VZCZCXRO5450
PP RUEHCHI RUEHDT RUEHNH
DE RUEHHM #0753/01 2340841
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
P 210841Z AUG 08
FM AMCONSUL HO CHI MINH CITY
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 4806
INFO RUEHHI/AMEMBASSY HANOI PRIORITY 3234
RUCNASE/ASEAN MEMBER COLLECTIVE
RUEHHM/AMCONSUL HO CHI MINH CITY 5034

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 HO CHI MINH CITY 000753 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR EAP/MLS, DRLPRM/A AND  PRM/ANE 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PGOV PHUM SOCI ECON VM
SUBJECT: EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES FOR VIETNAM'S ETHNIC MINORITY 
CHILDREN 
 
REF: A) HCMC 517 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000753  001.2 OF 004 
 
 
¶1. (SBU) Summary: Despite the GVN's goal of ethnic minority 
development in the Central Highlands, ethnic minorities continue 
to lag behind their Kinh counterparts in education, and as a 
result in almost every other economic enterprise.  Due to 
cultural, historical, and pedagogical obstacles to educational 
attainment, ethnic minorities begin their educational careers at 
a distinct disadvantage to ethnic Vietnamese students and 
continue to fall behind thereafter until, all too frequently, 
they drop out entirely.  While the GVN has instituted programs 
to rectify this "education gap," those programs are hamstrung by 
an ideological commitment to national unity at the expense of 
learning outcomes as well as by an extreme scarcity of the human 
resources that would be needed to implement major educational 
reforms tailored to the unique needs of ethnic minorities. 
While improving education for ethnic minorities represents an 
enormous challenge, the stakes are high: if the GVN fails to 
ameliorate the educational and thus economic marginalization of 
ethnic minorities, past and present discontentment among the 
minorities will almost certainly grow worse as they fall further 
and further behind their ethnic Vietnamese neighbors. End 
Summary. 
 
STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS HAMPER EDUCATION 
------------------------------------ 
¶2. (SBU) Improving education in the Central Highlands is not an 
easy task.  While enormous steps have been made in access to 
primary education, an efficient, child-friendly educational 
system producing secondary-educated, skilled students is still 
far away.  Indeed, improving Vietnam's dysfunctional educational 
system ranks among Missions Vietnam's top goals.   In the case 
of the ethnic minorities of the Central Highlands, these 
systemic weaknesses in the Vietnamese educational system are 
greatly exacerbated by factors unique to ethnic minorities and 
the region. 
 
¶3. (SBU) Economic and cultural factors act as barriers to 
education for ethnic minority children.  Economics is an 
important factor.  Simply put, ethnic minorities are caught in a 
vicious circle in which poor people are unlikely to excel in 
school and uneducated people are unlikely to escape poverty. 
Because more than 50 percent of Vietnam's ethnic minorities 
currently live in poverty, they are disproportionately caught in 
this vicious cycle.  The impact of poverty on educational 
attainment is exacerbated for ethnic minorities by the fact that 
the inexpensive foods they traditionally consume must be 
communally prepared and are not easily transported to school, 
effectively forcing many poor children to choose between lunch 
and school.  In addition, as in any poor farming region, child 
labor is a fact of life and the opportunity costs of children 
attending school rather than helping in the fields can be 
prohibitive for a subsistence farming family. 
 
¶4. (SBU) The dearth of economic opportunities for ethnic 
minorities makes investment in their children's education even 
less appealing: when high school graduates return to the fields, 
parents see the extra seven years of school fees and lost wages 
as poured down the drain.  UNICEF, Plan International, and other 
NGOs have reported that "selling" education through community 
involvement can be effective  increasing both attendance rates 
and parental support, but it is a difficult proposition.  There 
are also long-term cultural issues to consider since those 
members of ethnic minority groups who do excel at education 
generally do not return to their remote home villages to live 
traditional lifestyles in which their education would offer them 
no advantages. 
 
CULTURAL BARRIERS COMPLICATE MATTERS 
------------------------------------ 
¶5. (SBU) With many ethnic minority groups, there are also 
cultural barriers to widespread educational advancement.  Deeply 
rooted stereotypes that post-primary education is "not 
necessary" or "not possible" are quite common among ethnic 
minorities and even the most tireless advocates for ethnic 
minority education have cited these stereotypes in conversations 
with ConOffs.  These stereotypes are not baseless: ethnic 
minorities traditionally practiced swidden agriculture, a roving 
lifestyle predicated on slash-and-burn farming techniques that 
were neither conducive to, nor dependent upon, formal education. 
 Cultural traditions also impede preparedness: according to one 
Jarai pastor, ethnic minority children are ill-prepared to 
communicate effectively with adults or deal with a structured 
setting since they traditionally "run around with their friends" 
from ages two to seven.  Parental support for education is hard 
to come by as most elders did not attend school themselves. 
 
