Since children shape the future of society, education is the foundation on which society stands.

Particularly in Japan where natural resources are scarce and the population continues aging inexorably while the birthrate remains chronically low, providing a quality public education is a matter of life and death for the nation.

And because a high-quality education requires competent teachers, the education ministry recently proposed a set of measures for securing such teachers.

However, the proposals are far from adequate.

The government must rethink its overall policy plans and give a higher priority to education and discuss in earnest how to secure the necessary funding to that end.

The long working hours of schoolteachers have always been a big problem. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the hours put in by Japanese primary and junior high school teachers are excessively long by international standards.

And the sorry reality is that the teachers have only very limited time to spare for personal interactions with individual pupils or for preparing for classes--matters that have directly to do with the development of schoolchildren.

Youngsters who need extra help from teachers because of their problematic home environment or their Japanese language skill levels are on the increase today.

And changes in society have added to the variety of subjects that need to be taught, not to mention that junior high school teachers are also responsible for overseeing extracurricular club activities.

The education ministry has taken all sorts of steps to shorten the teachers' long working hours, limiting them to 45 overtime hours per month. However, in fiscal 2022, 64 percent of primary school teachers and 77 percent of junior high school teachers reached that limit.

Their tough working conditions are driving many people from the profession, and the number of schools that cannot secure sufficient teachers is growing.

The latest measures proposed by the education ministry were intended to change this situation.

In accordance with the current law concerning their salaries and other benefits, public school teachers who put in overtime work receive a uniform 4 percent of their base salaries added to their paychecks.

Calls for scrapping this law have been loud for years. However, doing so would result in an estimated 900 billion yen ($5.7 billion) a year in overtime pay expenses, according to one study.

The education ministry has decided against abolishing this law for now, as it will also be difficult for school principals to accurately assess overtime hours of teachers.

However, the ministry did propose this time to raise the overtime pay amount from the current 4 percent to "10 percent or higher" of the teachers' base salaries. This is in view of the more recent working conditions of teachers, and we certainly agree that increasing the salaries of overworked teachers is the way to go.

The ministry also proposed new measures that are in keeping with the ongoing work style reforms.

Among the measures is to promote the so-called "work interval program," which is meant to ensure that teachers get a specific rest period from the end of the day’s work to the start of the next day’s work.  Another is to expand the rules that limit the number of classes assigned to primary schools’ homeroom teachers by introducing teachers specializing in certain subjects.

We believe both these measures make sense.

Still, so long as the present salaries and demanding working conditions remain unchanged, we do not expect any significant increase in the number of people applying for teaching positions.

Reducing teachers' workloads and guaranteeing greater efficiency, as well as hiring many more teachers and school counselors, are all indispensable to improving the quality of public education.

Japan’s proportion of public expenses for education to the gross domestic product (GDP) remains to be lower than the OECD average for many years.

The government must not jeopardize the future of society by not implementing necessary policies.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 1