22M Students in Vietnam Start New School Year

More than 22 million students of all levels in Vietnam are starting the 2014-2015 academic year on Sept 5, state media reported. Of the total, there are 4.3 million preschool children; more than 15 million high school pupils; 400,000 students of vocational schools and nearly 2.2 million college and university students, the Ministry of Education and Training said. In the new school year, the education sector will conduct four major tasks with a focus on comprehensive reform as required in the party’s resolution. Vietnam has defined education as one of its national policies. The current schooling system is criticized for being bulky and ineffective, teaching children with outdated and propaganda methods without soft skills and interaction with society, unlike in Western countries which focus on critical thinking, creativity and innovation, cooperation and communication. Experts attributed the failure to the chaos in the education sector as teachers and students at tertiary level tend to chase after grades rather than soft and hard skills. Worse still, the country has up to 26.2% of university graduates jobless and 61% of graduates need to be retrained at work. As a result, Vietnamese manpower’s productivity is low, equal to one fifth of Malaysians, two fifth of Thais, and one fifteenth of Singaporeans. Vietnam is facing a strong brain drain if the government does not offer better policies to encourage intellectuals, mostly the foreign-trained ones and overseas Vietnamese, to return and work in the home country, observers said. (Vietnamplus.vn Sept 4)