¶6. (SBU) The most common time for ethnic minorities to drop out 
of the educational system entirely is when they should move from 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000753  002.2 OF 004 
 
 
primary to secondary school.  Reasons for this include the 
children's growing labor potential and, particularly for girls, 
the practice of child marriage which is still common among many 
groups despite being illegal.  Among some minorities, it is 
common for girls to be married by age 13 or 14 with children 
following soon afterwards.  NGO's active in the area also report 
that the problem of school dropouts tends to fall through the 
bureaucratic cracks since the various components of the Ministry 
of Education and Training (MOET) tend to focus very narrowly on 
their specific function (running primary or secondary schools, 
running vocational schools, running universities, etc.) and 
therefore do not address cross-cutting issues such as tracking 
and facilitating the transition from primary to secondary school 
or motivating children to stay in school and attain a good 
education. 
 
ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL 
------------------------- 
¶7. (SBU) MOET's mandating a unified national curriculum and a 
single language of instruction (Vietnamese) complicates the 
situation further.  According to Plan and UNICEF 
representatives, the GVN sees unified education as the glue 
melding together Vietnam's 54 ethnic groups.  (Comment: Even the 
number "54" represents the GVN's obsession with enumerating and 
categorizing what is more likely an even more diverse ethnic 
range; most Western scholars believe there are many more than 54 
separate groups, but the GVN's overriding goal of national unity 
translates into a contrived number that cannot be challenged. 
End comment.) 
 
¶8. (SBU) This use of education as a tool to achieve national 
unity is particularly important in the Central Highlands given 
the region's long history of ethnic minority separatism (ref B). 
 As a result, progressive measures are extremely sensitive; a 
UNICEF Education specialist noted that only in the past two 
years ago has UNICEF been able to even broach the topic of 
mother-tongue education to MOET.  Unfortunately, insistence on 
single curriculum and language puts ethnic minority students at 
a distinct disadvantage since few ethnic minority children speak 
any Vietnamese prior to school.  As a result, they enter primary 
school already far behind their Kinh comrades.  Locally relevant 
curriculum, incorporating traditional ethnic minority knowledge, 
is by and large excluded; even though 20 percent "local" 
curriculum is officially permitted, it is largely neglected as 
few provinces allot resources to develop locally-relevant 
material.  In this light, ethnic minorities' lack of enthusiasm 
for education is understandable: they are less than enthusiastic 
about attending schools taught in a language they do not speak 
based on a curriculum for urban middle-class Kinh that 
deliberately neglects their cultural national heritage. 
 
¶9. (SBU) Theoretically, at least, the "one language" policy 
should be softening.  According to Vietnam's 2003 Poverty 
Reduction Strategy Papers, one of MOET's goals is to enable 
students to complete primary education partly in Vietnamese and 
partly in their mother-tongue by 2010.  In support of this, Save 
the Children and UNICEF are engaged in action-research programs 
working towards developing mother-tongue education for ethnic 
minorities.  Unfortunately, UNICEF describes their on-the-ground 
progress as plodding.  While mother-tongue literacy is 
all-but-universally accepted as the best path to second-language 
literacy by educational theorists, MOET representatives claim 
that "Vietnam is different" and are demanding research specific 
to Vietnam.  UNICEF (using a written mother-tongue curriculum) 
and Save (oral only) have "action-research" projects designed to 
address MOET's concerns by demonstrating the greater 
effectiveness of mother tongue literacy for second-language 
(Vietnamese) literacy.  MOET's reluctance and the resulting 
necessity for research is delaying large-scale implementation of 
native language instruction.  UNICEF has thus far developed only 
kindergarten and first grade curriculums and has only 
implemented it in those schools involved in the research project. 
 
¶10. (SBU) MOET does not ignore the language barrier entirely. 
Rather than emphasizing local language instruction, however, 
they provide an additional year of pre-primary education for 
minority students to familiarize them with Vietnamese before 
they start school.  This program also faces constraints.  Not 
only is funding a constant issue (as in all Vietnamese schools), 
there are almost no teachers competent in pre-school or 
kindergarten pedagogy.  Teaching methods incorporating 
Western-style "active learning" are generally known only to 
those who have worked with NGOs.  Even if these problems could 
be resolved, teaching five-years old to attain fluency in 
Vietnamese in the span of a year is highly ambitious to say the 
least. 
 
