The Ministry of Finance held a meeting of the Finance System Council on Monday, Oct. 27, and proposed to reduce about 5,000 elementary and junior high schools in reference to the budget compilation of compulsory education. Based on the basic guideline (12 to 18 classes a school) of The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the Finance Ministry will advance the integration and abolition of small schools. They intend to reduce the budget of compulsory education by decreasing the fixed number of teachers. In the current situation, however, as schools are regarded to play a pivotal role in rural areas, some people are likely to oppose the proposal saying it will go against regional revival.
In rural areas, there are many schools which are smaller than the standard scale determined by the MEXT. The Finance Ministry provided their perspective that they will decrease the number of elementary and junior high schools from around 30,000 to 25,158 if the number is adjusted based on the standard of the MEXT.
The Finance Ministry pointed out the government spending on elementary and junior high schools per student is higher than that of western countries. There is also a fact that the number of teachers per student increased by 1.4 times in 25 years, and as “the integration and abolition of schools and the reduction the number of teachers has not advanced yet” (the Budget Bureau), the ministry explained the necessity of schools’ integration and abolition.
The Ministry of Finance is planning to ask the MEXT to reduce the budget based on the estimation in order to prepare for the budget of the new fiscal year. The MEXT is trying to reconsider the present school districts.
The integration and abolition of schools has drawn criticism that “it has the possibility to make depopulation of rural areas more serious” by the village in Ehime Prefecture. More objections are expected from rural areas or researchers of semi-mountainous areas against the integration and abolition plan for the sake of efficiency regardless of the situations of rural areas or good points of small schools.
(Oct. 28, 2014)