GREETING PROFESSOR TRAN VAN DOAN FROM NATIONAL TAIWAN UNIVERSITY

The Center for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies just met with Prof. Tran Van Doan from National Taiwan University on the occasion of his business trip to Vietnam.

The professor had a talk about higher education in Vietnam in comparison to that in Taiwan, aiming at training human resource with high quality to develop the country.

Now Prof. Tran Van Doan is a professor of history of Western philosophy at the National Taiwan University. He also used to be a visiting lecturer at several well-known universities in Austria, Japan, Britain and the US, etc. Moreover, the professor is the author of more than 15 monographs and over 150 scientific theses written in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, German, French and Italian.

According to the professor, education should be of concern to any countries at any ages. The Vietnam’s higher education system has many features similar to that of Taiwan before. Thanks to necessary reforms, Taiwan has now had many dramatic changes and its education service becomes more effective.

The university entrance exam in Taiwan is held 3 times a year, which puts less pressure on candidates since those who haven’t passed a previous exam can promptly retake it without spending a year to wait for the next exam as before. The university system of Taiwan is also more diversified, allowing students to choose their desired subjects and change any subject during the course if they find it unsuitable for them.

Prof. Tran Van Doan

The professors who are invited to lecture at the university have to pass a strict examination for approval and spend annual assessments of teaching quality. They must be ones having high academic qualifications, or ones achieving outstanding success in a particular field (they are conferred the rank of professor even though they don’t have any qualifications), or ones wining prizes at the world level. It can be seen that the Taiwan’s education puts emphasis on the effectiveness of its business and teaching quality rather than on the qualifications of lecturers.

As for post-graduates, they are invited to be assistant professors to have income, which helps them ensure the stability of their research instead of being awarded scholarships.

At the National Taiwan University where Prof. Tran Van Doan is teaching, students are allowed to be resident in the university so that they can have time to study and do research all day long in there. All of the professors at the university are provided with accommodation until they retire and their pension is equal to their official working salary. Children of these professors are also granted all tuition, insurance costs, and so on.

The professor said at the talk that the development of a society and country is always closely connected with intellectual level and competence of its people. Vietnam has to carry out a step-by-step reform with human resource training as its first priority.

Vietnam also needs to learn valuable experience of education from Taiwan as well as from other advanced countries in the world to train high quality intellectuals, contributing to the country’s development in the process of industrialization and modernization nowadays.

In his return to Vietnam this time, Prof. Tran Van Doan also worked with the University of Technology and Ho Chi Minh City National University.

Recent news

Same category