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Who wants to be a teacher these days? A once noble and attractive profession has sunk to the status dubbed “black,” suggesting working conditions approximating slavery. Long hours, low pay, grinding pressure, abuse from above, abuse from below – a toxic mix, spawning what Spa (May 2-9) aptly calls a “school crisis.” Who wants to be a teacher? Fewer and fewer. Seventy-five percent of the nation’s school districts are short of teachers, education ministry figures show.
More than ever the future depends on education. More than ever the future of education is in doubt. An overloaded, understaffed system creaks along, straining to cope with the most rapidly changing world mankind has ever confronted. Older teachers are retiring in droves and cannot be replaced. Younger ones take leave in record numbers – for mental health problems brought on by stresses scarcely imaginable to earlier generations of teachers or, less desperately but equally unprecedented, reflecting recent progress in reconciling professional and personal life, to have babies, raise children or nurse aging and infirm parents. Leave taken, there’s no one to fill the gap.
The stresses are both symptom and cause. Staff shortages increase workloads; overwork is exhausting; exhausted teachers are inattentive; kids run amok; order breaks down; teachers collapse; those who don’t, keep the mechanism functioning after a fashion – but is this education?
Is this a career? A young man or woman pondering the future, stirred, let us say, by idealism and the lofty goal of opening young minds to the joys of learning, might well pause on the threshold of the classroom in its present state – and turn elsewhere.
Japan as of April 2022, the education ministry calculated, was 2,558 public elementary, junior and senior high schools teachers short of its needs. This seems strange. Wouldn’t the dwindling number of children ease the strains on the system? Yes and no, says Spa – yes in purely numerical terms, no owing to another problem which the shrinking child population might aggravate: the growing number of children requiring special attention.
Children have less peer company than ever before. Never have they been so overwhelmed – not to say choked – by grownup and elderly infiltration of their environment. They too are under stress. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a frequent and spreading manifestation. Japanese education, once notorious for treating all students as though all were equal and alike, no longer can because they no longer are (if they ever were). Pathology aside, the gifted seem more gifted, the average less quick, the economically deprived more likely to lag farther behind classmates whose parents send them to expensive after-school supplementary classes. Sharper distinctions in character and circumstances call for more individual attention in the classroom – which is not available because the staff it requires is not at hand.
Fewer aspiring teachers means declining professional quality, Spa fears. In 2000, only one applicant in 13.3 actually made it into the classroom; in 2021, one in 3.7. A generation ago schools could pick and choose from a large pool of aspirants; now they must settle for who they can get. Not everyone is a born teacher. A system too hard pressed to be selective risks putting children at the mercy of dubious characters. “Power harassment,” frequently cited as a rising school problem, is a catch-all phrase covering everything from a teacher’s snappish impatience through classroom quasi-dictatorship to – at very worst – outright abuse.
Children deserve better of teachers than frazzled irritability. But teachers deserve better of the system they serve; to which all too often they’re being sacrificed. The pressure they’re under fosters neither good work nor human dignity. Classroom challenges aside – and one more of those that must be mentioned is the expanding curriculum as new subjects like computer programming and elementary school English are added to reflect society’s rising demand for more and new knowledge – there’s an escalating workload that includes, besides intensive lesson preparation and supervision of after-school clubs, various administrative tasks – office work – lately being foisted on them as an economy measure.
Spa’s coup de grace is a phenomenon earlier generations of teachers knew little of: “monster parents.” “You give a kid hell for skipping class and smoking,” fumes a 42-year-old junior high school teacher, “and the next thing you know you’ve got the parents down your throat: ‘If your lessons were more interesting it wouldn’t happen!’”
© Japan Today
18 Comments
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Ricky Kaminski13
The end game of a system that never strived to move with the times. You would be shocked to see how little thinking goes on in these classrooms too. Like seriously shocked. Dysfunctional holding pens of outdated methods, abuse, teach-to-the-test mentalities, and listless masked-up teachers all feeling deep down, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark! The students are hip to the fairly obvious fact that everyone is pretending too. Not like the future of a nation depends on them or nothin.
Luckily kids are too resilient to care too much and just get on with being teenagers, but you turn off that switch, the call to lifelong learning at great peril, and it stays off!
jeancolmar
The opening paragraph could have been about 30 years ago. The over-workloads. The vacations that actually don't exist. The totalitarian principals. The endless backstabbing between teachers. The vindictive transfers--like to a mountain or an island--that separate families for years. And more.
I only wonder why the attrition of teachers is happening now and not decades ago.
