The Socialist Republic of Vietnam

The affects of the socio-cultural and geopolitical context on education

The geographical location

•Southeast Asia in the Indochinese peninsula

•The Indochinese peninsular refers to mixed Indian and Chinese culture adopted by countries.

• Vietnam is surrounded by china in the north, Laos in the west, Cambodia in the southwest and the south china sea along the east

Geographical factors• Roughly 127,000 square miles in the shape of an S

• 88.1 million people, primarily Buddhist faith with Vietnamese as first language

• Tropical monsoon type climate, two monsoon seasons

• Mountainous and hilly in the north

• Typhoons and flooding are common

• Agriculture remains the primary activity, employing more than half of the labour force.

Political history• Originally ruled by china, Vietnams educational system was traditionally Confucian style

•Confucian education is geared towards moral and religious development and teaching children about there duty to the state.

•In the 19th century French colonialists took over Vietnam and designed the education system around the French model although this was elitist.

•After world war two the French were expelled from the country through the Geneva conference

•Following this the north and south of the country fought for rule resulting in the north winning and a communist party leading the nation.

Education today

• A school day is from Monday to Saturday and 3.5 hours long, children attend in shifts.

• Primary and lower secondary are compulsory and primary is free although there are many private institutes

• Teachers not meeting quality standards

• Poor access to school for poor disabled or ethnic minority children

• Not much access to bilingual education

• Undernourished children achieve lower (20% under 5)

• There are 110 public higher institutes including 23 colleges and 27 universities

• Poor families send boys rather than girls

• Adult literacy rate is just over 90%

• Secondary curriculum is currently being revised • The reforms of 1979 focused on making

education more relevant to the economy applying a lot of practical skills and technical school along with sciences.

Factors affecting the development of the education

system

• Low Government funding.. aims to be at 20% by 2015

• Over reliance on private education

• The fact that some regions are remote

• Poverty

Suggestions• Develop a training policy that ensures all teachers are teaching to the

same standards and have adequate resources

• Improve wages of teachers and promote teaching as a career

• Build an adequate number of schools at all levels with a sufficient number of staffs

• This will in turn mean children have longer school days and receive a higher standard of education

• Make secondary free and secondary upper compulsory

• Start children at a younger age

• Generally invest more money into education

• Create equal opportunity policies to ensure ethnic minority, disabled and poor children have the same education