HIDA Journal 2016 AUTUMN No.9

10/14

HIDA JOURNAL8 You analyze various data on educational circumstances in Myanmar and provide advice on the future educational policies. Could you tell us about the current situation and issues of educational systems in Myanmar which was also the theme of your lecture?Among some issues in educational systems in Myanmar, the rst issue is about the school system. Myanmar has adopted the 5-4-2 system where people enter elementary school at the age of 5 and graduate high school at the age of 16. However, the age at high school graduation in this system is earlier than that in the interna-tional standard, 18 years old. In order to conform to the international standard, Myanmar has launched a reform of the school system en-tering elementary school at the age of 6 and graduating high school at the age of 18 after a 12-year basic education,.The second issue is that there are many students dropped out of school. It is obvious according to the data analysis. Each year, 5–6% of students drop out of school after entering elementary school. The number of students who reach the high school graduation examina-tion is about one third of those who entered elementary school. The number of students who pass the high school graduation examina-tion and obtain a university entrance qualication is only about one third of those who reached the high school graduation examination. Roughly speaking, one million people enter elementary school each year, and about 100,000 of them can enter university. Although the dropout rate has been declining year by year and the overall aca-demic background has been higher, there are still a large number of students dropped out of school. The most common reason of dropout is that it is difcult to keep up with the class. School education is provided for free in Myanmar, but the custom of private class still survives. School teachers invite their students to their homes after school and provide a remedial class. In attending the class, parents of the students prepare rewards and the students take them to their teachers. So students from families that cannot afford to pay rewards cannot take the remedial class, and accordingly, they cannot keep up with their studies at school and drop out of their school. There is the custom of private class at university as well. In the past, the main industry of Myanmar was agriculture. However, with the progress of industrialization and increase in employment opportunities in other industries than agriculture in the future, it is necessary to take care of academic skills of students dropped out of school. On the other hand, it cannot be publicly recommended to conduct vocational training for young people dropped out of school as it will promote youth labor. Myanmar seems to consider the provision of informal lessons on weekends to students dropped out of school to have them acquire ac-ademic skills equivalent to those at junior high school graduation as well as the provision of training to such students to have them acquire sufcient skills to be able to work at a factory, etc. after acquiring academic skills. At the end of your comment now, you referred to vocational education. With the recent development of Myanmar, Japanese companies expanding their businesses into Myanmar have been increasing year by year, and companies using HIDA’s program to accept trainees from Myanmar have been also increasing since around 2012. I think companies expanding overseas want to hire industry ready personnel. Could you please tell us about the circumstances of vocational education in Myanmar in detail?As I mentioned earlier, there were few people in Myanmar who work at a company as it was an agricultural country. Therefore, vocation-al education had been rarely provided. At present, there are some schools carrying out proper vocational training, but in general, the number of vocational schools is small. Most of students go on to general high school and try to take the graduation examination for entering university. There are few options to go to vocational school instead. In addition, since funds are not spent to vocational school, they do not have sufcient facilities and equipment. Students at vo-cational school learn operations by using machines that were like those used decades ago and mainly take classroom lectures such as the memorization of names of tools by watching them, etc. As a result, they cannot obtain practical skills used at factory. Therefore, vocational school is not popular in Myanmar. Other than vocational school, the Ministry of Industry has training facilities. In the past, industries of Myanmar were undertaken by state enterprises under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Industry, and persons employed Interview: Educational Circumstances in Myanmar and Future VisionsDr. Muta giving his lectureDr. Hiromitsu Muta, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo Institute of TechnologyHIDA held the opening ceremony of Yangon Ofce, its fourth overseas ofce, in Yangon, Myanmar on June 10, 2016. (Details will be described in the next page.) At the commemorative seminar held following the opening ceremony, a lecture titled “Current Issues on Human Resources Development in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar from a View Point of Supply Side” was given by Dr. Hiromitsu Muta, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo Institute of Technology, who is engaged in education system reform as Policy Advisor at the Ministry of Education of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. We spoke with Dr. Muta about educational circumstances and characteristics in Myanmar and future visions, with the content of his lecture.

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