Note: The U.S. is also experiencing a dearth of teachers, who. with everything else, suffer low and possible gun violence.
wallace
Today I used ChatGPT to translate English into Japanese. It was very good 100% correct. More than machine translations.
TrevorPeace
About ten years ago I appeared as a guest 'geography' teacher in a classroom of 9-year-olds, where a Japanese friend's son attended. My friend was also a teacher, but that's another story, and it parallels what several comments here have described, sadly.
At any rate, for an hour I had a class of very attentive children, some of whom could understand English but the majority of which appreciated the teacher's translations of what I was telling them. Those students learned more about British Columbia and Canada than they possibly could have with a regular Japanese teacher, I'm sure. I have the 'thank-you' letters and photos to show that opinion.
So, to make this long story short - perhaps Japanese schools and the children who attend them would benefit from guest instructors on a regular basis? Any subject for the curious. Open their minds and they'll grow. Just a thought.
GBR48
Slim the curriculum down. [Globally] most kids will never need most of what they are taught. Move more to the period between school and university (UK: sixth form) where brighter kids specialise more in advance of University. Kids pick up much more nowadays from sources outside school and are more streetwise than they used to be.
Fixing the misery of Japanese teachers shouldn't be that hard as much of the worst stuff is unnecessary and could be surgically removed. I suspect there isn't the will or leadership to do it though. Japan really doesn't like change, particularly cultural change.
Monster parents are a global problem. The world is becoming an angrier place.
Moonraker
The Education Ministry should not get a free pass. It has no conception of what a child is, much less what a human being could be. I know because I spent years teaching the highest-level products of the system.
Septim Dynasty
Another sign of a poor Japan in the making.
bass4funk
I understand why people come and do it, but when I came to Japan, and saw what these people were making, at that time, it seems like a pretty good deal for someone who was new, fresh out of high school, and starting off or starting or trying to make a living in a new country, and many people that I knew became successful and started their own English schools, or moved on to something else, but nowadays, it’s just something that’s just not feasible, what they’re paying these people are just beads and scraps, no way to make a living in today’s world.
aaronagstring
Are people reading the same article, or not reading it at all? This is about Japanese teachers in the education system of Japan, not ALTs or foreign teachers coming to Japan to make money. Totally irrelevant arguments.
Elvis is here
Unless tests become open book, regarding AI, teachers have nothing to worry about.
jeancolmar
Error !! Dunce for day! Here is the correction.
"Note: The U.S. is also experiencing a dearth of teachers, who. with everything else, suffer low WAGES and possible gun violence.'
Aly Rustom
Teaching in Japan sinking to status of 'black' profession
What profession in Japan isn't?
kohakuebisu
Despite the rat-tat-tat list of "this is terrible", and "this is terrible", and "this is terrible" in the article, it misses the well known and pretty obvious link between teaching and "black" professions in Japan. Which is
An increasing number of teachers are not employed on full conditions.
Yep, lots of them are supposed to do the 70 week as a part timer or contracted employee, not as a "kyoin", a teacher on a full contract. A teacher with kyoin status in Nagano will be on over 6 million yen a year, which is poor for the hours spent at school, but is enough to raise a family in inaka if you get subsidized housing like teachers do. If you are just on a contract (hiseiki), it'll be under 4 million for the same workload.
Working someone hard does make a job a "black" profession. Working them hard for poor conditions does though.
THOMAS R MOUNTCASTLE
I lived in Japan for almost 12 years. This article is spot on. Taro kun can do no wrong.
Sven Asai
The problems stem from a time long before, not from the current situation. A real teacher doesn’t care a lot about overtime or too low payment, but is in fact available for the students 365days &24hrs and just wants to teach and see the students become splendid society members, active, engaged, skilled and more intelligent than even the teacher. That’s the goal, students who are or can become better than the teachers! The same for parents, they were mostly well educated and mannered themselves and therefore wanted the same for their children and the same the teachers worked for. Parents acted in line with teachers, not against them. And of course last but not least, the students in majority wanted to learn something, for themselves, for their future or because they had interests in certain subjects, some even in many or all different subjects. They preferred good teachers and textbooks, the stricter the better as long they were fair to everyone and interesting during lessons. That were the criteria, before some more allowed hair colors, kind of skirts or trousers and underwear , or demanding thousand different bathrooms for thousand different genders. You see, it’s not even fitting anymore even if there were no shortages. Everyone acts against the others instead to cooperate. And that has reasons which arose long ago, not just today.
Sal Affist
The problem is that the compensation for a teacher tells everyone how little they are valued. If society really valued teachers, they would be paid more and there would be more competition to get such positions, leading to better quality. When they get paid (after factoring in their hours) about what someone could earn at a minimum wage, why bother?