Vietnam EDUCATION
Village medical clinic
Courtesy United Nations
Agronomy students in a college near Can Tho
Courtesy United Nations
The Vietnamese inherited a high respect for learning. Under
Confucianism, education was essential for admission to the ruling
class of scholar-officials, the mandarinate. Under French rule,
even though Vietnamese were excluded from the colonial power
elite, education was a requisite for employment in the colonial
civil service and for other white-collar, high-status jobs. In
divided Vietnam, education continued to be a channel for social
mobility in both the North and the South.
Before the 1950s, poverty was a major impediment to learning,
and secondary and higher education were beyond the reach of all
but a small number of upper class people. Subsequently, however,
rival regimes in Hanoi and Saigon broadened educational
opportunities. Both governments accomplished this despite the
shortage of teachers, textbooks, equipment, and classrooms and
despite the disruptions of war in the 1960s and early 1970s. The
school system was originally patterned after the French model,
but the curriculum was revised to give more emphasis to
Vietnamese history, language, and literature and, in Hanoi, to
the teaching of revolutionary ethics and Marxism-Leninism.
In the years after 1975, all public and private schools in
the South were taken over by the state as a first step toward
integration into a unified socialist school system. Thousands of
teachers were sent from the North to direct and supervise the
process of transition, and former teachers under the Saigon
regime were allowed to continue their work only after they had
completed "special courses" designed to expose "the ideological
and cultural poisoning of which they had been victims for twenty
years."
The educational system in 1987 was based on reforms announced
in January 1979 that were designed to make education more
relevant to the nation's economic and social needs. These reforms
combined theory with practical application and emphasized the
training of skilled workers, technicians, and managers. The
reforms also stressed the need to develop the country's
scientific and technological levels of achievement until they
were comparable to international levels in order to assist
Vietnam in expanding its technical cooperation with foreign
countries in general and socialist countries in particular.
The 1979 reforms were implemented in stages beginning in the
1981-82 school year (September to August). By 1985 the northern
and southern schools had been integrated into one system, new
textbooks had been distributed throughout the country, and the
curriculum had been made uniform for the first time. The
government also tried to make the first nine years of general
education compulsory, despite the continuing shortage of
teachers, school buildings, and equipment, particularly modern
equipment for teaching applied sciences. The low morale of
underpaid teachers with low job status complicated these
attempts.
The perennial shortage of money presented another stumbling
block in education. In order to address the problem, the 1979
reforms called on agricultural cooperatives and even "private
citizens" to make contributions to local schools and to
participate in "a movement for self-supply of teaching aids." In
an apparent effort to utilize local resources for educational
development, the government assigned "people's educational
councils," set up at the grass-roots level, to undertake the
task. Composed of representatives of the school, parents, local
administration, and various mass organizations, these councils
were designed to promote more productive relations between the
school and the local community.
Education continued to be structured in a traditional manner,
including preschool, vocational and professional schools,
supplementary courses, and higher education. "General" education,
however, was extended from ten to twelve years. The first nine
years of general education formed the compulsory level,
corresponding to primary and junior high schools; the last three
years constituted the secondary level. Graduates of secondary
schools were considered to have completed training in "general
culture" and to be ready for employment requiring skilled labor.
They were also eligible to apply to colleges or advanced
vocational and professional schools. The general education
category also covered the schooling of gifted and handicapped
children. As part of the effort to foster "love and respect" for
manual labor, students spent 15 percent of school time at the
primary level and 17 percent at the secondary level in manual
work.
Vocational schools at the secondary and college levels served
to train technicians and skilled workers. Graduates of
professional specialized schools at the college level primarily
filled mid-level cadre positions in the technical, economic,
educational, cultural, and medical fields. Senior cadres in these
fields as well as members of the upper bureaucracy usually had
graduated from regular universities. The 1979 educational reforms
gave high priority to vocational and professional training in
order to absorb a large number of general education students who
were unable to proceed to colleges and secondary-level vocational
schools. In 1980, for example, 70 percent of primary school
students and 85 percent of secondary school students failed to
matriculate either because of bleak prospects for employment
after graduation or because the country's ninety-three
institutions of higher learning could admit only 10 percent of
all applicants.
