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The recent increase in crimes among young people, especially pupils and students, is a proven evidence of education failure, one education expert said.

Gian Tu Trung, Director of the Institute for Research on Educational Development, said young criminals were a result of people’s ignorance and lack of morality.

 “Fighting among pupils is not a new issue. However, public concerns have been raised when the country has recently reported a rise in the number of savage and bloody school fights. The problem is that people in the neighbourhoods where these fights have taken place did nothing to stop the violence, but instead helped aggravate the situation,” Trung commented.

 According to him, the government, school, family, society and the criminals themselves lacked morality.

 “Education, especially teachers are to blame as they fail to act as someone like soul and intellectual experts who are to guide their students,” he commented.

 He said that in order to develop good citizens, it’s necessary to not only to improve citizenship class and issues associated with morality, but to improve education programmes and methods as a whole.

 Textbooks for subjects taught at schools such as maths, physics and literature seem to just provide students with academic lessons for their future careers instead of providing them with practical skills to guide their behaviour in real life. Many students now are products of a shortcoming education, he claimed.

 In order to improve the situation, it was necessary to conduct comprehensive education reforms so as to re-define what a good person would be, the expected final product of education and how to realise the target, he said.

 “To this end, the roles of five major elements in the national education should be re-defined, including the government, school, teacher, family and learner. The role of the government should be supervision instead of enrolment or examination or textbook compiling. Schools and teachers have yet to complete their responsibilities when it comes to producing good textbooks and acting as a good instructor. Families tend to force their children to become someone they expect instead of providing them a chance to develop on their own,” he added.