Every year they build more classrooms in Ho Chi Minh City so that the classes can be smaller and the teaching better, and every year the increasing number of students destroys their strategic plan for improving formal education at the primary and secondary levels.
The overcrowding of classrooms gives educators a headache, but making the classes smaller would force them to refuse admission to more and more young people. Since they have to admit everyone who wants to continue their formal education, class sizes just keep growing.
Some schools have reduced the number of places for all-day students who live far away, and are concentrating on the more normal half-day routine (Vietnamese schools usually handle two lots of students every day – one in the morning and the other in the afternoon).
Although school principals understand that fewer all-day places will make it hard for parents who work full-time to pick up their kids and make sure the young ones are looked after at home in the afternoon, they can only shrug their shoulders as the situation is beyond their control.
Pham Thi Lai, the headmistress of Ban Co Junior High, says the demand for all-day classes is very big and growing, but her school is restricted to having seven such classes.
It’s even worse in District 4 as there are not even enough places in primary school there. The district’s education department has received 3,000 enrollment applications for the new school year, well over the 2,400 they were expecting.
And in Go Vap District, some wards have no pre-school, no primary school and no junior high school at all.
The shortage of schools and classrooms means more and more students are being squeezed into cramped rooms. In some schools, a class might be as many as 56 kids.
Oversized classes are detrimental to learning, and lead to more study at home and more private tuition just to keep up with the syllabus.
One unsatisfactory remedy has been to convert unsuitable rooms into classrooms, but these are usually firetraps.
More serious still is the situation where children enrolled at one school have to attend another because of the lack of space. Just ask the teenagers of Tay Thanh Senior High in Tan Phu District, Hiep Binh Senior High in Thu Duc, or Nguyen Huu Tien Senior High in Hoc Mon.
The new school year is fast approaching and, as they say, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Despite knowing about the overcrowding in the city’s schools, most parents are confident of getting their children into a suitable school.
Even the educators will say the same thing, and they know the true situation better than anyone.
