VietNamNet Bridge - Local authorities are willing to spend trillions of dong to build imposing monuments, but are hesitant to spend money for nursery schools.

 

Vietnam’s education goes against int’l tendency?

A report of the World Bank shows that Vietnam has 15,500 under-six children who are deaf or hearing impaired. The majority of the students cannot access preschool education, while their parents cannot receive necessary professional support.

“The education is abandoning disadvantaged children,” said Nguyen Tung Lam, a renowned educator, chair of the Hanoi Education Psychology Association.

Statistics show that Vietnam still has 25 percent of children suffer from malnutrition or have problems in growth, and the physical disadvantages will be their lifetime problems.

Lam, when stressing that there exist too many problems in Vietnam education, commented that Vietnam education is ‘going against the growing tendency in the world’.

While other countries gather strength on preschool and primary education, Vietnam has been focusing on high school and higher education.

And while other countries reserve their budgets to help disadvantaged children, Vietnam spends big money on talented students. While local authorities can spend trillions of dong to build imposing monuments and administration offices, they would be hesitant to spend the money on building more preschools.

Only in recent years did Vietnam begin to pay higher attention to preschool education and education of disadvantaged children.

The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) decided that by 2020, Vietnam would have 75 percent of students with disabilities who can follow integrated study, while the proportion is hoped to rise to 80 percent by 2030.

However, the development of human resources for the special education sector still cannot satisfy the requirements.

Local authorities are willing to spend trillions of dong to build imposing monuments, but are hesitant to spend money for nursery schools.

It is estimated that Vietnam needs 1 million special teachers to work with students with disabilities at three levels, preschool, primary and secondary education.

Meanwhile, it has only produced 3,000 special teachers with bachelor’s degree so far.

Lam also cited a national survey conducted by the Ministry of Health, General Statistics Office (GSO), WHO and UNICEF recently on 3,000 students in Hanoi and Hai Duong which showed 9 percent of students once had intention to commit suicide, and 6 percent tried to commit suicide because of the problems in study and life. Meanwhile, 19.5 percent of students aged 10-16 have mental health problems.

The reason behind this, according to Lam, is an unreasonable curriculum design which creates too much work for students.

Some years ago, an education institute developed an initiative of weighing primary school students’ schoolbags and found that the bags were heavy if compared with the knowledge primary school students needed to receive.

MOET repeatedly stated that it has been re-designing the curriculum to ease the workload on students. However, it seems that nothing has changed. Students still follow busy learning schedules every day, from early in the morning till 10 pm.


GDVN