency, authentic assessment, inquiry, and human-centred skills.

As 2030 is fast approaching, it is time to re-evaluate the extent to which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been achieved, and ask a very important question: what comes next? In an effort to address this looming question, Japan has recently initiated a major educational reform, shifting focus towards the so-called ‘Sustainable Well-being Goals’, or SWGs, as a concept beyond SDGs. In his keynote presentation titled ‘Japan’s Education Reform and Future of Global Education in the AI Era’, at the 17th Asian Conference on Education (ACE2025), Former State Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Professor Kan Hiroshi Suzuki of The University of Tokyo, Japan, traced the changes in policy and practice following Japan’s recent education reform, and the implications of AI proliferation for education. 

According to Professor Suzuki, international organisations are increasingly moving away from considering GDP as a measure of social well-being. Instead, the OECD has introduced the ‘Better Life’ index, and the United Nations have started publishing an annual ‘World Happiness Report’. ‘The underlying philosophy driving the concept of Sustainable Wellbeing Goals within education is a shift from passive learning to self-directed learning and agency, transitioning from learning that competes on memorisation, speed, and accuracy to learning driven by self-driven motivation through inquiry-based learning’, Professor Suzuki explained. Following this redirection of attention, Japan has, for the first time in 40 years, reformed its national curriculum in 2020 as well as its university entrance examinations in 2021. 

As for the national curriculum, Japan already added foreign language learning, cross-cultural communication, and problem-solving initiatives at the primary level. At the senior high school level, new subjects such as ‘public philosophy and public policy’ were introduced to cultivate the ability to handle conflicts and act responsibly. History was also redesigned as ‘comprehensive history studies’, situating Japanese history within a global context to develop historical thinking rather than isolated factual learning. Senior high school entrance examinations have also changed, specifically the assessment criteria, to better assess students’ thinking, judgment, and expression skills, rather than memorisation, knowledge, and pure skill. 

According to Professor Suzuki, this reform came after some serious consideration about where Japan ranks globally in terms of well-being. ‘According to the OECD PISA results’, he explained, ‘Japanese education is generally considered successful. But the low level of student well-being and the sharp increase in school refusal cases represent a serious situation’. Regarding science literacy, Japan ranked first among OECD countries. However, children’s well-being in Japan ranked 37th out of 38 countries, and last in terms of students’ confidence in self-directed learning. The same is true for family support and a sense of belonging, with Japan being ranked the worst among 80 countries. The proportion of people who do not engage in self-improvement or self-development after entering the workforce is also very high. 

These issues become even more pertinent as we enter an AI-dominated era. ‘We, as a planet and as human beings, are facing the limits of civilisation, mass production, mass energy consumption, and mass waste’, Professor Suzuki exclaimed. ‘We are at the end of the “industrial society”-style of education. Now, AI and robots are taking over the jobs of “industrial society”-type people’. This is why education needs to make an important distinction between educational reform for AI and educational reform by AI. In terms of how education can prepare students for an AI-driven society, Professor Suzuki explained that identifying, defining, and solving problems concerning the Earth, society, humanity, regional revitalisation, food issues, energy consumption, and the environment will be increasingly important. Equally important, according to him, will be non-cognitive skills, such as collaboration, understanding others, persuasion, negotiation, and service orientation, as well as abstract disciplines such as art, history, archaeology, philosophy, or theology for cultivating innovative thinking. ‘So please check and understand again what a human is, and what AI is’, he urged the audience, noting that a hybrid collaboration is very important. 

In terms of education reform by AI, Professor Suzuki mentioned ways in which we can incorporate AI into education well. According to him, AI should be regarded as a teaching assistant rather than a teacher replacement, and every student should have access to an assistant like this. Keywords he proposed for this implementation include self-directed, self-motivated, inquiry-based writing, and individual and personalised learning.

Professor Suzuki closed his presentation with an important remark for a future that includes AI: ‘The way to master Generative AI is the ability to question – how to make a good question – not to answer it’. This is in line with what was discussed at The 6th Barcelona Conference on Education (BCE2025), where Professor Carlos Delgado Kloos from the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, and Director of the UNESCO Chair on Scalable Digital Education for All, stated that there is no one absolute truth, and that the question matters more than the answer.

Watch Prof Suzuki’s full keynote presentation at ACE2025 in the video below.

Banner image: Yanhao Fang, Unsplash