An obstacles course for highlands kids

In the Viet Nam News article, "An obstacles course for highlands kids," the author discusses the issue of the accessibility of education in the highland region of Vietnam, where many children in remote and poor areas are forced to travel long distances, often by boat or swimming, in order to reach their schools. For families with inadequate resources, they must face the bleak reality of having their children swim to school due to the high costs of boat transportation. These issues are primarily due to Vietnam's poor infrastructure, especially in the highlands region. These issues are further compounded by children's needs to cook and care for themselves while their parents work in fields substantial distances away. Children of the highlands face an ultimatum: go to school and tolerate these tough conditions or follow their parents to the farm. Teachers also face a struggle of adapting to the lack of resources available to them and the dire situations of the students they serve. Though many localities in the region are working to ensure that every village receives a classroom and organizations and individuals are allocating funds to the building of roads and bridges to aid these students, these efforts are not enough to facilitate highland children's educational experiences. As the author of the article says, all sectors must contribute to infrastructural improvements in Vietnam to allow highland children to go to school.

This article captures the issue of Vietnam's rapid efforts of modernization that has led to an emphasis on urban development at the cost of highland and rural communities. As I have noticed in previous articles on Vietnam, the Vietnamese government is working with different nations and organizations to introduce technological innovations to administrative entities and techniques, such as keeping records through online databases and developing an e-market. However, it seems like as a result of its myopic view of modernization, the government has neglected the basic infrastructural needs of the country. Even more so, the government seems to neglect a substantial part of its population, the rural and highland population that has provided the agricultural foundation for Vietnam's economy and well being. It will be interesting to see if funds will be allocated to rural parts of the country and whether the government will decide to fund education for all in order to create an educated population that can keep up with a modernizing Vietnam.