By Keiichi Inai

After the Fundamental Law of Education was revised on December 15, 2006 for the first time since being enacted in 1947, the Abe Cabinet started working on educational reform and set up the Education Rebuilding Council which submitted a report on the three reformed educational bills. They are the Educational Personnel Certification Law, the School Education Law, and the Local Educational Administration Law.

Prime Minister Abe then explained his policy and will submit the bills to the Diet, during this session which ends in mid March. Those who are engaged in education are watching the progress of the revisions of the three laws carefully. However, at this stage, the revisions still have unclear points.

The revision of the Educational Personnel Certification Law is the most important among them because the Cabinet has set a policy to ban reinstatement of teachers deemed unfit to teach. They suggested revamping the teacher license law and the system of recognizing teachers who lack proper teaching abilities. They think that the quality of education depends on whether a teacher's ability is good or bad.

They intend to pass the bill, but can school principals and local Boards of Education remove "incompetent teachers" properly? There could be cases where managerial personnel may put pressure on teachers they don't like in order to get them to resign. Some teachers may be not able to teach freely.

Problems happening at various educational institutions are caused not only by teachers' misconduct and lack of teaching ability, but also by students and their parents. For example, bullying and suicide ought to be solved not only by teachers, but by everyone concerned. So even if the Board of Education makes teachers enhance their learning ability by competing with each other, there will still be many unsolved problems. It is not enough to try to revitalize the education system by only improving the quality of teachers.

Some schools were criticized because they concealed the fact that they didn't teach the compulsory subjects required to be studied for graduation and instead made their students concentrate on studying for the university entrance exams. The government is trying to resolve this problem by changing the board and school systems on the basis of the law.

The entrance examination system itself will not change, so the chances of this happening again remain. Schools which have shamelessly concealed their illegal conduct have caused distrust among citizens and especially among the students who are eager to be teachers. What is needed now is to get rid of the inclination to be influenced by the school objective of meeting numerical targets.

The government is carrying out education reform as reflected in the title of the panel's report "Rebuilding of education by society as a whole." Many citizens favor a speedy push toward reform, but more debate among the government, teachers and the general public is needed. It is unforgivable to have a system which permits management do whatever it wants at schools.

It is better to carry the revisions over for now and discuss them more carefully. The current education problems are a reflection of society and it is not easy to solve them by only revising the Fundamental Law of Education or the three education laws. The government should recognize these problems as serious social problems. Whether the government's education rebuilding effort is really necessary or not, we must keep an eye on the progress of these reforms.