VietNamNet
17-03-2008

Some 114,000 pupils had dropped out by the end of the first semester of the 2007-2008 academic year, according to the Ministry of Education and Training, 10% of which came from Tra Vinh province, and nearly 5% from Ca Mau.

Leaving school to find jobs

Vo Van Dat in Tap Son Commune in Tra Cu district, whose son, a Tap Son secondary school pupil, has dropped out, related that his son decided to stop studying to work for a scrap collection establishment in HCM City. Dat said that his son prefers earning VND1mil a month to going to school, though he did not ask his son to give up school.

Tran Van Hiep, another 6th class student at Tap Son Secondary School, has also decided to stop going to school to stay at home. He sometimes goes out to collect waste materials for money. Tap Son School teachers many times have gone to Hiep’s home to persuade him to go back to school, promising to cover his school fees and give him clothing and textbooks, but he still insists on staying at home.

Hiep and Data are two of the 33 pupils at Tap Son School who have dropped out since Tet. Tap Son is the school with the highest number of drop-out pupils in Tra Cu district. 56% of drop-outs are Khmer minority ones.

The ‘school fear’

According to the Tra Vinh Education and Training Department, 6,000 pupils at state run schools had dropped out by the end of January 2008. The three districts of Tra Cu, Cau Ngang and Duyen Hai alone saw 2,211 pupils drop out.

Huynh Van Hoan, Headmaster of Tap Son School, said that 70% of students dropped out because of financial difficulties, while the other 30% gave up school because of their inability to learn.

“Most of the students with bad learning capacity are of Khmer minority; they cannot speak Vietnamese well and cannot follow the study curriculum,” said Luong Huyen Vu, a teacher from Tap Son School.

Tran Van Liem, a teacher of the school, who has been devoting six years to persuading students to come back to school, said that most drop-outs are pupils living in difficult conditions, and they have to stay at home to help their parents earn a living.

Liem said that students here are ‘afraid of school’. As a lot of Khmer students cannot speak the Vietnamese language, they cannot understand what teachers say.

In Ca Mau province, some 4,100 secondary and high school students, or 12% of students in secondary and high schools, have dropped out. Cai Nuoc is the district which has seen the most students drop out (1,000), while Ngoc Hien has had 700 drop out, accounting for 22% of the district’s total students.

Vinh Tra