Vietnam - Violence threatens school environment

These days it’s common to hear about violence in school and find videos on the internet of students fighting each other.

If one types “school violence” in Vietnamese on Google, the search tool comes up with more than 18,100,000 links connecting to stories about Viet Nam’s school violence. If one types “female student fights” on YouTube, numerous hits link to violent clips of female students fighting.

Early in the 2011-12 academic year, the Ministry of Education and Training released a report saying that more than 1,620 cases of fights between students had been discovered nationwide in the 2010-11 school year.

Though schools applied several measures to stop school violence, such as suspending students caught fighting for certain periods of time, the measures have proven to be in vain.

Nguyen Minh Duc, an 11th grader at the To Hien Thanh Private High School in Ha Noi, said that there were fights at school and in his classes almost every day.

“They have so many nonsensical reasons to fight, just because they thought their friends called them on their mobile phones to insult them, or some of them fell in love with the ‘wrong’ schoolboy or schoolgirl,” said Duc.

The number of girls taking part in the fighting was equal to the number of boys, he said.

Some of Duc’s female classmates said they wanted to prove that they were in no way inferior to males and they did not hesitate to fight with each other.

Pham Phuong Loan, a student at Ha Noi University who was once the victim of a fight, said that she was beaten just because she took her friend’s textbook by mistake.

“The girl who beat me was beaten by her parents many times for no reason and she did the same with her classmates,” she said.

Who is to blame for the rising school violence? Is the morality of young people degrading? Or are parents and schools neglecting their task of teaching morality to students?

Some people believe that the best course of action would be to expel the naughty students from school.

Nguyen Minh Hoa, a resident of Dong Da District whose 16-year-old daughter was the victim of school violence, said: “Teaching such naughty students is so hard for teachers. Expelling them from school can help ease the burden on teachers, protect other students and create a healthy learning environment.”

However, lawyer Nguyen Van Khoa, a member of the Hai Phong Bar Association, said that expelling students from school would be falling into traps set by the naughty students.

“In many cases, the students fight just because they do not want to go to school anymore,” he said.

Moreover, not going to school means that they would lack education and management, potentially leading them to a life of crime in the future, he added.

Professor Van Nhu Cuong, principal of the Luong The Vinh Private High School and a member of the National Education Council, said if only we had emotional lessons about friendship, compassion, generosity and forgiveness in the school curriculum, students would be more friendly to each other.

“What a pity that there are so few of such lessons in textbooks and other Youth Union activities,” he said.

All schools have to try their best to follow the Ministry of Education and Training’s curriculum according to schedule and seek an ever higher number of graduates; the result was that moral education has been disregarded, said Cuong.

“Reducing focus on the curriculum by 30 per cent and giving students moral lessons instead can help us a lot in reducing the number of school violence cases,” he said.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Hong Mai, a member of the Ha Noi Junior Teacher’s Training College’s Student Life Division, said families and society should not lay all the blame on education.

“If a child is violent, his/her parents should review their behaviour first. If they teach their children with violence, how can they have obedient children?” she said.

Co-operation between family, school and society was very important in teaching children, and family played the first and most important role, said Mai.

In the long term, finding methods to reduce the number of school violence cases will still remain a difficult task for society and the education sector.

VNA

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