Fundamentally, comprehensively renewing education and training represents a strategic policy of our Party and State. This is a matter of importance and urgency to all schools in general, the Political Academy in particular, which should continue to be researched and applied to reality via synchronous, effective measures.

The Political Academy is a centre for training and cultivating political cadres and military social sciences and humanities researchers. Being fully aware of the Academy’s position, over the years, grounded on the Military’s missions and especially issues on building a politically strong Vietnam People’s Army (VPA), the Academy has thoroughly grasped the Party’s resolutions and directives on education and training, particularly Conclusion 51-KL/TW, dated May 30^th, 2019 by the Party Central Committee’s Secretariat on continuing executing the 11^th Party Central Committee’s Resolution 29-NQ/TW, dated November 4^th, 2013, the Resolution of the 13^th National Party Congress, and the Resolution of the 11^th Military Party Congress to proactively develop its action plans and programmes. At the same time, it has drastically implemented the “Strategy for the development of education and training within the Military towards 2030, with a vision towards 2045” and the “Action Plan for a digital transformation in education and training in the period of 2021-2025, with orientations towards 2030.” It has always advocated that “the quality of training at schools goes hand in hand with units’ combat readiness capacity.” It has concentrated on renewing, standardising, and modernising training programmes and contents for each group of learners as well as innovating steps of the teaching and learning process under the motto of “substantive learning, substantive teaching, and substantive assessment.” As a result, the quality of training across the Academy has unceasingly improved. It has provided thousands of political officers and researchers and teachers of social sciences and humanities with good quality for the Party and the VPA. It has also provided reliable scientific arguments for formulating the Party’s guidelines and the State’s laws on defence-security consolidation. It has effectively taken part in defending Marxism-Leninism, Ho Chi Minh’s ideology, the State’s laws and policies as a direct contribution to building a revolutionary, regular, elite, gradually modern VPA.

Currently and in the upcoming years, the Academy’s education and training work will continue to have new developments in terms of training scale, category, and method with more demanding requirements. To successfully fulfil its missions and meet the requirements set by the building of a compact, strong VPA towards modernity, the Academy should concentrate its leadership and direction on comprehensively renewing education and training, “building and standardising a contingent of instructors,” and “improving the quality of learning and teaching” as a breakthrough. By 2025, 70% of cadres within the Academy must have postgraduate degrees; 80% - 85% of instructors and researchers must hold postgraduate degrees. This is a very heavy task requiring the Academy’s great determination and effort. To that end, in our opinion, the Political Academy should focus on well implementing several basic measures as follows.

First of all, continue renewing the Academy’s training models, goals, contents, and programmes. This is a measure of critical importance to cultivating and training cadres to be capable of meeting the requirements of practice. Grasping the Party’s guidelines on a fundamental, comprehensive reform in education and training and the building of a contingent of political cadres and teachers and researchers of military social sciences and humanities in a standardised, modernised manner, the Academy should continue proactively, actively taking proper steps towards a reform in its training programmes and contents, while completing its training models and goals to guarantee the “outcome standards.” As for the training models and goals, political cadres graduating from the Academy must have great political zeal and good skills in the Party building and party and political work. Teachers of military social sciences and humanities must have deep specialised knowledge and good teaching skills. Meanwhile, researchers of military social sciences and humanities must have vast, deep knowledge, good research methods, independent, creative settlement of research problems, and great capacity to effectively organise both individual and collective research projects. Concerning the training contents and programmes, adhering to the Party’s guidelines and the building of the VPA in the new situation, the Academy should develop its training programmes in a logical way with a connection between educational levels, while completely handling an overlap between subjects and educational levels. Due attention should be paid to reviewing, supplementing, and designing contents of subjects in order to comprehensively develop learners’ qualities and abilities, closely combining theory with practice, improving learners’ scientific thinking ability and method, and ensuring an appropriate ratio of knowledge of military social sciences and military sciences in the training process.

Furthermore, the Academy should continue organising and deploying delegations of cadres and instructors to units across the Military for conducting researches and surveys on the quality of cadres holding different positions after their graduation from the Academy. Doing so will enable the Academy to grasp needs of each group of learners for their knowledge, experience, capacity, and working style, master new theoretical and practical developments in party and political work associated with units’ missions, identify advantages and difficulties in troops’ training, combat readiness, and combat, and receive feedback and proposals from units’ leaderships and commands on its education and training. Besides, the Academy could proactively organise seminars and forums on each speciality with the participation of competent offices of the Ministry of National Defence and the Ministry of Education and Training as well as top educational specialists. Consideration should be given to promoting the role of scientific and training councils at Academy level and within faculties, managerial cadres, and instructors in identifying the amount of knowledge, methods of organising training work relevant to each group of learners, and training programmes. Grounded on results from those above-mentioned activities, the Academy should drastically direct its competent offices and faculties to develop detailed training programmes.

Second, focus on raising the quality of instructors, educational managers, and scientists, particularly top ones, actively renewing teaching-learning methods, and improving the quality of teaching and learning. Under the Party’s guidelines on “building a pool of teachers and educational managers as a key step,” the Academy Party Congress for the 2020-2025 tenure has clearly identified guidelines and synchronous measures for the building of a corps of cadres. In the short term, it is necessary to well carry out personnel planning work, closely combine the building of a pool of key leaders with the building of a contingent of party committee members and top scientists, make plans on selecting and recruiting instructors and scientists for each speciality to maintain the continuous, solid development, and provide opportunities for all staff members to develop themselves. At the same time, significance should be attached to diversifying sources of cadres, flexibly adopting measures to select, train, and cultivate cadres, actively standardising the contingent of instructors, scientists, and educational managers, and creating a favourable condition for cadres’ self-study and self-improvement to meet the Academy’s increasingly high task requirements.

Additionally, the Academy should keep renewing teaching-learning methods and improving the quality of teaching and learning. Faculties of the Academy should employ teaching methods relevant to each group of learners in order to properly equip learners with knowledge, comprehensively develop learners’ abilities, and bring into play learners’ self-consciousness, proactiveness, and creativity. Great weight should be added to actively organising methodological activities, designing many sample lectures for the Academy’s faculties to develop their specialised ones, employing the topics-based teaching method, widely, deeply applying information technology and modern technical equipment to teaching work, and strictly maintaining regulations on teaching inspection and evaluation to draw lessons on each lecture.

Third, step up infrastructural development and scientific research work to best serve education and training. This is a matter of utmost importance to accelerating the reform and improvement in the Academy’s education and training and building a “smart school capable of accessing the 4^th industrial revolution.” To that end, the Academy should focus on consolidating its lecture halls, classrooms, and digital libraries and acquiring modern equipment in a synchronous, uniform fashion for teaching, learning, and research. At the same time, it is essential to well implement the breakthrough in “enhancing basic researches, raising the quality of grass-roots level research projects, and better designing textbooks and training documents.” Special importance should be attached to closely combining basic researches with applied researches, practical summary, and theoretical development. The Academy should apply highly feasible research products, programmes, and topics to designing textbooks and training documents and publishing reference books for teaching, learning, and research within itself and other military schools.

Fundamentally, comprehensively renewing education and training is a central, urgent task that should be regularly, continuously performed. Thus, well implementing those above-mentioned measures will enable the Political Academy to train a contingent of “both red and expert” cadres to satisfy the requirements set by the Military build-up and national development.

Sr. Col. NGUYEN TRUONG GIANG, MA

Political Academy, Ministry of National Defence