¶11. (SBU) The "one language" policy is not the only element of 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000753  003.2 OF 004 
 
 
Vietnam's standard curriculum that has the (perhaps unintended) 
effect of disadvantaging and discouraging ethnic minority 
students.  A representative of the NGO Plan International 
explained that because the national curriculum was designed for 
urban ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) students,  it should not be 
surprising that ethnic minorities do not fit it interesting or 
valuable.  She stated that the stereotype of ethnic minorities 
"not caring" about education is inaccurate -- ethnic minorities 
care deeply about education insofar as it is relevant to their 
lives, their culture, and their future.  Since at present it is 
relevant to none of these things, ethnic minorities do not value 
education because there is little there for them to value. 
Because MOET is conceptually uncooperative with full localized 
curriculums, Plan International and others have worked within 
the allowed 20 per cent to create both materials and local 
capacity for curriculum development.  While NGO representatives 
do not expect a wholesale move to local curriculum in the 
foreseeable future, they are hoping for a gradual expansion of 
locally-relevant material until it comprises 30 - 40 percent of 
the total. 
 
PROGRAMS PRAGMATICALLY DIFFICULT 
-------------------------------- 
¶12. (SBU) Even if MOET wanted to move rapidly to increase local 
content and mother tongue instruction, implementing the changes 
would be challenging at best and likely not possible in the near 
future.  Finding qualified teachers, for example, would be an 
almost insurmountable problem for mother tongue language 
instruction.  There are, for example, simply no H'mong teachers 
capable of teaching above the 4th grade level.  Even those 
attempts that MOET has instituted to encourage more ethnic 
minorities to attend school can backfire.  Plan International 
pointed out that the lowered entrance, class, and exit exam 
requirements for ethnic minority students that are intended to 
encourage greater numbers to attend high school and teaching 
colleges has had the effect of systematically producing 
unqualified teachers who have not passed normal requirements. 
There are also cultural barriers within MOET, which has shown a 
tendency to consider ethnic minorities as monolithic, assigning 
teachers of one ethnic group to teach another and somehow 
assuming that they would know the language. 
 
¶13. (SBU) Other structural problems make the goal of 
native-language, culturally-relevant education even harder to 
attain.  Ethnic minority-Vietnamese bilingual education might be 
feasible in an area where all the pupils in a school are from 
the same minority group, but an area with only one ethnic 
minority is rare.  A typical school in the Central Highlands is 
likely to comprise five or six ethnic groups, each of whom 
speaks a different language and has different cultural 
traditions.  The multitude of ethnic minority groups whose 
traditional lands overlap and intersect also means that 
developing suitable local curriculum is equally challenging. 
While some provincial officials may oppose ethnic minority 
curriculum because they fear it will lead to separatist 
sentiments, the majority do not fund curriculum development for 
lack of resources. 
 
LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL DIMMING 
-------------------------------------- 
¶13. (SBU) UNESCO and UNICEF representatives express concern at 
recent developments in the GVN's approach to education.  They 
are concerned that the Minister of Education's decision to place 
greater emphasis on higher education, especially graduate study 
abroad, may work to the detriment of basic education initiatives 
for the most needy.  While higher education is of great economic 
and social benefit to the Vietnamese nation and economy, UNICEF 
and UNESCO representatives are concerned that the GVN appears to 
be shifting its limited educational funding away from basic 
education for the masses and special education for impoverished 
minorities and towards educating a privileged few at great 
expense. 
 
COMMENT 
------- 
¶14. (SBU) As with almost any other group in today's modern 
world, educational attainment will play a large role in 
determining the economic future of ethnic minorities in Vietnam. 
 Education will also play a pivotal role in their integration 
into the social, cultural, and economic fabric of Vietnam. 
Ironically, the GVN's focus on nationally unifying education has 
in many ways backfired since it serves to disadvantage and 
marginalize the very ethnic minority students it is intended to 
integrate into the Vietnamese nation.  Fundamental changes in 
the GVN's attitudes and approach are needed or ethnic minorities 
will continue to fall out of step as Vietnam's urban centers 
lead the charge towards increasing prosperity based upon 
industrialization and global integration.  Unfortunately, even 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000753  004.2 OF 004 
 
 
if MOET had the best intentions and the best planning to back 
them up, pervasive structural and capacity problems mean that 
improving education for ethnic minorities would be very 
difficult.  End comment. 
 
¶15. (U) This cable was coordinated with Embassy Hanoi. 
FAIRFAX