VietNamNet Bridge – A lot of Vietnamese parents complain that their children have problems when going to school because the bad learning environment.

When preparing a child for going to primary school, a parent would say to the child that this would be a very beautiful well equipped class, where there are tables and chairs, teachers and classmates, where the child is taught to become a useful citizen of the country.

However, a lot of children find it very difficult to get adapted to the schooling environment and they realize that the class described by the parents can be seen only in their dreams.

Some months ago, local newspapers reported that a teacher forced a student to stand for hours in the open air because the student could not remember the five things the Uncle Ho taught Vietnamese children. Another teacher reportedly asked students to slap their own faces.

Nguyen Thi Thu, a parent in Dong Da district in Hanoi, related that when she saw a child coming and slapping her daughter’s face, she came and asked why the child did this, and received a very strange answer: “because I am the monitor of the class.”

“I felt very angry. Who taught him think and say that way?” she said. “Did he mean that the head of the class can beat others? Is this the result of the education?”

Ha, a woman in Khuong Thuong residential quarter in Hanoi, related that one day, she realized that her niece was very sad after she returned from school. The girl then told Ha that the classmates refused to make friends with her, because the girl has no father.

“It seems that children nowadays prove to have an old head on young shoulders,” Ha noted.

“The discriminatory treatment has been conducted even among small children. They may “boycott” their classmates just because the classmates are from the poor families, or because the parents have divorced,” she added.

“I do not think that small children need to be taught such cruel words,” she continued.

Kieu Trang, a parent in Kim Lien residential quarter, said it seems that teachers nowadays follow unreasonable teaching method.

One day, the teacher asked the monitor to help her manage the class when she was away. The monitor then “governed” the class by beating the classmates with a long 50 cm ruler.

“I cannot imagine that the teacher would give a small student such a big power that the student himself cannot understand,” Trang said.

The stories about how to prepare children for primary school have become a hot topic on education online forum.

A parent with nickname Xuan2000 said she was so disappointed about the first days of her daughter at school.

“I imagined that these would be very happy days for my daughter. However, everything was quite different,” she said.

“The monitor with a scowl on her face knocked the ruler into the table, causing the sounds that may frighten anyone. Then she read the texts on the blackboard and asked others to read after her,” she said. “The monitor had eyes wide open in anger when someone made mistakes.”

Others parents have also expressed their dissatisfaction about the method that they call “anti-educational.”

“Some years ago, I sent my daughter to a nursery school near the house. The teacher there always asked the biggest boy in the class to slap into classmates’ faces with a ruler,” a parent said, adding that right after realizing that she decided to send the daughter to another school.

Compiled by Kim Mai