Thirty-one per cent of ethnic minority children in Vietnam reach upper secondary school, against sixty-three per cent of Kinh children. Our languages are not the language of instruction anywhere. This page sets out what is measured, what it means, and why a school is the quietest instrument in the whole programme.
The figures
| Measure | Ethnic minority | Kinh | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Children reaching upper secondary school | 31% | 63% | CERD dialogue with Viet Nam, November 2023 |
| Population aged 15+ with high school or higher | 9% (all minorities averaged) | 22.7% | 2009 census |
| Primary school completion, lowest recorded minority (Hmong) | 37.7% | 80.0% | 2009 census |
The published Vietnamese series report "ethnic minorities" as a block of fifty-three peoples across the whole country, so none of these figures is specifically ours. Highland districts sit at the worse end of every one of them, and no disaggregated Central Highlands series is published. That absence is itself a finding.
What was taken, and when
- 1892 onward — French missionaries and administrators transcribe highland languages into the Latin alphabet. Bahnar is reduced to writing first, out of the Kon Tum mission; Rhade follows and is codified as a legal register under Léopold Sabatier.
- 1901 — The first elementary school in the highlands opens at Buon Ma Thuot. Sabatier's Franco-Rhade school follows, and produces the generation that founds BAJARAKA.
- 1955–63 — Under Ngo Dinh Diem, instruction in our languages is prohibited and documents in them are destroyed. Vietnamese names are imposed on villages and on men in uniform.
- After 1975 — Our languages are barred from the schools again; higher education becomes effectively closed to Dega students; districts away from the towns have no schools at all.
- Today — Vietnamese is the language of instruction. Some mother-tongue teaching exists as a subject in some provinces; none of our languages is a language of administration anywhere.
Twice in seventy years the same instrument was used by two governments that agreed on very little else. That is the fact this page exists to record.
Why the school is the quietest instrument
A confiscated field produces a complaint. A closed church produces a congregation meeting somewhere else. A school produces nothing, because its effect arrives twenty years later and lands on people who cannot describe what was done to them — they only know they read Vietnamese better than Rhade and that their grandmother is hard to talk to.
Consider what a child who begins school at six in a language nobody at home speaks is being asked to do. Learn to read, in a second language, from teachers who may not speak the first, in a curriculum in which the child's own people appear as a colourful minority rather than as the inhabitants of the place the school stands on. Fall behind. Be recorded as falling behind. That record then explains the outcome by the child.
The result is the 31 per cent. It is not a mystery and it is not a measure of anybody's ability.
What Vietnam says
The state points to boarding schools for ethnic minority pupils, preferential university admission, and representation of minorities in the National Assembly — which CERD members commended in November 2023. These are real. A boarding school also removes a child from the village for the years in which a village is learned, and preferential admission operates on a cohort two thirds of which is already gone by upper secondary. A remedy applied at the end of a pipeline does not fix the pipeline.
What is lost when a language goes
Our customary law was oral and recited in verse. The Rhade code survives on paper because a French administrator wrote it down in the 1920s; most of the others do not survive at all. Song cycles, the vocabulary of the gong ensembles, the plant and animal knowledge of a forest economy, and the names of places that appear on no map are all carried in speech, and speech only lasts as long as somebody is taught it.
The smallest of our peoples — the Brau and the Ro Mam, a few hundred each — are the clearest case. A language with three hundred speakers, none of them educated in it, is one generation from ending.
Sources
- OHCHR, CERD dialogue with Viet Nam, November 2023 — the 31 per cent / 63 per cent figures, given to the delegation by Sheikha Abdulla Ali Al-Misnad
- UNFPA Viet Nam, education factsheet drawn from the 2009 Population and Housing Census — attainment and completion figures
- Montagnard Human Rights Organization, History — the 1892 transcription, the 1901 school, and the Diem-era prohibition
- Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders (2003) — the Franco-Rhade school and the codification of Rhade
Compiled September 2026. We would like disaggregated figures for the five highland provinces, and any provincial curriculum document showing what is taught about the Dega. Both are wanted.