• Index of this issue

No. 75, November 2012

The Ministry of Education and Sports is mandated to ensure development of an effective human resource base through providing and enabling education opportunities for all Lao people in order to increase economic growth, enhance living conditions and enable a well-trained and educated workforce. The National Poverty Reduction Strategy and Socio-Economic Development Plan highlight that education development is a key enabling factor in attracting foreign inward investment. This strategic plan is for the period of present to 2020.

All sectors of the government organization including the National Library of Laos should have actively involve and to provide all facilities for upgrade the current situation of education of the nation. In this article, I would like to introduce the activity of the National Library of Laos.

Laos is a developing country, where the physical geography and wide ethnic and linguistic diversity, together with financial constraints have challenged the implementation of educational policies, while the government would like education to be available in all parts of the country in practice the remain significant inequality in its provision. In particular, literacy levels have been very low in primary schools, both in rural and urban schools. Many reasons have been found by the national library surveying, focusing on literary program. Children from ethnic groups must learn Lao in the first year of primary school before beginning the regular curriculum in the second year. For regularly made balance between all students the National Library involved in this program by running the national reading promotion throughout the country for promoting all students, teachers and parents to help and read books. Every year, supplementary reading materials to support their education have been lacking and books that have been available have mostly been for adults, which are too difficult for young children to read. A survey conducted by the national reading promotion program of the National Library found that one solution to this situation is to publish more children books, to educate the local teachers to learn how to use the supplementary books in the regular curriculum. In addition to this program in order to improve the quality of primary education, especially literacy levels, it is necessary to provide reading rooms, school libraries, and book boxes for more remote areas. The books distributed to the school, seventy percent of the reading materials are folktales.

photo of children reading books from a mobile library	photo of children looking for books in a mobile library

Our objective is to use this as a vehicle for education in moral and culture values amongst the diverse Lao population. This includes customs and traditions, and ways to respect and living together peacefully, which have traditionally harmonized the Lao Society. In this way, the use of folktales in primary education is twofold: to promote literacy as quickly as possible and to cultivate good citizens. The National Library of Laos will continue efforts to achieve the target.