Vietnam: The Political Economy of Education in a “Socialist” Periphery

Abstract

In this article I examine historic changes in the goals, conduct and outcomes of education policies in Vietnam from the 1940s to the present, under the Communist Party of Vietnam. Recent studies of Vietnam's education system centre on econometric and demographic analysis of education data dating back to the early 1990s, when Vietnam began an unprecedented economic boom and when the quality and availability of education data improved dramatically. While I incorporate some of the findings of these recent studies, and while I concur with many of their conclusions, my analysis here is more historical and sociological and is focused on institutions.

Notes

 1. This analysis examines education policies and outcomes under the CPV, from its rise to power in the north (in the 1940s) and in the south (after 1975).

 2. See, for example, Vo, Truong, Doan, and Nguyen (2001), and Nguyen (2002).

 3. See, for example, World Bank (2004).

 4. I have argued elsewhere (London, 2003, 2004) that the history of social provision in Vietnam can be usefully understood as a sequence of “regimes”, temporal periods demarcated by distinctive changes in the norms, principles and institutions governing social provision. For more on this approach, see Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) and Ian Gough's (1999) efforts to extend it to developing countries. Davis (2001) provides a useful critique.

 5. For a more comprehensive empirical analysis, see London (2004).

 6. The integrated political and administrative grid the CPV used to manage society under state socialism remains largely intact today. For more on Vietnam's politico-administrative hierarchies, see Porter (1993), Phong and Beresford (1998), and Kerkvliet (2005).

 7. In the postwar south, the party's efforts to implement land reforms met with myriad forms of resistance (Ngo, 1991; White, 1986 ). As Benedict Kerkvliet (2005) has recently shown, even in northern Vietnam of the 1960s, the state's efforts at coercive collectivisation met various forms of resistance.

 8. See Beresford (1989a, 1989b, 1997); Fforde (1999); Fforde & deVylder (1996).

 9. Specifically, agricultural producers had to sell their produce at artificially low prices, to the detriment of household welfare, local revenue, and the quantity and quality of services in rural areas (Vo, 1990).

10. The 1982 constitution stipulated that all citizens had a right to K–12 education.

11. Expanding access to education was a rallying cry of Vietnamese anti-colonialism well before the emergence of the CPV, but it was the CPV that most effectively used education as a means of politicising and mobilising the masses—beginning in the 1930s and 1940s and continuing for decades thereafter.

12. For more on this, see Pham (1999, p. 51) and London (2003).

13. Local spending on education was supposed to follow a series of centrally determined budgetary norms and formulae and, in principle, was tailored to the conditions and needs of urban and rural areas.

14. According to anecdotal evidence, boys drafted into the army were often awarded upper secondary school diplomas after one year of education.

15. See Ministry of National Defense (1990).

16. For example, between 1975 and 1980, gross enrolments in primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education increased by 19%, 25% and 28% respectively (GSO, 2001); while between 1981 and 1990, the number of primary school teachers in Vietnam increased by some 20%, including an increase of 35% in the southern part of the country (MOET, 1992, p. 40).

17. Ethnic minority groups account for roughly 15% of the population and (with the exception of the wealthier Chinese) were far less likely to have access to education due to their settlement in remote and neglected regions, cultural barriers and other reasons.

18. The continuing poor performance of Vietnam's economy was compounded by the country's political and economic isolation under the US-Sino embargo.

19. This account draws largely on the work of Adam Fforde (1999) and Melanie Beresford (1997).

20. Sepehri (2004) provides a useful summary of research on user fees in Vietnam's education and health sectors.

21. When first introduced in 1989, school fees were set at the cash equivalent of 4 kg and 7 kg of rice per month for lower and upper secondary students, respectively. By 1993, the state eliminated school fees at the primary level, but increased fees for lower and upper secondary education.

22. Survey data on household education expenditure reveal that by 1996–1997, school fees accounted for 46.1% and 61.7% of yearly education expenditures per lower and upper secondary student respectively (GSO, 1999). Other education expenditure includes spending on books, transport, as well as after school “extra study” (discussed in the next section).

