Teacher fails kids' exam

2004-11-26 14:29

Tokyo - A Japanese elementary school teacher with decades of experience was fired after he failed exams designed for his students, an official said on Friday.

The 56-year-old teacher in the western city of Osaka was declared unfit to teach after he repeatedly failed the test on kanji, the Chinese characters commonly used in Japanese.

"In March, he was put into a special training programme to improve his teaching skills. But he failed to show any signs of improvement," an official with the Osaka education board said.

"Generally speaking, one would hope a public school teacher can pass a kanji test for grade-school children," he said.

A governmental study this year said Japanese students' ability to speak their own language was going down and blamed the trend on a declining birth rate that has reduced competition in schools.

Twenty percent of students at private universities had Japanese skills below high school level, compared with 6.8% when a similar survey was taken between 1998 and 2000, said the survey, adding that some foreign students studying in Japan spoke the language better than native speakers.

- AFP