Education is the key to a country’s economic progress and
its achievement of social justice.
As the year 2011 is nearing its end, we hope
to write a special article that provides our readers with an insight into
Vietnam’s state of educational development.
While it is important that we
learn to look on the bright side of life and appreciate the progress that has
been achieved, in the case of Vietnam, unless we take a long, hard look at the
problems confronting us and acknowledge our failures, the country could never
catch up with the rest of the world.
That is why though in the
beginning we intended to select both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ stories to
highlight both educational progress and the challenges facing the country, we
ended up with all the following negatives.
A heated public debate erupted
and raged throughout June when the Ministry of Education and Training put
forward a US$3.3 billion proposal to design a new curriculum and develop new
textbooks for K-12 education.
The proposal drew heavy fire
from many critics who denounced it for the excessive funding. The ministry then
tried to defuse the situation by explaining that only 1.4 percent of the
allocation would be spent on the work and the rest would go to training
teachers and education managers, and upgrading facilities.
Related story:
On June 30, hundreds of Hanoi
parents stayed overnight in front of a kindergarten in Thanh Cong Ward, Ba Dinh
District in an effort to ‘book’ a seat for their kids.
The parents gathered at Thanh
Cong A kindergarten from 3:00 pm throughout the night to jostle for a place in
a list of those who would receive the enrolment forms the school was giving out
the next morning.
This was because the northern
capital has suffered a serious shortage of preschool facilities. In the case of
Thanh Cong A, it planned to enroll 140 children aged 2 and 3 when up to 400
such kids wanted to join it.
Similar overwhelming numbers of
parents also gathered around many other preschools in the capital on the eve of
the enrolling date.
Pham Thi Hong Nga, vice
director of the Hanoi Department of Education and Training, promised to local
media in July that the capital would provide enough kindergartens for every
child in Hanoi by 2015.
Related story:
Educators and the whole society
were shocked at statistics released in July by universities nationwide that
showed thousands of high-school graduates received zero on the history tests
they had taken in university entrance exams earlier that month.
More than 95% of the candidates
got below-average scores (under 5), according to the statistics.
These were the worst results
ever known in history, many educators said.
Some said the tests were too challenging while others attributed the poor results to rote learning methods at school.
Some said the tests were too challenging while others attributed the poor results to rote learning methods at school.
However, public outrage was
fueled only after Pham Vu Luan, Minister of Education and Training, commented
that it was only normal to find so many students who scored nothing on the
tests.
Luan even told local media that
the education sector was not to blame as this was a common problem of the times
which could also be found in many other countries.
Related stories:
A top scorer who applied to Ha
Hoa Tien University in the northern province of Ha Nam failed to hit the pass
threshold set by the Ministry of Education and Training in July’s university
entrance exams.
The ministry prepared tests for
the exams which were then used by the country’s universities to enroll
students.
Phan Tien Thanh, a Ha Nam
local, scored just 12.5 out of 30 in math, physics, and chemistry – the highest
among those who had sat for the tests at the school – while the threshold was
13 for those subjects.
Ha Hoa Tien is a private
university which has been established during a recent boom of private-owned
higher education institutions in the nation.
Many then expressed doubts
about the quality of Vietnam’s private universities which have already suffered
from a poor reputation and deemed to be of an inferior quality to their public
equivalents.
In July, the Vietnamese math
team disappointed their teachers back home by earning a mere six bronze medals
at the 52nd International Mathematical Olympiad in the Netherlands, Vietnam’s
worst ever record in 35 years of competing.
Fields Medallist Ngo Bao Chau
then told Tuoi Tre in an exclusive interview that he was not
surprised by the result because even the best math schools in the country had
been admitting students with low scores in the last five or six years.
Fewer and fewer students who
had competed in international math competitions went on to choose math as a
career, he said.
Chau won the Fields Medal in
2010, a four-yearly prize set up to honor up to four mathematicians under 40
for their outstanding discoveries in mathematics.
The Department of Information
Technology (DIT) under the Ministry of Education and Training in August
proposed adding four more letters, including F and Z, to the Vietnamese
alphabet which has 29 letters.
The other two that DIT
suggested should be added were J and W.
The proposition immediately met
with severe opposition and criticism, most of which argued the Vietnamese
language would risk being assimilated into other languages if the four were to
be added.
Others said the additional
letters would encourage the ‘distortion’ of Vietnamese by ‘licensing’ many
local teens to proceed with what they are doing: combining the four with the
official letters to make strange and incomprehensible words in chats or on
online forums and social networking sites.
None of them have ever been
included in the alphabet up to now.
Related stories:
Public attention was drawn in
October to two Tuoi Tre news stories which said employers,
including a province seeking civil servants, refused to recruit candidates with
a degree from a private university.
Local experts then said they
breached the law on education which stipulates there must be no discrimination
against those candidates.
Some backed the
‘discrimination,’ explaining graduates of public schools often performed better
at work, while others preferred sticking to the law.
In Vietnam, private schools are
often deemed to be of poorer quality than their public counterparts.
Related story:
A public debate erupted in
November after changes had been made to one of Vietnam’s most famous fairy
tales – the Story of Tấm and Cám.
Specifically, the story’s
ending was edited with the cannibalistic element removed before it was
published in current literature textbooks for Vietnamese tenth graders.
Many people, including teachers
and parents, protested this modification, saying it was inadvisable to tamper
with a traditional fairy tale because it was a legacy of the past.
Some argued the removal was
good for educational purposes since the original ending might adversely affect
students’ character.
Others regarded the element
simply as a message that good people got rewarded and bad people were punished.
Tấm and Cám is a Cinderella-like
story about a beautiful young girl called Tấm who lived with
her wicked step-mother and step-sister Cám.
The story ends with Tấm getting
married to a king and the step-mother died of shock after eating her own
daughter’s flesh.
Also in November, local people
were shocked by a Tuoi Tre article which revealed more and
more college graduates were on the way back to school for vocational training
since they failed to find a job.
The education sector was then
blamed for equipping students with only theory rather practical skills which
matter a lot when looking for a job.
Many named this a funny paradox
as only in Vietnam do we find those who are unable to get a job after
graduation from college enroll in vocational schools.
But the paradox, sadly, has
become a common trend in recent years, according to an educator.
Teachers, and even parents,
have recently pointed out myriad mistakes in textbooks used to teach a variety
of subjects to K-12 students in Vietnam.
The mistakes range from factual
errors, inconsistent concepts and symbols to improper word usage and
explanations, and wrong references of dates of birth, names, and time and
location in geography, chemistry, math, and literature textbooks.
Nguyen Vinh Hien, Vice Minister
of Education and Training, told Tuoi Tre in an interview that
“minor mistakes” should be corrected by teachers themselves, whereas the
textbook publisher – the state-owned Education Publishing House – would only
take care of “big ones.”
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