« National Education in Cambodia, a decisive if not major issue for the future »
The dynamism, the creativity, and the development of a Nation, necessarily passes through the quality of its Educational system. Its population must be well educated and, in order to do so, a high quality system and adequate resources are needed.
The National Education issue thus becomes a building to which all actors of the Society must contribute in order to raise it at the highest level.
This belief therefore led the Henri Capitant Cambodia Association to organize a major conference on the reform of the Cambodian education system on the 24th January 2017, in the movie theater of the French Institute of Cambodia under the theme : “National Education in Cambodia, a decisive, if not major issue for the future“.
This conference animated by His Excellency Mr. Hang Chuon Naron, Minister of Education, Youth and Sport, before several guests and participants, including: Mr. Alain Fortin, Counselor of the Embassy of France, His Excellency Mr. Kheang Seng, Vice-President of the Anti-Corruption Unit, Mr. Yi Prasnar, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Henri Capitant Cambodia Association and the Professor Mr. Hisham Mousar, member of the Scientific Council of the Henri Capitant Cambodia Association, gave the occasion to the Minister to present an overview of the evolution of the Cambodia Education System since the Independence (November 1953), which he simply subdivided, into three periods: “a Glorious period, a period of Annihilation and a period of Rebirth“. The particularity of the System is that it went through the vicissitudes of the Khmers-Rouges regime (April 1975 to January 1979), during which the State was unable to do anything in the field of education, and during which most of the intellectuals, professors and students were massacred.
But even if, statistically, the changes of the last sixty years in the field of education have made it possible to move from “an enrollment rate of about 12% on the eve of Independence to more than 98% in 2013“, it was only in the early 2000s that there were remarkable reforms in the Education system. And to the Minister to remind the measures1 that he has initiated in favor of quality education since 2013 and which offer concrete results in this direction.
In the same process of implementing reforms in the education system, the Minister also reviewed the commitment and the progress of his Ministry on the five-pillar reforms2.
However, despite many improvements at all levels of the education system, the Minister deplores a number of gaps that still need to be filled, especially concerning “the quality of training (sometimes the quantitative concern has prevailed at the expense of the quality of the training), the treatment of the social causes of the loss or the lack of education and the adequacy between training and employment for meet the needs of the country and make education a driving force for economic development or sustainable development “.
These are the challenges of the country and that the Association would like to reveal through in order to find concrete solutions and propose reforms to make Education better and accessible to all.
The team of Henri Capitant Cambodia. Clic here to read the Minister’s speech.
1 Find on his attached speech
2 See the speech