The President’s Office is conducting a survey on teaching ethics to general school students in 15 cities and provinces.

“The time limit designed for morality lessons is too modest, while the curriculums are unpractical,” Nguyen Chi Thanh, Assistant to the Vice President Nguyen Thi Doan, said when briefing what the survey has found.

Mai Nhi Ha from the Primary Education Division of the Hanoi Education and Training Department admitted that primary school students only have one 45-minute period to learn ethics a week, while a lesson is provided within two periods.

Ha also admitted that the lessons have been designed in an unreasonable way that makes students feel too heavy and unpractical. There is a lesson about the cooperation with international students, which Ha believes is difficult for the students in the suburbs because they don’t have the opportunities for practice to understand better about the issue.

In a lesson, students are requested to seek information about the United Nations. Ha believes that even the teachers have vague knowledge about the issue, let alone students.

In another lesson, primary school students are taught that they need to make greetings when meeting other people, but they are not shown how to do this.

Headmaster of Doan Thi Diem Primary School in Hanoi has also noted that one period a week is enough for ethics lessons, while the unreasonably designed curriculums and mechanical issues make it difficult for teachers to persuade students.

Ly Thi Luong, Headmaster of the Ngo Sy Lien Secondary School in Hanoi, said that morality lessons just account for 3.4-3.7 percent of the time limits, while this should be seen as the most important issue in education. She believes that morality issues not only should be taught in curricular hours, but also in extracurricular activities.

Meanwhile, high school students don’t have ethics lessons. Only 10th graders have the lessons within 29 periods a year, when they receive heavy, abstract and academic knowledge.

Students still stay bewildered in their lives

Educators say that ethics lessons aim to help learners utilize the knowledge they receive at school to judge the phenomena and things in the life, understand the nature of the phenomena and make suitable behaviors.

However, the lessons provided by the teachers prove to be useless to students. Students’ heads have been stuffed with too much academic knowledge, but they still cannot behave themselves reasonably in daily circumstances.

Deputy Director of the Hanoi Education Department -- Nguyen Hiep Thong, has noted that students have to deal with a big amount of knowledge in ethics lessons, but they still don’t have necessary skills to overcome the difficulties in their lives.

A female student of the Tien Phong Secondary School in Me Linh District in Hanoi committed suicide in 2012, just because she was suspected of appropriating VND500,000 from the class’ fund.

According to Dr. Pham Manh Ha, a psychologist from the Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanity, the problem is that students nowadays tend to focus too much on learning scientific knowledge, while they lack behavioral culture.

Stressing that the ethics lessons should be designed in a way that helps students make reasonable behaviors in different circumstances instead of providing mechanical knowledge, Luong said it’d better to design less theoretical and more practical lessons.

Tien phong