Part 2: What is Happening to Education in Hiroshima?
Keitoku Kazuhiro, 56, the principal of Takasugi Elementary School in the city of Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture, took his own life on March 9 of this year. It was a suicide caused by overwork.
In March 2002 Keitoku had been brought in from the private sector to work as a principal, as part of an experimental initiative to introduce new leadership in the schools. However, he was subjected to such an arduous workload that he was diagnosed with depression just a month and a half after he assumed his post. According to a survey by the Hiroshima Teachers Union, administrators work more than 150 hours of overtime in most months. At a time when two senior teachers had collapsed from overwork in succession, Keitoku was crushed under a total of 370 reports required by the city board of education. Just before his suicide, Keitoku was working an average of over seven hours of overtime a day.
Keitoku’s tragedy was widely reported in the media and is fresh in memory. However, the death from overwork of a junior high school teacher in the same city of Onomichi six months earlier is not well known. Keitoku was not the only one swamped by work under the banner of educational reform.
Collapsing in Front of the Students
Nishikawa Osamu, then 54 and a teacher at Kurihara Junior High School in Onomichi, died in September 2002 of an acute brain hemorrhage. Fond of saying, “Unless you can loosen up, there can’t be good teaching,” he was well-trusted by those around him. At the same time, he often complained, “You can’t raise children on supervision alone. We’ve lost the flexibility to arrange things so we can nurture.” Discouraged about the possibility of teaching according to his ideals, he had decided he would take early retirement in March 2003.
Nishikawa was a home-room teacher for second-year students and taught five Japanese classes. On the side, he also counseled students, supervised the health service, and managed planning for the annual class trip.
A new national course of study was issued in 2002, at the same time that the school week was shortened to five days, and the teaching schedule was compressed. At the same time, Onomichi city school teachers were required to prepare syllabuses and weekly lesson plans, and the preparation of massive numbers of surveys and reports was added to the teachers’ heavy burden.
On top of all of this, last year marked the full implementation of a program called Onomichi Education Plan 21. This Onomichi take on educational reform aimed to achieve the top level in compulsory education. Its components, introduced in quick succession, included the “one school, one inquiry” program to build schools with particular characters; a general studies program of making study trips to workplaces; and compulsory open-session moral education classes, along with national academic standards testing to ensure solid achievement. The program encouraged competition among the schools and overwhelmed the schools with work.
It appears that Nishikawa entered the new school year under stress, concerned that the new course of study did not allot enough time for the study of Japanese, while new texts arrived just before school began, allowing him little time to prepare. In addition, there were daily meetings at the start of the school year to wrestle with the implementation of the workplace study trip program.
During the first term, Nishikawa was pressed with preparations both for the school athletic day and for the class trip. Training for the athletic meet took place during an intense heat wave, and around that time he began to complain of headaches and pain in the neck. He brought increasing loads of work home at night, and several days before he collapsed, he had a stack of 200 student essays to read and critique, in addition to planning for the class trip. He took to saying, “I’m tired. Weary.” When his family encouraged him to take some time off, he refused, “I can’t until after the meeting on the class trip.” On his way to class the day before he died, Nishikawa tripped on the stairs. A colleague who saw him picking up chalk soon afterward remembers that his movement was sluggish.
The next day, September 26, the meeting to explain the class trip to the students and their guardians took place in the school gym. Just a few minutes after the meeting began, Nishikawa collapsed suddenly. He was taken to the hospital, but he was already in a coma.
Nishikawa had collapsed in front of a large number of students. It was undoubtedly a great shock to many people. But, according to a colleague, “Within a week, everything returned to normal at the school, as if nothing had happened.” This too is an indication of how, pressed to the wall by their work, his colleagues were unable to indulge their emotions.
There Is Not Even Inner Freedom
“I should have quit two years ago. I can’t teach the way I want to. Old bones, make way!” Nishikawa spoke this way to people around him. In these words, we can see clearly the state of education in Hiroshima.
The number of young retirees among teachers and administrators in Hiroshima has been steadily increasing. Early retirees, according to prefectural board of education statistics, averaged about 93 per year in the late 1990s, but soared to 162 in 2002. This is because, as Nishikawa said, teachers “can’t teach the way they want to.” For example, given the required submission of syllabi and lesson plans, teachers can’t deviate from the bounds of the national course of study. Further, like corporate competition over business results, everything has been reduced to numerical measures. Schools have become like factories, and education based on the teacher’s discretion has become impossible.
The increased supervision of education in Hiroshima Prefecture was begun in response to a reform directive issued by the Ministry of Education in 1998. The immediate cause was the practice of some of the schools in the city of Fukuyama of listing the moral education course as “Human Rights” and kokugo, the “national language,” which is how Japanese language and literature classes are referred to in elementary and secondary schools, as “Japanese” in the class schedule. This was a deviation from the national course of study, and the prefectural board of education was directed to report for the next three years on the status of rectification efforts. The reports were required to cover thirteen topics in both educational content and school administration. The items included not only the name and content of moral education classes, but such matters as whether the national flag was displayed at school ceremonies, whether the national anthem was taught and sung, the supervision of teachers’ work and their hours, and the management of teachers meetings.
Hiroshima has a long history of conducting peace education, as the site of the atomic bombing, and dowa education, aimed at eliminating discrimination against Burakumin. These programs were developed and approved independently by the educational administration, working in association with a variety of organizations. However, after the reform directive, the prefectural board of education declared that “a variety of compromises were made necessary in the course of negotiations with teachers’ organizations, dowa education research associations, and various activist groups, and the neutrality of education was compromised.” This represented a 180 degree reversal of the policy. Dowa education was now considered deviant.
