Don't put down education with the word "price"

Although the leaders of the Ministry of Education and Training have explained the change from "tuition fees" to "training service prices", as a parent, I still disagree.

If this is implemented, parents and children will have to forget the short, meaningful word that everyone has used up to now, “tuition fee”. Therefore, a new word is needed to replace it, but it must be more meaningful and easier to use than the old word. When comparing that criterion, the phrase “training service price” clearly does not meet it.

Imagine one day your child or your child’s teacher says: “Mom and Dad, it’s time to pay the training fee!”, or in the morning you give your child an envelope and say: “Remember to pay the training fee today!”, it sounds so long-winded and too annoying. Is it necessary to make the problem so complicated?

The Minister of Education and Training has caused public outrage by wanting to collect “training service fees” instead of “tuition fees” as before. Photo: Trong Phu

In legal terms, “fee” is the amount of money that an organization or individual must pay when another organization or individual provides a service. Fees are associated with specific money, paying fees means paying money, collecting fees means collecting money, the amount of money collected will more or less depend on the requirements of the service provider.

On the contrary, “price” is a value expressed in money, not tied to a specific currency, so it cannot be collected or paid. Thus, it is clear that “collecting price” is a meaningless phrase.

In the field of training, I think that if we use “training service price” it will exhaust the remaining intangible value in the current teacher-student relationship. In a time when people are starting to worry about the blandness of the teacher-student relationship, the image of the ferryman in the eyes of students is much different from the past, this proposal will make that relationship become more and more flat, falling completely into the vortex of business and buying and selling.

Although teachers do not teach for the purpose of being “respected by their teachers”, from my personal observation, I clearly see that the more students respect learning, respect, and appreciate their teachers, the better they will learn. On the contrary, teachers rarely consider teaching as a transaction to be valued.

All the costs written in numbers in the process of cultivating people are actually not the highest value of training, so don't lower yourself to the noble profession with the word "price".