Physical education: too much, too little
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Physical education at all levels in Vietnam has been notorious for cultivating in students a hatred for sports with its rigid grading system, joyless drill and limited offerings.
But the revised current curriculum for primary and secondary schools, with its ambitious goal of giving students a “well-rounded” physical education by teaching them a wide range of sports, doesn’t seem to make physical education here any better.
For instance, under the current curriculum, high school students must learn seven sports, six mandatory and one optional, during a school-year. The curriculum further requires teachers to give instructions on at least two sports in every 45-minute session (physical education classes meet twice per week in Vietnam).
For example, in one class-meeting in spring, 11th graders have to master both sophisticated balancing, receiving and attacking moves in shuttlecock kicking and approach run, takeoff and action in the air and landing in long jump.
Teachers say this is simply impossible. Nguyen Xuan Tri Nghia, Head of the Physical Education Department at Saigon Practice High School, made a simple calculation.
Since students need to spend 15 minutes to warm up, they have only 30 minutes to practice all of these moves. If there are 30 students in a class (actual attendance is often higher) and a long jump takes one minute, each student can only jump once, not to mention they have no chance to practice shuttlecock kicking at all.
“Honestly, this is all for show with absolutely no athletic value,” said Coach Nguyen Dinh Minh of the Sprint Unit of the National Running Team. Minh said to master any move in any sport, an athlete needs to practice hundreds of times, not a mere several times a week.
Teachers say if the goal was simply to acquaint students with those sports, it might be achieved. The ministry’s goal, however, is to improve students’ health.
But according to many sport doctors, students’ health is more likely to be negatively affected rather than increase by the current curriculum.
Every sport requires its own warm-up techniques and strategies to develop muscles and sinews, so applying the same ones to all sports will do more harm than good, said Doctor Diep Nguyen Bao Toan, a member of the HCMC Sport Medicine Society.
Doctor Tang Ha Nam Anh from HCMC University of Medicine and Pharmacy said giving students a chance to focus on just one or two sports would be much healthier.
In response to these concerns, Ngu Duy Anh, Head of the Students’ Affairs Department at the education ministry said the ministry was heading toward turning mandatory physical education classes into optional sport clubs, a practice widely used elsewhere in the world.
But Anh cautioned that the lack of specialized infrastructure and teachers would make it difficult to carry out this solution in Vietnam.
