Sad story "Small plan"

Every year, before the students' Tet holiday, schools receive orders to collect small plans sent by the District Youth Union.

Upon receiving the plan, the school immediately implemented it. The collection per primary school student is 1.5 kg of paper, and for secondary school students it is 2 kg of paper or 20 - 30 beer cans.

Although many teachers are not satisfied with this way of forcing students to pay, it is an order from a superior, which teacher dares to object?

Sad stories about collecting

Getting 1.5 kg - 2 kg of paper is not an easy task. One parent reacted indignantly:

“My family doesn't have any scrap paper to collect. The school would rather convert it into money and we would pay in full. Collecting it like this is more difficult.”.

Then she told me she had to go to some old newspaper stores to buy paper for her child to submit.

So every student chooses to hand in the cans. Because, during Tet, every family has dozens of beer or soft drink cans.

Thinking like that, in reality, there are still families who do not have beer cans because “there are no men at home so they do not drink beer. Furthermore, the family has 3 children in school so they fight over each one,” one parent said indignantly.

So to have cans to pay, the children had to go pick them up at street vendors or bars. But now the bars also collect them to sell.

Seeing each child taking a share or standing there staring at the guests, waiting for each guest to finish drinking and throw the can on the ground, they quickly rushed out to grab it, and there were many times when there was a scene of fighting and cursing loudly.

Another child came to school with tears streaming down his face and said, "I told you, but you still sold everything."

Then she told me that this morning because she didn't have any cans to turn in, she refused to go to school and was scolded and beaten by her mother.

In a fit of anger because her child was crying and whining to stay home from school, the boy's mother also vented her frustration on the teachers and the school in front of the child.

Misrepresenting the meaning of the Small Plan movement

In fact, the Small Plan movement of the Ho Chi Minh Young Pioneers is extremely practical and meaningful.

This is a movement of Vietnamese children born in 1958, organized by the Ho Chi Minh Young Pioneers Team at the initiative of children of Son Tay and Hai Phong provinces, using the collected funds to build the Young Pioneers plastic factory in Hai Phong.

On December 2, 1958, President Ton Duc Thang wrote a letter allowing the movement to expand throughout the North.

During the factory inauguration ceremony, 18,000 products of the factory were given to children in the South living under the Republic of Vietnam government.

This action aims to show solidarity between children from both the North and the South.

In 1975, after the country was reunified, the movement was carried out further in the South.

Mainly activities include collecting paper, scrap, increasing production, planting trees, raising poultry, "Plant a tree, raise an animal",..., students collect scrap paper, collect beer cans to make the movement. The plan is small but I guarantee that if you ask them about the meaning of this movement, not many of them will know.

The most commonly heard answers are still "teachers told us to submit it" or "schools forced us to submit it"...

Organizing the Small Plan movement is for no other purpose than to foster compassion and the spirit of "sharing food and clothes" in each team member.

From there, practice the awareness of saving, loving labor, solidarity, sharing, and sympathy with people around.

Through that, educate compassion, know how to help people in difficult circumstances in life.

However, the way the Small Plan movement is currently implemented in many localities across the country is based on quotas and formalities, such as setting quotas to force each student to hand in a certain amount of paper and beer cans within a certain period of time.

Some schools, in order to exceed their targets, have included collecting paper and cans in class competitions and used it to evaluate the effectiveness of each teacher's homeroom work.

Under pressure from the school, some teachers put pressure on students.

Some teachers use "tricks" of encouragement, but some teachers are harsh and intimidating.

Under pressure from teachers, the children knew that they had to find a way to get those cans or scraps of paper to hand in.

There are many students who, in order to be praised, bring several times more than the school requires.

We believe that the current way of doing small plans that many provinces and cities across the country are applying has completely lost the good meaning of the previous small plan movement.

So this practice needs to be stopped.