Who needs Mandarin? Drive to succeed pushes Vietnam to bolster English curriculum
Despite improvements in standardised test scores, Vietnam’s weakest link continues to be its educational system, but government directives suggest a renewed focus on English that could unleash a manufacturing dynamo
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are equal parts exhilarating and exhausting.
It’s as if, after 30 years of war and deprivation, the Vietnamese are determined to make the best of life. A will to succeed at all costs separates Vietnam from the other countries in the region. People in the original “Asean Five” nations have already gone through that burst of explosive economic growth.
Policymakers will point out that while the Vietnamese are ruthless competitors, the country’s soft infrastructure, most notably its education system, remains “light years” behind the rest of Asean.
However, recent surveys – most notably the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2016 Programme for International Student Assessment (or Pisa) – show that Vietnamese teenagers have eclipsed their regional counterparts and are now consistently outperforming their American and British equivalents in mathematics and science.
Typically, Vietnamese benchmark themselves and their country against Taiwan, South Korea, China and Japan.