Beleaguered Schoolteachers in Japan
A spate of appalling crimes since the latter half of last year has included the case of a schoolgirl who went missing on her way back from school and whose body was later found abandoned in a hilly area, and another schoolgirl who was stabbed to death by a teacher at a cram school. Worry and concern among parents of small children are steadily heightening. In rural areas where the population has been declining, quite a few school routes lie outside the reach of general scrutiny; police and local communities are expected to make continuous efforts to secure children's safety, but such crimes seem to impose fresh responsibilities on both schools and schoolteachers. Now, at a time when higher efficiency is being demanded of school education, and working conditions for schoolteachers are more demanding than ever before, perhaps it is impossible to expect them to respond to these new problems swiftly. The findings of recent surveys concerning schoolteachers provide a picture of their situation.
The first is a questionnaire survey conducted in December 2005 by the Cabinet Office. The survey was addressed to 1,084 education boards and school corporations across the country (valid reply rate - 80%), 129 teachers at primary and junior high schools in Koto-ward, Tokyo (19.8 %), and 131 English teachers across the country (6.0 %).
The survey showed that 38.2 percent of the school corporations and 37.3 percent of schoolteachers surveyed said that an increasing number of schoolteachers lacked teaching ability, the major reasons cited by the former including "a decline in the quality of those who become schoolteachers themselves" (38.8 %), and those by the latter including "an increase in duties, longer working hours, etc. which make it impossible to spend time on study and self-improvement" (58.8 %), respectively.
Another survey, also conducted in December 2005 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, concerns psychological problems of schoolteachers. The survey revealed that teachers at public primary, junior high and high schools across the country who took sick leave due to psychological problems during the previous fiscal year totaled 3,559, a record high since 1979 when the statistics were first gathered. The number of schoolteachers suffering from psychological troubles has been increasing sharply, and their proportion to those who take sick leave as a whole has also increased steadily. There are reportedly many cases where schoolteachers are distressed in teaching their pupils by excessive demands from and insufficient understanding among parents, and where they are overwhelmed by an increasingly stressful workload, including making reports to education boards, etc.
Now let us take a closer look at the results of a survey on unionization rates among organizations of school personnel (as of October 1, 2005), released in December 2005 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
The unionization rate among organizations of school personnel, which reached a peak of 86.3 percent in 1983, declined to 47.5 percent, a one percentage-point drop from the previous year. The unionization rate of the largest organization, the Japan Teachers' Union, was a record low of 29.5 percent, a drop of 0.4 percentage point from the previous year, when the figure dropped below 30 percent for the first time. At the same time, the proportion of new schoolteachers and personnel to join such unions has dropped for the third consecutive year to 25.1 percent. While the participation rate in the Japan Teachers' Union increased by 0.9 percentage point from the previous year to 19.8 percent, the rate among young teachers remained low.
The move to substantially reduce the number of civil ser of the teachers' unions, which have traditionally dealt with teacher's concerns, together with a reduction in the number of colleagues, may well make it much more difficult to alleviate the pressures affecting them.