Vocational schools continued to struggle to attract students.
In a study of mass education in Vietnam, a Western scholar
observed that "Vietnamese students aggressively avoided
vocational schools and the specialized middle schools favored by
the government." He also noted:
The reason for the imbalance between the technical schools and
the general middle schools was only too clear. The former were
thought to foreclose entry to high-status occupations. The latter
were thought to be an indispensable part of the ideal educational
odyssey through university and into the upper bureaucracy--the
modern equivalent of the old Vietnamese Confucian quest to become
a metropolitan examination graduate...or imperial tribute student
. . . as Vo Nguyen Giap bitterly acknowledged in January 1982.
Supplementary, or complementary, education served adults who
had not completed a basic and secondary general education and who
needed additional training in their specialties. Open to those
under forty-five, supplementary courses were offered through
correspondence, at worksites, or at special schools. Officials
expected that participants in these courses could raise their
"cultural level" to the equivalent of students who had completed
ninth or twelfth grade.
The number of students in institutions of higher learning
increased rapidly from about 50,000 (29,000 in the North and
20,834 in the South) in 1964 to 150,000 in 1980. Hanoi and Ho Chi
Minh City served as the two major centers for universities and
colleges; major provincial capitals were the sites of regional
colleges; and the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry
of Interior sponsored an unspecified number of colleges. Of the
150,000 college students in 1980, approximately 23 percent were
female.
In the mid-1980s, some Vietnamese observers believed that the
college system needed reform to make it more diverse and
flexible. They promoted change in order to accommodate more
secondary school applicants and to improve the quality of college
education. Students were perceived as spending too much time
trying to earn diplomas and not enough time "in practical,
creative activities."
Vietnam took part in international student exchange and
cooperation programs in the fields of education and technical
training, principally with the Soviet Union and with other
communist countries (excluding China). Nhan Dan reported
in 1983 that Vietnamese and Soviet linguists had compiled
textbooks for Vietnamese secondary general education schools and
that they had also begun a similar project in Russian for use in
Vietnamese colleges. The Soviets also assisted the Vietnamese in
publishing scientific and technical dictionaries. In 1984 a
Soviet source reported that, under the Soviet program of
educational assistance that had begun in 1959, about 60,000
Vietnamese specialists and skilled workers had been trained in
addition to 18,000 vocational students at the college and
secondary school levels. As of mid-1986, Vietnam had "cooperative
ties" with 15 Soviet universities.
In 1986 the reforms initiated in 1979 remained in the trial
and error stage, but the educational system was considerably
improved. Illiteracy was declining, and about 2.5 million
children were being admitted to school annually. The Vietnamese
report that in 1986 there were 3 million children enrolled in
child-care centers and kindergartens, close to 12 million
students in general education schools, and more than 300,000
students in vocational and professional schools and colleges.
Scientific and technical cadres numbered more than 1 million.
Nhan Dan reported in September 1986 that schools were
shifting from literary education to literary, ethical, and
vocational education, in accordance with the goals established by
the 1979 reforms. The quality of education, however, remained
low. Material and technical support for education were far from
adequate, student absenteeism and the dropout rate were high,
teachers continued to face difficult personal economic
circumstances, and students and teachers in general failed to
embrace the socialist ideals and practices the regime encouraged.
In April 1986, Reform Commission head Hoang Xuan Tuy related
that two-thirds of preschool aged children had not yet enrolled
in school, that elementary and junior-high-school education in
the highlands and in the Mekong River Delta was inadequate; that
instruction in general was still oriented toward purely academic
subjects and theory divorced from practical application. The
majority of general education students, he added, were
preoccupied with college entrance; and vocational schools,
professional schools, and colleges had yet to restructure their
curricula and training programs or to formulate plans for
scientific research and experimentation. In Hoang's assessment,
such shortcomings were symptomatic of a very low level of
financial and human resource investment in education that was
derived from the party and the government's failure to recognize
the importance of "the human factor" and the fundamental role of
education in socioeconomic development.
Data as of December 1987
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