Everything
starts with thinking before you act…
I often arrange to meet a Vietnamese at, say,
for example, 8pm. I’m ready at 8pm and waiting but people often ring me to say
they’re on their way so I wait… often for half an hour or more…This is time I
could be using for other things.
Vietnam has big plans, a big population and is
trying hard. This story is not about criticizing the Vietnamese.
In the traffic, people don’t look before they
go on the road. In the shops they don’t offer alternatives to make the sale.
Things happen on a daily basis because people seem unwilling to consider consequences
or cause and effect. I often ask the Vietnamese, ‘Why did you do that?’, when
I’m mystified as to why problems occur. I often get the reply, ‘Because
everyone does it that way’.
The excuses for why are many. The real issue
is to get people to change their attitudes. And this always starts with
education. Yet in Vietnam, a large proportion of education is stuck in a time
warp – meaning that it has not changed in a long time.
So this is the beginning of the great change…
getting people to realize that there other ways to do and think about things
and avoid or prevent obvious problems.
The first way is to design education so
everyone is more or less learning the same thing. Traffic education for
children is a good example. Some children learn to look left, and then right
and then left again before they cross the street or ride away on their bikes.
Yet everyday I see dozens of kids’ ignoring red lights. So the rules of road
safety must be taught to all kids (and adults) regardless of the law or whether
the learners are from low social-economic groups.
The next way is to get people thinking about
cause and effect and consequences. The teaching is simple… ‘what if”… the
exploration of possibilities… In Western education, students are taught about
cause and effect to learn that actions have consequences far beyond the
immediate results. This is a key component of technical and scientific training
– what happens to the road after you built – how to wire a house safely. The
concept is to get them plan effectively as part of school activities – this
leads to a habit of thinking before doing later in life.
Of particular importance is the need to allow
students to contribute to their own learning; doing team projects, presenting
knowledge to the class, discussing topics and issues, thinking about solutions.
This is vastly different to responding to exams, tests and drills. It requires
both teacher and student to become more responsible for the education generated
and actively examine the quality of what is learned. Not easy to change in a
culture that teaches acceptance and compliance rather than innovation and
challenging the thinking of the culture.
A striking feature of Asian Education is the
low level of self-learning encouraged by the educational systems. More advanced
educational systems foster the love of reading and the idea of ‘life-long’
learning; the notion that modern life changes so fast those workers must
upgrade their knowledge and skills regularly. It’s sometimes being excused as
too expensive but both books and knowledge are being digitalized at a
extraordinary speed and internet cafes are not expensive in Vietnam.
The final and hardest part is to link
education to the real world needs of people, companies and the national goals
of Vietnam. This requires a lot of international help to transform however the
Vietnamese must retain control of the direction and pace of such assistance. At
the moment, the nation is the first stages of an ambitious plan to upgrade and
modernize tertiary and online education. That’s a brilliant start but will take
some years to produce noticeable results.
The yet un-resolved question of how to do this
in vocational and technical education should become part of a national
invitation with benefits for international contributors and trainers. In the
western systems, this is about ‘training the trainer’. Those trainers then
train others, who then train others. However the challenge is to teach the
trainers to deal with the needs of different clients and the economic needs of
particular areas.
Vietnam is developing fast but the spread of
better educational methods is not yet able to match this progress. A young workforce
eager to learn new ways is a bonus as is the expanding internet access. However
the greatest challenge lies in accepting the price change will bring. Managers
and systems will have to be more open to innovation and examination. Workers
will have to accept that life will not be so relaxed and casual and the nation
will have to become more open to outside influences.
This nation’s youth and energy are ready for
the challenge in my opinion. I have met so many bright and cheerful young
adults keen to learn more… the hope rests with them.
STIVI COOKE
* Stivi Cooke is a qualified teacher of English and a
workplace trainer in hospitality in Hoi An.
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