23. The semi-public status is for students who perform below a certain level in lower and upper secondary school entrance examinations. People-founded schools are, by contrast, financially autonomous from the state education budget but are subject to state curriculum requirements, and are typically more expensive. Both semi-public and people-founded forms are permitted at all levels of education except the primary level.

24. By 1998, roughly 66% of children of primary school age were actually completing their primary level education (United Nations, 1999). This figure had increased to 83% by 2002, though to just 76% according to the World Bank (2004).

25. Notably, Vietnam has not experienced large gaps in enrolment among boys and girls, although gaps increase at higher levels. Between 1998 and 2003, the gap between girls' and boys' participation in lower secondary education increased slightly. The Government is targeting a nationwide net enrolment rate of 80% by 2005 and 90% by 2010 for lower secondary education (SRV & World Bank, 2005).

26. International organisations include bilateral donors and multilateral development agencies, as well as non-Governmental organisations. Together, these represent a significant source of education finance. These development agencies are intimately involved in shaping education policy (to be discussed in future work).

27. Today, education expenditures represent roughly 17% of the national budget (“Labour and education issues”, 2004)

28. London (2004) specifies the functional distribution of state education expenditures.

29. Whereas Vietnam's education budget has just recently eclipsed the 3% of GDP mark, the corresponding figure is 4.2% in the Philippines, 5.4% in Thailand and 6.7% in Malaysia (ADB data cited in “Lao dong va giao duc”, 2004).

30. According to the Ministry of Finance, inflation for the years 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998 ran at 14.7%, 12.4%, 4.5%, 3.8% and 9.2%, respectively.

31. Vietnam's two richest regions—the southeast (including Ho Chi Minh City) and Red River Delta (including Ha Noi and Hai Phong)—and five other geographical regions

32. By 2003, some 58% of kindergarten students were enrolled in non-state schools (MOET, 2005).

33. A 1996 World Bank study found that primary and secondary school teachers in Vietnam were paid significantly lower wages than in other Asian countries, if wages were measured in relation to GDP per capita (World Bank, 1996b). Although there have been recent increases in pay, and administrative decentralisation measures allow local authorities to raise teachers' pay, it is unclear how these developments will affect the overall standing of teachers' wages in Vietnam.

34. According to the 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Survey, extra study expenses, on average, comprised roughly 18% of household education expenditures for lower secondary students and 28% for upper secondary students. These figures are misleading. First, there is considerable evidence that extra study has increased since 1998. Second, average expenditures on tutoring do not take into consideration the wide disparities in expenditure on extra study between rich and poor. From my own research in 2000 in central Vietnam's Quang Nam province, it was observed that many rural households expended VND100,000 per month on extra study for secondary school students, as compared to VND17,000 for school fees.

35. Notes from personal communication with an upper secondary teacher in Da Nang, May 2000.

36. There is much anecdotal evidence supporting this claim, though no systematic survey has been conducted.

37. This is more eloquently captured in Vietnamese as “hoc them la chinh va hoc chinh la phu”, as one Vietnamese put it (http://diendan.edu.net.vn/PrintPost.aspx?PostID = 17353).

38. The Seventh Party Congress in 1991 explicitly recognised the problem of education and health access for the poor (UN Development Program-Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, 1999).

39. It took the Government two years to specify the institutional arrangements for its implementation. To conduct this means testing, by the end of 1998, the state established HEPR boards in 6,958 communes (out of 7,518 at the time), and local authorities commenced poverty-mapping efforts using Government criteria to identify poor households in each commune.

40. For the first three years of the HEPR, for example, the Ministry of Education and Training committed (on average) an amount equal only to roughly 2% of the education budget.

41. Although the HEPR scheme was designed to incorporate democratic participation at the grassroots level, the implementation of the programmes is frequently top-down (Vietnam Consultative Group, 2004, pp. 27 & 30).