Vietnam has launched a comprehensive education reform plan to addresspitfalls in the previous system and promote everyday skills.

From now on, the Vietnamese educational model will not be "the teacherspeaks and students take notes", said Minister of Education andTraining Pham Vu Luan.

Rather, students will learnskills applicable to real life including teamwork, independent study andpresentation, and exams will test their ability to apply knowledgerather than memorised facts, he said.

The changefollows a resolution on the comprehensive reform of education andtraining adopted by the Party Central Committee at its 8th plenum, heldearly this month.

The committee noted that Vietnam's education and training sector still has many problems.

The quality of education fails to meet the demands of socio-economicdevelopment and does not give Vietnam a competitive advantage whencompared with other countries in the region and around the world.

Moreover, the system suffers from limited funding and failure toanticipate the need for qualified human resources during the country'sindustrialisation and modernisation process.

Thenewly-adopted reforms include a wide range of innovations, from trainingprogrammes at all educational levels and changed teaching and testingmethods to mechanisms to ensure educational quality, including theimprovement of teachers training.

Current textbookswere too academic and theoretical, so textbook changes would be a keypart of the reform, Minister Luan said.

Moreover,primary and secondary school students would gain practical knowledgesuitable to their physical and mental development.

In high school, in addition to a few compulsory subjects, students wouldbe able to choose what they wanted to learn depending on their hobbies,ability or career orientation.

"This will hopefullyavoid the overloading that general education students are now facing asthey have to study tens of the same subjects from lower grades to upperones," he said.

Professor Hoang Tuy, a leadingmathematician and one of the founders of the country's math-sciencecurriculum, said that the reform plan represented a progressive approachto education.

"Now it is the time to develop an educational system to help learners become independent and critical-thinking."

After secondary school graduation, students would have more optionsincluding following higher education or job training depending on theirinterests and labour demand instead of being forced to follow a fixedtraining programme, the Professor said.

However, hecautioned, translating the new way of thinking into real strategieswould take time and the results of such a comprehensive policy mighttake as long as a decade to be revealed.-VNA