VietNamNet Bridge – Ethical lessons taught at general schools don’t help
students much in their lives.
The President’s Office is conducting a survey on teaching ethics to general
school students in 15 cities and provinces.
“The time limit designed for morality lessons is too modest, while the
curriculums are unpractical,” Nguyen Chi Thanh, Assistant to the Vice President
Nguyen Thi Doan, said when briefing what the survey has found.
Mai Nhi Ha from the Primary Education Division of the Hanoi Education and
Training Department admitted that primary school students only have one
45-minute period to learn ethics a week, while a lesson is provided within two
periods.
Ha also admitted that the lessons have been designed in an unreasonable way that
makes students feel too heavy and unpractical. There is a lesson about the
cooperation with international students, which Ha believes is difficult for the
students in the suburbs because they don’t have the opportunities for practice
to understand better about the issue.
In a lesson, students are requested to seek information about the United
Nations. Ha believes that even the teachers have vague knowledge about the
issue, let alone students.
In another lesson, primary school students are taught that they need to make
greetings when meeting other people, but they are not shown how to do this.
Headmaster of Doan Thi Diem Primary School in Hanoi has also noted that one
period a week is enough for ethics lessons, while the unreasonably designed
curriculums and mechanical issues make it difficult for teachers to persuade
students.
Ly Thi Luong, Headmaster of the Ngo Sy Lien Secondary School in Hanoi, said that
morality lessons just account for 3.4-3.7 percent of the time limits, while this
should be seen as the most important issue in education. She believes that
morality issues not only should be taught in curricular hours, but also in
extracurricular activities.
Meanwhile, high school students don’t have ethics lessons. Only 10th graders
have the lessons within 29 periods a year, when they receive heavy, abstract and
academic knowledge.
Students still stay bewildered in their lives
Educators say that ethics lessons aim to help learners utilize the knowledge
they receive at school to judge the phenomena and things in the life, understand
the nature of the phenomena and make suitable behaviors.
However, the lessons provided by the teachers prove to be useless to students.
Students’ heads have been stuffed with too much academic knowledge, but they
still cannot behave themselves reasonably in daily circumstances.
Deputy Director of the Hanoi Education Department — Nguyen Hiep Thong, has
noted that students have to deal with a big amount of knowledge in ethics
lessons, but they still don’t have necessary skills to overcome the difficulties
in their lives.
A female student of the Tien Phong Secondary School in Me Linh District in Hanoi
committed suicide in 2012, just because she was suspected of appropriating
VND500,000 from the class’ fund.
According to Dr. Pham Manh Ha, a psychologist from the Hanoi University of
Social Sciences and Humanity, the problem is that students nowadays tend to
focus too much on learning scientific knowledge, while they lack behavioral
culture.
Stressing that the ethics lessons should be designed in a way that helps
students make reasonable behaviors in different circumstances instead of
providing mechanical knowledge, Luong said it’d better to design less
theoretical and more practical lessons.
Tien Phong