Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese

Dear friends,

I would like to share with you this article ,which printed in "The Economist"
dated Mrach 1992.

Regards,


Pha^?m Phan

* Post without permission.
* Typos are mine.

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			VIETNAM : Private lessons


" 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, 9 millions
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
goverment 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.

The bad news is that Vietnam's educational achievement is at risk. Years
of subsidies for inefficient state-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 "ten 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 run the province,
explain 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.

Low pay is a problem throughout the system : a professor at Hanoi
University is paid only 150,000 dong a month. The shortage of money has
made the goverment 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 teacher's pay.

Hanoi has a private university,the Thang Long (Soaring Dragon). It is
temporarily housed in a half-finished building, in Hanoi's western
suburbs, 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 pay 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/hour, agreed that the standard of
education at Thang Long was much higher than at the state university.

There are three private secondary schools in Hanoi and another four in
Ho Chi Minh city. Despite, or perhaps because of,their success, "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.



 
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese