Education in Vietnam is meant to be free. Vietnam's constitution pledges in Article 59, "Primary education is compulsory and tuition - free." A new draft amendment to the constitution deletes the reference to free education, supplanting it with a much vaguer Article 42: "Citizens have a right and obligation to study."
But other costs, such as for textbooks and uniforms, keep poor children out. Public schools can't charge tuition until the secondary level, so they require students to pay fees for sanitation, traffic guards, gardeners, pens, notebooks, and even to have the buildings repainted. The cost is higher in secondary school and beyond, where institutions can and nearly always do charge tuition.
This so-called socialist country has yet to socialise education, as the wide range of fees means school is already out of reach for many. Most families must foot at least part of the bill for grade school, a somewhat unreasonable concept in a “socialist” system. Even the most free-market countries have tended to nationalise this rudimentary component of a welfare state.
Katarina Tomasevski, former UN Special Rapporteur on education, has argued that Vietnam partly "privatised" schooling “...has obliterated the notion of education as a public responsibility, and the previous model of education as a free public service."
But other costs, such as for textbooks and uniforms, keep poor children out. Public schools can't charge tuition until the secondary level, so they require students to pay fees for sanitation, traffic guards, gardeners, pens, notebooks, and even to have the buildings repainted. The cost is higher in secondary school and beyond, where institutions can and nearly always do charge tuition.
This so-called socialist country has yet to socialise education, as the wide range of fees means school is already out of reach for many. Most families must foot at least part of the bill for grade school, a somewhat unreasonable concept in a “socialist” system. Even the most free-market countries have tended to nationalise this rudimentary component of a welfare state.
Katarina Tomasevski, former UN Special Rapporteur on education, has argued that Vietnam partly "privatised" schooling “...has obliterated the notion of education as a public responsibility, and the previous model of education as a free public service."
The class enemy is the Vietnamese state, controlled by Communist Party bureaucrats, acting now in the interests of a Vietnamese capitalist class and the role of this blog is to expose the fiction that Vietnam is in anyway socialist or that the policies of the so-called Communist Party benefits the Vietnamese people who are exploited in the same way as in any other SE Asian country. Those "naive and unlearned" people, as you describe them, understand only too well their status and endeavour against a dictatorship to struggle to better their conditions.
ReplyDeleteSee this article on workers struggles in Vietnam
http://peopleresist.net/component/content/article/299-the-vietnam-strike-wave