Many students in Vietnam are not ready to plan for their future as schools rely too much on book-smarts and fail to equip them with real-life skills, educators told a Hanoi conference Friday.

Titled “Students’ Attitude and Knowledge About Future Planning”, the study surveyed more than 2,000 high school and college students in Hanoi, HCMC, Da Nang and Can Tho, finding that 76 percent enjoyed making plans to realize their dreams and 72 percent were willing to partake in activities necessary for their desired future.

But Nguyen Kim Dung, deputy head of the institute, said the study showed that most Vietnamese students’ career paths were still “fuzzy” and that many were unsure of their concrete goals after school. “They’ve got a very vague idea about what their future jobs would require.

“They tend to concentrate only on academic knowledge and are yet to pay attention to other life skills.”

As many as 83 percent of the students told the survey that their “future plan” was “to perform well in all school subjects” while 91.6 percent said they wanted to be competent in foreign languages.

Dung said most of the students surveyed were hesitant to have to support themselves and 75.4 percent of them said they wanted to continue their studies as long as possible with 23.3 wishing to study abroad.

“Vietnamese society still favors degrees while job skills and other abilities are not given the proper priority yet.”

Her counterpart Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh from Hanoi Education University said students were afraid to take risks because they were not equipped with “life skills” such as patience, discipline and reliability.

Ho Thieu Tung, deputy director of HCMC Education and Training Department, told the conference that knowledge learned in schools only accounted for 30 percent of success in the “real world” and that the students had to look to gain other knowledge from real-life experiences.

“Students with excellent records tend to be good only at academic research and teaching while our society also needs skilled people for many other fields such as business, sports and arts,” Hung said.

Even vocational training lessons are largely theoretical lectures to an crowd instead of practical instructions to individuals, said Nguyen Thanh Ky, head of Vocational School Department under Hanoi Department of Education and Training.

The study authors suggested schools give students more time to discover real life themselves, instead of just providing book-knowledge.

Source: Thanh Nien, Tuoi Tre