The new school year opening ceremony at a specialized high school

The meeting, which was the first one of its kind to be held in 40 years, was attended by Education Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan, as well as representatives of 64 education departments and high schools for gifted students nationwide.

At the conference, Mr. Nhan emphasised the important role the high schools for gifted students were playing in the development and fostering of talents and high-quality human resources for the country.

Initiated in 1964, the “specialised” high school system - as it is commonly called - is now growing in scale and quality. At present, there are 74 specialised high schools with a total number of 47,500 students.

So far, 479 students from these schools have taken part in International Olympiad contests. 423 of them have won a total number of 71 gold and 156 silver medals. The ultimate purpose of the system, however, shouldn’t be to train prize winners, said Mr. Nhan during the conference, since such a goal often puts tremendous pressure on students.

According to many delegates, this seems to be the case at most specialised high schools. “At some schools, when outstanding student contests approach, students put aside all other subjects in order to focus on their majors. And this makes them weak in areas they aren’t specialising in,” said Nguyen Van Loi, President of Foreign Languages High School under Hanoi National University.

Vo Anh Dung from the Institute of Education Strategies and Programmes brought up another problem: these schools haven’t yet developed a common vision, and this is reflected in their countless different names ranging from High School for the Gifted to High-Quality High School.

President of Bac Ninh Specialised High School agreed. He said these schools weren’t following a common training programme of one sort or another, so individual schools often developed their own curricula and textbooks.

Other concerns were also discussed at the conference. For instance, provincial specialised high schools are worried about the lack of high-quality teachers, while those in big cities like Hanoi and HCM City are concerned about increasing competition from private and joint venture schools.

In an attempt to overhaul the system, MoET will also soon submit a new guideline for talent education to the government as well as establish a unit to take charge of the specialised high school system.

This unit will lay the foundation for the establishment of the Department of Talent Training and Development. MoET’s guideline to be carried out from 2008 to 2020 will include 9 programmes ranging from infrastructure upgrading and teacher’s capacity development to admission and curriculum changes.

(Source: SGGP, VNN)