VietNamNet Bridge - An 8,000-word petition has been sent by the Vietnam Education Dialogue (VED) Group headed by Professor Ngo Bao Chau, a mathematician and Fields medal winner, to education and training leaders.

 

The requests made by the group on five major issues were made after thorough research to discover ways to reform Vietnam’s higher education conducted over three years.

The general viewpoint of the group is that Vietnam’s university education needs to undergo fundamental and deep reform, from principles to organizational rules, and the reshuffling will be a long process.

VED has recommended decentralizing local authorities and ministries to govern universities. It has also suggested giving autonomy to universities, which will set the enrollment numbers, tuition, curricula and training quality. 

Meanwhile, the state controls higher education through two important tools – examining training quality and making public information about schools’ training quality.

The information should be assigned to an independent organization, while the training quality should be measured by a combination of indexes about the students’ satisfaction after they finish school, the percentage of students who find a job within 12 months after the graduation and the graduates’ average income.

VED also thinks that it would be better to cut down the number of compulsory learning subjects and the number of hours students have to spend in class.

VED’s other suggestions include the establishment of university lecturers’ parliaments through which school leaders can consult with lecturers on all matters relating to scientific research and teaching, and the establishment of committees through which lecturers can offer opinions directly to boards of management.

VED is a group headed by Professor Ngo Bao Chau, a famous mathematician, with other academicians. The group’s voice has immediately caught special attention from the public and raised debate.

Ngo Bao Chau is a Vietnamese and French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad. He is the first Vietnamese to receive the Fields Medal.

Dr. Nguyen Thanh Nam, former CEO of FPT, Vietnam’s largest information technology group, now an educator working for FPT University, said it would be unreasonable to  compare Vietnam’s education with the US only and consider the US as a benchmark for reference.

Nam sparked a controversy after saying that training quality must be measured by graduates’ skills and capabilities; that is, positions and productivity. He believes that the Ministry of Education and Training should organize exams for universities to assess their training quality, and that there is no need to have schools assessed by accreditation organizations.

Dat Viet