From: quangl@tabasco.sps.mot.com (Quang Le)
Subject: Re: [EDUC] Private Lessons
Originator: daemon@media.mit.edu
Reply-To: quangl@tabasco.sps.mot.com
Organization: N/A
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 01:24:44 GMT

Hello, netters

Thanks VietAnh for posting a comprehensive article about the current situation
of Vietnam Education. 

>Excerpted without permission from The Economist (March 28th-April 3rd 1992):
>(There's also an accompanying picture of Vietnamese schoolchildren running and
> smiling at the photographer with the caption 'The best days of their lives'.)

I strongly recommend netters to read "The Economist," a prestige magazine
from  Great Britain. each issue of "The Economist" usually has one or two 
articles about Vietnam and its people. Their correspondents come to Hanoi or
Saigon to collect news and talk with people to compose the story, not sitting
around Orange County, reading communist newspaper (Tuo^?i Tre?), then  making 
a reciprocal story such as "Vietnamese miserable girls..."


>    "An ignorant nation is a weak nation. That is why I propose to start
>     an anti-illiteracy campaign, considering illiteracy an enemy as 
>     dangerous as foreign aggression and famine." Thus Ho Chi Minh in 1945.
>     The campaign that Uncle Ho launched, and his successors continued, has
>     been one of the few clear successes of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
>     The marriage of foreign capital and a large supply of well-educated
>     workers is the foundation of the party's plan to double GDP per person
>     by the turn of the century. Some Asian investors believe Vietnam could
>     then take off, like South Korea and Taiwan, both of them addicted to
>     education.

>     When Ho made his speech, only 300 Vietnamese had university degrees and
>     95% of the population was reckoned to be illiterate. Today 9m Vietnamese
>     children go to primary school and 88% of the population is literate. At
>     the top, more than 7,000 Vietnamese have earned doctorates, mostly in 
>     technical subjects, at Soviet universities. In the middle, the government
>     frets that only 72% of children go on from primary to secondary school.
>     By contrast, in Thailand, where GDP per person is ten times higher than
>     in Vietnam, only 28% of children go on to secondary school.

A non-communist government, as in Thailand, never has the same mean with 
democracy, development, and a literate population. Anyone can point out any
nation in South East Asia have a real multiparty politics? The monopoly of
power is a disease of any developing country. South-East Asia is no Eastern
Europe. The communist government may be the worst choice, but it still lives
comforable in a geopraphical area like that for a long time. 

If one chooses neither to cooperate nor fight ( by real firearm, not by net
flame :-)))the VN communist government he could help their own people by
buying 30-year bonds. The bonds will mature as the same time the communists
agree to give up power!

>     The bad news is that Vietnam's educational achievement is at risk. Years
>     of subsidies for inefficient stated-owned enterprises have drained money
>     away from the social services. A report by the education ministry admits
>     that school premises and teaching aids are "miserably poor", primary
>     schools are short of "tens of thousands of teachers", and the teaching
>     methods of teachers tend to be too "conservative". In Nghe An province,
>     the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh and today the poorest part of the country,
>     a representative from the People's Committee, which runs the province,
>     explains the problem. The committee would like to be able to pay teachers
>     more than 60,000 dong ($5.22) a month, he says. But there is no money.
>     Most teachers in the province raise chickens and pigs to make ends meet.

That is a sad true. But what could we do to help them? Buy eggs and porks???

>     Low pay is a problem throughout the system: a professor at Hanoi Univers-
>     ity is paid only 150,000 dong a month. The shortage of money has made the
>     government quietly drop one of the proudest boasts of socialism, free
>     education for all. Schools and universities can now charge fees in order
>     to top up teachers' pay.

Dropping free education, free health care, free housing, and guarantee of
employment, the current government of Vietnam moved close to militarilism as
in Thailand as ever. 

>     Hanoi has a private university, the Thang Long (Soaring Dragon). It is
>     temporarily housed in a half-finished building, in Hanoi's western sub-
>     urbs, which would have been the Pushkin Institute if the Russians had not
>     abandoned it. It admitted its first students in 1989 and now has 147,
>     studying applied mathematics, computing and English. Each pays 50,000 dong
>     a month. There was not a computer to be seen in one computing class. But
>     the students and their professor, who was moonlighting from the state
>     university for 10,000 dong an hour, agreed that the standard of education
>     at Thang Long was much higher than at the state university.

In my heart, I heard a lot of "Help!," from students and professors in this
school. Could anyone please point out a safe and efficient to help them?

>     There are three private secondary schools in Hanoi and another four in Ho
>     Chi Minh City (Saigon). Despite, or perhaps because of, their successes,
>     "the leadership is afraid of private schools," says a senior academic in
>     Hanoi. After all, not many parents want to pay to have Marxist-Leninism,
>     disguised as "civics education" and "collective activities", drummed into
>     their children, as still happens in state schools.

Just a little fun. Is it the same reason that American parents want to send
their children to private school here?

Have a nice day.
Tha^n,
Quang Le

PS. Besides Nhan Tran's News, I think that there will be a mutual benefit if
many of us type and post interesting articles about VN to this forum. 





Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese