« Designing Dissent | Main | Language Reform: Talking not Walking »
May 21, 2005
Education Reform: Walking not Talking
Another story about the urgent need for educational reform in Vietnam rang out like a proclamation that the earth was in fact round. This type of story comes out in intervals, meanwhile little has changed.
To successfully carry out the country's industrialisation and modernisation process, higher education has to be renewed as quickly as possible, emphasised Prime Minister Phan Van Khai at a meeting of the National Education Council held yesterday in Hanoi. (VietnamNet, 21/05/2005)
Meanwhile, language classes at the Alliance Francais, British Council, Goethe Institut and private language schools are preparing the students for NOT continuing university level education in Vietnam but abroad! Regionally close Australia and Singapore remain targets with those with financial means. Students are languishing in Vietnamese universities. “Sending students overseas is not an efficient way” says Thomas Vallely, the new director of the Vietnam Education Fund of the Fulbright program, (the VEF is a US scholarship that enables technical and science students to study in the US, whereas the original Fulbright was only open in economics).
Meanwhile, "Vietnam will establish an additional 110 universities and colleges in the period to 2010 with an effort to raise the number of tertiary institutions to 354 throughout at that time, up from the current 244, according to a plan of the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET). [United Nations Development Program (UNDP)]" Hopefully there will be significant improvements to the existing ones first.
And universites alone do not make the student. See earlier posts on bookstores and libraries in Vietnam.
Posted by rst at May 21, 2005 10:07 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.diacritic.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/24