VietNamNet Bridge – VND34 trillion:  a 34 followed by 12 zeroes. That’s the price tag ($1.6 billion in US dollars) that the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) puts on its program to renovate the school system’s textbooks.

The question now is, could officials of the ministry have really been surprised at the dismay and outrage that announcement has evoked from scholars, education experts, and average Vietnamese?

Unflattering words have been used to critique MOET’s renovation plan. Experts have called it “unfeasible”; some say the plan consists of “just slogans”, while one says MOET has been “incapable of defining the shape of the Vietnamese education system for the next 10 years”.

“You (MOET) are right when saying the curricula and textbooks must be renovated, as they have become unsuitable and backward. But you are not saying what you will do to reach that goal,” commented National Assembly Chair Nguyen Sinh Hung.

Answering the question over how the VND34 trillion would be spent, MOET’s Deputy Minister Nguyen Vinh Hien said it would go towards recompiling the curricula, textbooks, training and retraining teachers and management staff, and on publicity. The sum does not include expenditures for the upgrading of physical facilities at poorly equipped schools.

Professor Hoang Tuy, a well known educator, said he was dumbstruck upon hearing of the program’s planned cost. “I hope I heard wrong,” Tuy told Tuoi Tre News. “VND34 trillion means $1.6 billion, a gigantic number, which is thousands of times higher than any figure I could have imagined”.

Tuy affirmed that even the rich economies of the world do not spend money like water in this way, especially in the midst of difficult economic times such as Vietnam currently faces. “The estimates are unacceptable,” Tuy insisted.

Associate Professor Van Nhu Cuong, Headmaster of Luong The Vinh High School, a well-known educator, affirmed that the textbook recompilation effort could be competently performed with a budget one thousandth (1/1,000) the size of MOET’s proposed figure. “I believe that a set of textbooks for one grade should cost about VND2.5-3 billion,” he estimated. “This means that we would need VND36 billion to compile textbooks for the 12 general education grades.”

“If adding in other expenses, including the fees for inviting highly qualified experts to consult on the project, the cost would be higher. But it could not be more than 3/1,000 of MOET’s figure,” Cuong claimed.

Chair of the National Assembly’s Economics Committee, Nguyen Van Giau, pointed out that Vietnam does now spend fully 20 percent of its budget on education development. He cautioned, though, that if such a large sum is set aside for textbook recompilation, the implementation of other projects may be adversely affected.

One education expert emphasized that, even with the massive expenditure proposed, no one can say for sure whether the plan to renovate the nation’s education system would prove successful.

He, like others in his field, may be experiencing an uneasy sense of deja vu. In 2000, Vietnam also kicked off a program to build up standard curricula and diversify textbook compilers. However, most agree that little or no progress was made. And, to date, MOET remains the nation’s only textbook compiler.

MOET’s Do Ngoc Thong, Deputy Director of the Secondary Education Department, has tried to reassure the public, asserting that the VDN34 trillion would be divided amongst seven or eight different spending items.

However, he said he cannot remember exactly how much is to be spent on each item.

Nguyen Thao