From: v-nguyen@cis.ohio-state.edu (Viet-Anh V Nguyen)
Subject: [EDUC] Private Lessons
Originator: v-nguyen@retina.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University, Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 22:09:19 GMT

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'.)


    "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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.