Going to public
schools in California, I got used to average students envying Asian ones,
including Vietnamese, for breezing through math and science class. Now in
Vietnam, I hear people asking how to improve education, personally or
nationally, along U.S. and other western models.
What
this tells me: Each country is battling its own, evolving challenges.
In
the United States, education observers warn year after year that the country’s
performance in the hard sciences is slipping behind that of Asian nations. Some
attribute the decline to recession-induced budget cuts, hitting schools so
severely that last year the Associated Press wrote teaching “has never seemed
less appealing.”
Yet
the United States allocates more money to K-12 schools than any other country
except Luxembourg, according to the Programme for International Student
Assessment. And everyone, in theory, can go to school for free.
In
Vietnam, on the other hand, “public” education carries an entirely different
meaning. Just about everyone pays, and those who can’t afford tuition,
especially in the countryside, drop out. Chronically underpaid teachers find
other revenue, through either direct bribes, or extra classes they politely
suggest students take. The combination of instructor endorsement and exam
obsession has enabled a widely-held perception that cheating is rampant across
the country.
Academic
dishonesty burst into the national spotlight this month when video footage from
northern Vietnam caught students freely consulting one another during
graduation tests, some of them aided by a teacher.
National
assessments are an essential part of the country’s tradition. A 2010 report by
PISA lists Vietnam among a handful of countries where a history of civil exams
and scholars in government have produced the modern-day emphasis on education
as a measure of success, compared with wealth or military achievement in other
countries.
But
the tests have shifted priorities to ends rather than means, to quantitative
scores rather than actual knowledge. Partly for that reason, learning has
become a process of rote memorization in Vietnam.
How
to get students to care enough about tests to study, but not so much that they
stop studying -- that’s a balance just about every country struggles with.
Seeing
a Vietnamese instructor cheat on tape is jarring but not isolated. Even in the
United States it’s become common enough to read about teachers giving students
answers or filling tests for them, an arguably recent controversy as some U.S.
states have experimented with different public school tests.
More
subtly, the preoccupation with exams -- statewide testing, SATs, ACTs, and
others -- has sacrificed critical thinking. A related factor, the increasing
competitiveness of U.S. colleges, also has incentivized high school students to
look good on paper but empty otherwise. One of my old high school teachers
complained to me that his students from a decade earlier could run circles
around the ones he teaches now.
Vietnam
risks a similar fate, a future of quantifiably accomplished young people
without any critical thinking skills.
To
take action, Vietnamese educators could look at U.S. colleges that are trying a
more holistic approach to the admissions process. That is, they are evaluating
applicants based on not just numerical scores but extracurricular activities,
interests, and other indicators of the students’ overall character. What that
means for Vietnam is, judging students based on a range of achievements, rather
than just the one test result in high school that decides where they end up in
college.
As
for pre-college, I don’t know a lick about pedagogy, so I will just stick to
the obvious. The top concern among students now is to ultimately find a
well-paying job, which is a respectable goal, but not one that always fosters
genuine learning. The jobs will come eventually, but first educators must get
students to care by meeting them on their own territory. What do young people
do for fun, and how can it be threaded into their education? Reading manga?
Playing games online? Surely there is a way to incorporate these into
occasional lesson plans. By starting early, teachers can create lifelong
learners, and if they don’t know where to start, they can always ask the
students.
LIEN
HOANG
TUOI
TRE
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