Vietnam - Follow-up - Historian assails subversion of history teaching

Vietnam’s educators are using history as a tool for politics, a leading historian has lamented.

Prof Dinh Xuan Lam was pitching into a recent public debate on why thousands of candidates scored zero in history in the university entrance exam last month.

Some experts have pinned the blame for this on dull and dogmatic history textbooks, and criticized authorities for using it for political propaganda.

Lam, a People’s Teacher who has himself authored several history textbooks, said history was a challenging science like any other, and should be objectively approached and presented.

He too slammed the Ministry of Education and Training, the sole textbook publisher, for using history as a propaganda tool.

"We have been trying for long to prove to education officials that they are mistaken about history.

“It is not a subject to propagandize politics using historical events and statistics, but it is a science with all its fascinations and challenges."

The former way of teaching history, which was meant to inspire patriotism and heroism during wartime, should not be used in peacetime, he said.

Lam, who is vice president of the Vietnamese Association of Historical Sciences, also said there were many errors in history books, pointing to a story about Vietnamese walking to China to pay tribute to emperors during a certain period and calling it “absurd.”

The association had repeatedly called for correcting textbooks, he said. "There are major historic events which are wrongly portrayed and have been pointed out at many seminars. But the ministry has yet to make changes to wrong judgments and viewpoints, merely changing dates, names, etc.”

In the debate on the low scores, many teachers have blamed the need for high-school students to memorize almost everything, even trivial things, terming it a “mechanical” requirement.

While the learning is by rote, the test paper required critical thinking, they explained.

Some also blamed the low scoring on insufficient learning time. For instance, 12th graders are expected to learn nearly everything about world history since 1945 and Vietnamese history since 1919 in just one or two classes a week.

The number of students scoring average marks (5 out of 10) or above in the exam was the lowest in the last several years.

Lam said the results hardly surprised him given how history was taught in recent years.

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