Circular No. 59/2026/TT-BGDĐT of the Ministry of Education and Training allows teachers to retire if they meet the conditions to sign full-time labor contracts with educational institutions, which is a very commendable policy.
The new regulation not only creates a legal corridor to effectively use the experienced teaching staff but also contributes to solving the teacher shortage problem that is happening in many localities.
The Circular also sets out a very important principle, using retired teachers to improve the quality of education but not to replace the full-time teaching staff, without affecting the strategy of developing successor staff.
For many years, many schools, especially in remote and isolated areas or localities with rapid mechanical population growth, have always been in a state of teacher shortage.
While training and recruiting teachers takes time, in the immediate future, the team of retired teachers still has many people who are healthy enough, professional enough and especially very experienced.
A teacher with 30, 40 years of teaching not only carries professional knowledge. What is more precious is life experience, is pedagogical art, is the ability to handle educational situations that books cannot fully teach.
Those experiences are accumulated through a lifetime of working in the profession.
However, the use of retired teachers should not be understood as an alternative solution to training and recruiting young teachers.
Young teachers bring creativity, access to new technologies and educational methods. Retired teachers bring in depth of experience and experience.
A noteworthy point of Circular 59 is the requirement that educational institutions must publicize the list of contract teachers, evaluate teaching quality and collect feedback from learners.
Collecting feedback helps the use of retired teachers based on actual capacity, not career age or reputation.
For many educators, continuing to stand on the podium after retirement is not only a job but also a happiness.
Society also benefits, students have experienced teachers, schools have high-quality resources, and the education sector has time to train successors.
Retirement is the end of a period of work, but it is not necessarily the end of a journey of dedication.
If teachers are still healthy enough, still have the desire to teach and society still needs their experience, then creating conditions for them to continue teaching is the most effective way to use the intellectual resources of society.