To begin with, the authority of the principal as a supervisor was reinforced. Teachers’ meetings became an extension of the principal, with a strengthened chain of authority to transmit his directives. There were principals who declared, “Those who don’t follow my direction are no longer needed at this school,” and democratic operation of the schools became increasingly difficult. According to one teacher, a principal baldly said, “Why don’t you just quit?” when he handed out the monthly pay slip. Relations among teachers were strained, as they were made to compete to prove their loyalty to the administrators.
The rectification directive was an authoritarian document that implied that those who did not conform would be punished, and that supervision and control were indications of loyalty to the Ministry of Education. The absolute policy regarding the national flag and anthem at graduation and entrance ceremonies is an example. The report form sent to all school principals by the prefectural board of education required detailed information in response to such questions as, “Was the flag displayed at the front of the stage?” and “Did the singing of the anthem echo across the ceremony hall?” In the “Principal’s Handbook” there was even a manual, in question and answer format, for how to deal with teachers who refused to stand for the national anthem. In this manner, 100 percent of public high schools in Hiroshima Prefecture were brought into compliance.
There are reports of a principal who called the parents of a child who remained seated during the singing of “Kimigayo.” There were those who took photographs of teachers as they were singing to record how widely they opened their mouths. Someone connected to a PTA came into a classroom one day suddenly and demanded, “You’re the teacher who sat during the singing of ‘Kimigayo,’ and you have the nerve to think you can teach!”–what amounted to a regional surveillance of teachers’ speech and conduct. And, in February 1999, Ishikawa Toshihiro, the principal of Sera High School, committed suicide as a result of contention over the national flag/anthem issue.
Managed education has taken hold in Hiroshima Prefecture to such an extent that people have been robbed of their internal freedom, but is this problem peculiar to Hiroshima?
Educational Reform Sans Children
“[What happens in Hiroshima] has become a test case for educational reform in all of Japan. If the government was to move ahead with educational reform, peace education was an obstacle and it was necessary to crush dowa education.”
These are the words of Ishioka Osamu, secretary-general of the Hiroshima Teachers Union. Many teachers describe Hiroshima as having been made the laboratory or, alternatively, the breach point for educational reform.
Presently, the government is preparing to embark on educational reform of radical proportions, perhaps encompassing revision of the Fundamental Law of Education. One can sense the government’s enthusiasm for reform as a great national movement in its official plan, “Educational Reform for the 21st Century” [issued in January 2002]. Its fundamental perspective is that “there is a spreading tendency to place too much emphasis on the individual while neglecting the ‘public’. . . . The standardization of education due to excessive egalitarianism . . . has tended to push aside education geared to fit the individuality or capabilities of children.” It seeks to introduce principles of selection and competition into school education. The Onomichi Education Plan 21, with its school evaluation system, can be seen as the vanguard of nationwide educational reform.
What, then, is the situation in the schools themselves? According to Imatani Kenji, secretary-general of the other teachers association, the All Hiroshima Teachers and Staff Union, “The distinguishing feature of the rectification directive and [Hiroshima‘s] educational reform, is that it is all about the form education ought to take, but children are absent from the discussion. We should be talking about what should be done for the children of Hiroshima.”
Teachers are being driven into competition between schools and into a race for meeting numerical goals, and they are increasingly unable to engage their students. And in order to meet their numerical goals, they are increasingly forced to interact with children in mechanical and managerial ways.
At the same time, teachers are swamped with the burgeoning surveys and reports sent down from the prefecture and city. The question of whether teachers can finish their work or not has become one of how quickly they can move children from task to task and perform their many clerical tasks. In the words of the Hiroshima Teachers Union’s Ishioka, “With the mountain of paperwork faced by teachers in the classroom, they have no sense that they are actually teaching. It’s work performed to the neglect of children.”
This has given rise to a situation where, when children come to ask a teacher to clarify something, the response is, “Ask that during the class,” or “I’m to busy to look at that.”
This situation, where an extreme workload can eat away at teachers’ psychological health, is reflected in the number of Hiroshima teachers taking leaves for psychological reasons, which has increased steadily in the years since the rectification directive was issued in 1998: where psychological leaves stood at 69 during the 1997 school year (36 percent of all medical leaves), by 2001 they had increased to 116 (45 percent of the total). Last year, in one elementary school in the city of Fukuyama, six of fifteen teachers took leave for treatment of psychological disorders. One class went through four primary teachers in half a year.
Mr. A, a guidance counselor at a prefectural high school, committed suicide in April of 2001. “Nipping [students] in the bud is not education. What have I been doing [as a teacher] all these years? You’re too cold. I quit,” Mr. A declared at a meeting to determine whether or not students would pass into the next grade. Several days later he killed himself. During the meeting there had been a confrontation among a number of teachers over failing a particular student. Mr. A’s protest was against the application of a hard and fast deadline, when just a day of remedial work would have allowed the student to pass. At this same high school, nine months after Mr. A’s death, another teacher who had been on long-term medical leave committed suicide.
According to a Hiroshima Teachers Union survey, twelve educators in the prefecture committed suicide between 1999 and the present. Of these, five were principals, one was a senior teacher, and the remaining six were classroom teachers.
Intensified supervision and control under the rectification directive has lead to numerous suicides and medical leaves. And Hiroshima‘s educational reform is quickly becoming a test case for “selective, competitive” educational model that the government is trying to implement nationally. It is a frantically driven form of education under the banner of “liberalization.” Hiroshima‘s educational reform–in the absence of children–is the shape of things to come in the near future for Japanese education.
Translation for Japan Focus by John Junkerman.
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