Doctor of Psychology Truong Bich Ha, after studying the draft standards for 5-year-old children, has concluded that 70% of the indices are unsuitable for children of that age.

Some experts believe that we should let children grow in the way they can

If we force our children to meet the standards, we will turn them prematurely senile and create negative impacts on the minds of the children.

Let’s look at the standards on physical development. The draft standards say that children need to run 150 m continuously (without a break). I think that the standard could be set to select children with aptitudes for sports rather than a common standard for all children.

Similarly, the requirement on children ‘to listen and feel the melody of songs’, and ‘express feeling and have reactions suitable to the rhythm of the music songs’, I think, should be used to find children with aptitudes for music.

The requirements like ‘speaking out about the capability and hobbies of other people’, ‘knowing how to share sympathy and joy with friends and relatives’ are things that even many adult people cannot do.

Regarding communication skill development, we just require children to use words relatively accurately and not to speak with a lisp, while we should not require them to ‘know how to begin a conversation in different ways’ and ‘change tones to make them fit the circumstances’.

How many indices in the draft standards do you think are unsuitable for 5-year-children?

Some 70 indices of the 125 prove to be unfeasible. I cannot understand why such indices were thought ought to be applied to 5-year-old children.

Some experts believe that we should let children grow in the way they can, while we should not impose standards on them. What do you think about that?

Raising children in a natural way and letting them to show all their virtues has always been a good scientific viewpoint. The standards and indices just serve as tools for schools and parents to ‘measure’ the characteristics, hobbies and capabilities of children in order to have suitable methods of care and education.

In education, we should not have a common concept for every child, and we should not set standards like they need to like this, and not to like this. If we force children to meet the standards we want, like we want them to love animals and the nature, while they really don’t want to, this will teach them to tell lie.

So what do you think we need to do to have a more scientific method to assess the skill development of 5-year-old children?

I think of creating tests, and having it be quite normal if not all children get the highest levels on the tests.

We should not strive to put teachers’ assessments into children’s files. Imagine that some children cannot meet some standard, and they feel a complex about that all their lives. We must not ‘close the souls of children’ with such unnecessary records.

VietNamNet/Tien phong