It is not uncommon nowadays to come across reports about students committing suicide.

The lack of lifeskills training renders students, especially in their adolescence, incapable of responding maturely to problems in life.

It is not uncommon nowadays to come across reports about students committing suicide.

They seem to do so for a number of reasons: poor performance in studies, family problems, broken love affairs or unrequited love, or conflicts with friends or teachers.

Fairly common these days are also reports on school violence, teenager drug abuse and mental disorders.

For long, experts and educators have linked these problems to the lack of lifeskills among the youth – skills that would help them cope better with inevitable problems and also make better choices and avoid disastrous behavior.

This topic came up again for discussion at a conference in Hanoi last week, where experts urged the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) to set up and introduce programs that incorporate lifeskills into academic curricula at school.

This will make education long-term and more effective than holding random seminars and outdoor activities, they said.

“Lifeskills should have been introduced into academic programs a long time ago,” said lecturer Tran Van Dan of the Hanoi Medical University.

Dao Van Vi from the Vietnam National Institute for Education Science echoed Dan, saying at least 70 countries in the world have introduced lifeskills into main academic programs in various forms.

Nguyen Vo Ky Anh, director of the Vietnam Study Encouragement Society’s Center for Environmental Education and Community Health, said seminars it has held on lifeskills at secondary schools have shown students can react properly in tough situations, if they are taught these skills earlier.

Lifeskills education should be provided at least from the primary school level, if not earlier during preschool, Anh said, suggesting it should be integrated into academic programs of some subjects or taught through the school’s outdoor activities.

Dan, meanwhile, stressed the need to teach lifeskills to students at secondary and high schools, saying it is at this age that they are very likely to suffer from psychological problems.

Tran Quoc Thanh, head of the Hanoi University of Education’s Educational Psychology Department, suggested life-skills education – including skills to cope with emotions and other social skills – should be in accordance with increasingly complicated issues that come up in society these days.

However, Hanoi-based Dong Da Secondary School’s principal Tran Thi Kim Lien expressed concern that parents and teachers could complain that the integration of lifeskills education into current academic programs will overload both students and teachers.

Meanwhile, “The lifeskills of some of the teachers now are not good enough,” VietNamNet quoted MoET deputy minister Nguyen Vinh Hien as saying.

“Many teachers do not behave or react well, even in an academic environment, not to mention society at large,” Hien said.

The corollary to Hien’s statement was added by Do Hoang Thi, who teaches at the Ethnic Minority Boarding School in the northwestern province of Ha Giang: “Only those teachers with adequate lifeskills of their own can impart them to students.”

“It’s very urgent that teachers improve their living skills now and in the future,” Hien said.

Phung Khac Binh, head of MoET’s Students Affairs Department, said lifeskills education can be integrated into some subjects and activities in the near future, with specific guidelines, and later set up as a subject from the first to the twelfth grade.

Suitable subjects for the integration, the conference heard, include Citizen Education - the equivalent of a civics course, and foreign languages.

This summer, teachers will receive from the MoET a set of guidelines on introducing lifeskills education into each subject, but its focus will depend on each locality, VietNamNet newswire reported recently.

For instance, in the northern province of Lang Son, where child and drug trafficking is a major problem, the emphasis can be on teaching students how to protect themselves from those threats.

VietNamNet/TN