by Pham Thi Hong Thanh
ABSTRACT
In almost every society, it is argued that education is vital to social, cultural, economic and scientific development. Education contributes to the development of society through equipping people with high level knowledge and skills so that they can create technological and scientific inventions to improve people’s lives. However, there is currently a paradox in many countries (including Vietnam) that education is falling behind fast developments of science and technology. Furthermore, it is slow to respond and reply to changes created in the context of economic globalization. Why is this so? Finding some answers to this question is the main issue of this paper. More specifically, using two futures’ methodologies, the paper will investigate how Vietnamese higher education and Vietnamese vocational and technical education are responding to impacts of globalization. First, the futures triangle (Inayatullah 2005) helps reveal three influences on Vietnamese higher education (the push and the pull of the future and the weight of history) under the impact of globalization. Then, Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) (Inayatullah 2004) will be applied to examine why Vietnamese vocational and technical education has not yet been able to catch up with changes in today’s world.(continue…)