Low Pay, Inadequate Facilities Plague System : Vietnam’s Schools Still Not Making the Grade

When last year’s school term began, an influential columnist surveyed Vietnam’s schools and delivered a bleak report to his readers.

“Tens of thousands of requests for resignation have been turned in by schoolteachers, citing such excuses as meager wages, poor working conditions and declining health standards,” he wrote.

“In many localities, the learning conditions of our children are very bad. Classrooms are small and have leaky roofs. Desks and chairs are in very bad shape. There is a shortage of blackboards, chalk, paper and ink. Five or six students share one set of textbooks.”

The column, entitled “Things That Must Be Done Immediately,” appeared in the Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan and was signed “N.V.L.,” who, as every Vietnamese knows, is Nguyen Van Linh, general secretary of the party.

That was 1987. How do things look now, months into another fall term? Not very different.

“At the beginning of this school year, the Council of Ministers pointed out the decisive role of education in the socioeconomic development of our country,” said Nghiem Truong Chau, vice minister of higher and vocational education. “The Ministry of Finance was told to increase the investment in education. . . . We are still negotiating.”

Education in Vietnam is a success story going sour.

When Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the elimination of illiteracy as a primary goal of newly independent Vietnam in 1945, the country had just five high schools and, according to Ho, fewer than 10% of the Vietnamese people could read and write. Over the next few years, his Viet Minh guerrillas, while defending their regime against the returning French colonialists, created a legend in revolutionary education by bringing literacy to the countryside.

9 Out of 10 Are Literate

Now, Chau said in an interview in her Hanoi offices, 9 out of 10 Vietnamese are literate. But are they learning the lessons they will need to pull a nation of 63 million out of the depths of economic stagnation?

“We are facing some difficulties,” conceded Chau.

A few examples:

-- The country’s 500,000 teachers, including university professors, make no more than 20,000 dong a month (about $22 at the official rate of 900 dong to the dollar), plus rice rations.

“I have 40 years’ seniority and make 15,000 (dong),” said Hoang Nhu Mai, a 70-year-old professor of literature at the University of Ho Chi Minh City. “I can last about five days on that, so I do some private tutoring. I write for a newspaper, I write books. We are labeled non-productive. An accountant here makes more.”

The economic squeeze has forced many young teachers, especially in the high-cost south, to quit the classroom in search of higher-paying jobs. Chau said that more are being trained than are resigning, but Mai insisted that this is not true in the south.

-- Schooling for Vietnam’s 13 million students is compulsory through the 5th grade, but the dropout rate at the end of the compulsory period is “rather big,” Chau said--at least 40%, mainly in the countryside and among the ethnic minorities in the mountain provinces, where education is least pervasive.

On completion of the 12th grade, students can take an entrance examination for one of Vietnam’s 95 general and specialized universities. No more than 15% are admitted, and another 20% to 30% go into vocational schools, which are promoted under the state plan.

-- Deficiencies in materials, equipment and classrooms exist from 1st grade to the university level. At a prestigious elementary school in Hanoi, which offers grades one through nine, headmaster Nong Ich Doan said the average class has 60 pupils and that “most of our textbooks are at least three or four years old.” The pupils, as elsewhere in Vietnam, are on half-day shifts.

Eager Students

The booming of a drum marks the end of recess (badminton, table tennis and calisthenics; there is no room for field games like soccer), and a large group troops to geography class. Their desks are worn, the benches splintered, but the children are eager, hands shooting into the air when the teacher asks, “Who can name the capitalist countries of Europe?”

To help boost his teachers’ salaries, headmaster Doan rents out his classrooms at night to foreign-language tutors, neighborhood organizations and a local pharmaceutical company that is training its workers. The fee for a classroom is 300 dong a night.

Unlike other Southeast Asian students, the Vietnamese are spared the expense of school uniforms. The only symbolic clothing is the red neckerchief worn by members of the party-based Young Pioneers.

“Even though the party and state have made a lot of efforts,” Linh wrote in his Nhan Dan column, “they still cannot meet all the demands of the educational sector. If the local people and administrations show due concern for the issues involved, resolutely cut unnecessary spending and provide more funds for our schools, the situation will greatly improve.”

It will be difficult. An Australian educator who spent time at the University of Hanoi said the student dormitories there are deplorable. “In one,” he said, “the kids have even started naming the rats.”

At his elementary school, Doan has summoned the parents to sit in on classes so they can tutor their children at night. And a collection taken up by the parents paid for new lamps for his classrooms.

Some Outside Aid

In Hanoi, where foreign diplomats can see the problems directly, some help has come from outside Vietnam. The capital’s Hanoi-Amsterdam Secondary School was built with financial aid from the Dutch government. Headmaster Nguyen Kim Hoan points with pride to his class size (30) and the number of his students passing the university entrance exam (80%). Hanoi-Amsterdam students have won prizes in international competitions in math, physics and the Russian language.

But even his graduates, Hoan said, face uncertain prospects. “The economic establishment doesn’t have enough jobs,” he said. “Many graduates have to wait years to find something.”

The newspaper Saigon Liberation reported earlier this year that 37% of the students in Ho Chi Minh City were “weak or substandard,” suggesting that they lack enthusiasm in the face of a difficult job market. Last year, 62,000 school graduates entered the Ho Chi Minh City job pool, but the government could find work for only 38,000. The rest will have to try the private sector.

At the University of Hanoi, reputedly the nation’s best, a tour of the science labs turned up a majority of students who said they wanted to become teachers despite the difficulties.

In science they can parlay their expertise into outside income. Many professors of the science faculty hire out as technological consultants to state and private firms. Some of the research done in the university’s labs goes directly into practical application.

Le Quan Thien, the vice headmaster, who directs a faculty of 1,000 teachers and nearly 500 administrative employees, said the main business of the science faculty “is to adapt research to production.” For instance, the university has an institute looking into the development of edible mushrooms to be sold at the Intershop in downtown Hanoi, where foreigners shop with hard currencies.

But while the state wants scientists and technicians, Confucian-oriented Vietnamese parents still put priority on classical education. A professor of literature is held in higher esteem than, say, a metallurgist, and the pressure of the parents often runs against the needs of the state, complicating reforms in the curriculum.

Parental pressure is also an adverse factor in supplemental education. At the University of Hanoi, a so-called B system has been established to offer courses to students who have failed the entrance exam. The university education is free, but B-system students must pay, and the parents complain that professors curtail their normal classes to teach for cash at night.

Lao Dong, a trade union weekly, said that “each year the state grants education less than 4% of the budget.” It said that 10,000 teachers had quit their jobs in southern Vietnam alone because of low pay and poor conditions.

Even Vietnam’s justifiable pride in spreading literacy is being challenged. Researchers have pointed to the lack of schools in the minority areas and the high dropout rate of students in rural areas of the south. Many of those who learned to read and write, some studies say, have left school at an early age and drifted back into illiteracy.

Education holds a social premium throughout Asia, but for destitute Vietnam, the cost is becoming prohibitive.

A Hanoi school has been transformed into a Vietnamese version of “Fame.” Page 16.