2007 Volume 53 Issue 1 Pages 20-36
Doi moi, which began in 1986, has influenced several aspects of Vietnamese life, including minorities. The Vietnamese government, seeing ethnic problems around the world at the end of the 1980s, reconsidered its own nation-state integration and decided to introduce some ‘multicultural’ ethnic policies. This purpose of this paper is to discern the objectives and roleof an education policy for minorities called Program No. 7, introduced by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) between 1991 and 2000. Its aims were to reform and popularize a new schooling system, the Boarding School for Minorities (truong pho thong dan toc noi tru).
This new schooling system followed the School for Young Ethnic People (truong thanh nien dan toc) represented by the Young Socialist Worker’s School of Hoa Binh established in 1958.The School for Young Ethnic People was a primary and secondary level ‘continuation school’ that aimed to develop low-level cadres from minority areas. Ethnic Kinh people with high-level academic backgrounds had been relocated to fill high-level cadre positions in those areas, but many could not bear the mountainous areas, owing to what they perceived as the‘ savage customs’ and the difficult languages of the minority groups. As a result, there was a shortage of qualified individuals to fill the high-level cadre positions through the end of the 1980s.
To address this situation, the Vietnamese government and MOET decided in 1991 to introduce a new policy to train people from minority areas with high educational levels to become young cadres. The objective of Program No. 7 was to build a new system of boarding schools, offering free school expenses and monthly scholarships, throughout the minority regions of Viet Nam.
This new system has had some negative aspects. The boarding schools were intended to send minority students to tertiary education institutions, but have not operated effectively as such because the system lacks guarantees that all graduates will progress to the next stage of education.In addition, the system for selecting enrollees has, for the first time, made inequalities in personal ability apparent among groups living in the same areas.
Using data collected in 2004 from field research in the Chi Lang district, Lang Son province, this paper finds, however, that the system has played a positive role for the Tay and Nung people living there — namely by creating a new status for minorities. By redefining the status of ‘minority’ in the Vietnamese nation as positive, and making such groups the target ofpreferential policies, the system has helped minorities reidentify themselves. Minority children, seeing the comparatively high advancement rate of pupils who attend the boarding schools, have come to imagine themselves as having equal opportunities for academic success. Program No. 7, therefore, has smoothly integrated minority groups into the national education system.
