An upcoming program to restructure Vietnam’s high school syllabus is evoking excitement and concerns among educators.

As Phu Nu reports, recently an online conference was held between officials of people’s committees and departments of education and training from provinces across Vietnam. The event was to discuss necessary preparations for the imminent overhaul to the national high school program for 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

Specifically, the new initiative will give students more flexibility in picking study subjects and slightly reduce the workload from 13 to 12 subjects, now comprising seven compulsory ones and five that highschoolers can pick from a pool of subjects. The seven standard subjects include literature, mathematics, a foreign language, physical education, national security education, region-specific workshops, and career counseling workshops.

Prospective students can pick five subjects in total and at least one from three main categories: social sciences (history, geography, economics and civics study), natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), and technology and arts (technology, computer science, arts).

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, the new curriculum will begin starting from the batch of 10th-graders of the 2022–2023 school year. Such a degree of choice is novel in the public school syllabus and thus has been a popular topic of discussion among parents and students who will be affected by the change. For education administrators and teachers, however, the program looms with foreseeable organizational hurdles.

A geography teacher in Saigon told Phu Nu that, even with the current subject loads, students are already ignoring subjects not covered by the coveted university entrance test. “With non-essential subjects, students tend to do the bare minimum to pass and focus on examinable subjects. Now with more choices, their education will be imbalanced while teachers of elective subjects will be out of work,” the teacher explained.

The potential mismatch in popularity between subjects also poses a major human resource dilemma for administrators. “When students are given more choices, if say only two pick to study music, we [the school] don’t know what to do because we currently don’t fill that position,” Nguyễn Văn Thuần, vice principal of a high school in Ha Tinh Province, shared with Kenh14. He added that there would be cases in which experienced teachers with decades of lesson time find themselves jobless due to lack of interest in their subject.

[Photo by Chau Doan via Flickr channel UN Women]