The Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) has drawn up a plan to recompile textbooks for general school students, estimating that the work would cost VND70 trillion (USD3.33 billion). Meanwhile, educators believe the programme is too costly.
Dung emphasised that only the “healthy competition in scientific research” would help generate high quality sets of textbooks.
Educators also believe that spending VND70 trillion to recompile textbooks is really a big waste of money, while MoET should assign the work to scientific associations which would be able to provide high quality products, and at reasonable costs.
“I have heard that the curriculums for general education would be re-discussed in 2015. After that, the new curriculums would be applied in a trial basis, and then re-compilation of textbooks would be implemented. The next step is putting the new textbooks into a trial use before they are officially utilized in teaching and learning at general schools,” Dung has listed the steps MOET would follow to design new textbooks, saying that this would be a time consuming process.
Dung has affirmed that no need to spend such a huge sum of VND70 trillion to compile new textbooks as suggested by MoET.
He thinks that it would be better to choose experienced specialists to be introduced by scientific research associations, who would team up with experienced teachers to compile new curriculums. The curriculums would be opened for public opinion before they are assessed and approved by a national council.
“Let publishing houses and authors to compete with each other, while the State does not have to spend money on this work,” Dung said. “The mechanism could be applied immediately, no need to wait until 2015.”
Khong Doan Dien, a people’s teacher who has spent 40 years in his life on education, said re-compiling textbooks should not be seen as the focus of the education renovation process. He has also expressed his disagreement on the VND70 trillion programme on compiling new textbooks, saying that no need to spend too much money in the current difficult conditions.
“The budget MoET plans to allocate to the textbook compilation programme should be spent to upgrade material facilities and build new schools in remote and mountainous areas,” Dien said.
Professor Nguyen Xuan Han has noted that Vietnam correct and edit textbooks every year, which is really a big waste of the money. Meanwhile, textbooks should be used for at least 12 years or longer.
There are 55 publishing houses in Vietnam and 6200 printing establishments which have the total turnover of one billion dollars a year. Vietnam needs 2 million tons of paper a year to print education textbooks. Meanwhile, only 40 percent of the amount can be found from domestic sources, while the other 60 percent must be fed by imports.
Especially, reference books are in big excess. A report by the Hanoi Book Distribution Company showed that in 2008, there were 3120 reference books for general schools. First graders alone had a wide range of 59 books for choice, while 11th graders had 442 reference books.
Regarding the budget for the textbook re-compilation programme, Han said that VND70 trillion is really a huge sum of money. A similar programme once ran in 2002-2011 which cost VND32 trillion.
