Education Quote by Nguyen Xuan Phuc

Technocratic on the surface, quietly political underneath: Nguyen Xuan Phuc frames education less as a moral crusade than as infrastructure. The phrasing is telling. “Enhance the quality” sounds managerial, almost neutral, but it smuggles in a hierarchy of value: the problem isn’t access or equity so much as performance, standards, output. And “education and training” pairs the classroom with the workshop, collapsing civic formation into employability. That’s not an accident; it’s a worldview.

The clincher is “develop human resources,” a corporate term that treats people as a strategic asset to be upgraded. The subtext is national competitiveness: Vietnam’s growth model depends on moving from low-cost labor to higher-skill production, and that shift demands a workforce that can meet foreign-investor expectations, adopt new technologies, and operate in a more complex economy. In that context, education becomes economic policy by other means.

This language also signals a familiar governing posture in one-party developmental states: legitimacy is earned through results. By emphasizing “quality,” Phuc implicitly acknowledges a public anxiety about schooling that doesn’t translate into good jobs, about credential inflation, and about a mismatch between what institutions teach and what the market pays for. The quote’s intent is both directive and reassuring: the state sees the bottleneck, and it has a plan.

What makes it work rhetorically is its blandness. It’s broad enough to unify ministries, businesses, and parents under a single aspiration, while vague enough to avoid the hard questions: who defines “quality,” who gets prioritized, and whether “human resources” leaves room for independent thinking that can’t be neatly KPI’d.