“We’re told we must follow ministry instructions, so there’s hardly any room for us to be creative,” he said.

Huy made the comments in front of several top officials from the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET), Department of Education and Training and dozens of local educators at Monday’s talks on teaching methodology.

The roundtable was held by Tuoi Tre newspaper, which opened a forum on the same topic two weeks ago. The paper called on readers to give their opinions on educational issues and received more than 600 responses.

At the discussion, Education Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan admitted the ministry had been slow in encouraging schools to apply innovative teaching methods.

He said the ministry wouldn’t be able to switch to an entirely different textbook system anytime soon, but he argued that teachers are still able to come up with their own creative teaching methods.

Vietnamese schools are often criticized for impractical lessons that are either too boring or too theoretical to engage students. Many classes are designed solely to have students memorize information to pass exams.

Teachers at the meeting said “innovative methods” come second to following textbooks and focusing on the parts that relate to exams.

Nguyen Viet Bac, deputy president of Saigon University, said even in creative subjects such as literature, teachers have to subtract points from student essays if they don’t provide the same ideas listed in pre-specified scoring guidelines.

Ho Thieu Hung, former director of the city’s Department of Education and Training, suggested providing an online forum for teachers across the country to exchange ideas, methods and materials.

Hung said one of the problems was that the country’s examination system only evaluates students’ knowledge of information and not the critical thinking skills they’ll need to excel in an increasingly competitive working environment.

He cited a study, soon to be released by the city’s Institute for Educational Research, in which the institute found that eight out of 10 high school students say they want to attend college and seven out of 10 college students say they want to pursue graduate degrees.

“Some might say that our students must be very keen on studying but I think for some of them it’s simply a way to postpone their entrance to the working world,” Hung said.

“Our main goal shouldn’t be to increase the number of students that pass exams or the number of doctorates we produce, it should be about producing students who know how to think and work.”

Reported by Huong Le