EDDI XXV - Academic Digest III
Local Insights from the Vietnamese Education System: the impacts of imperialism, colonialism and neo-liberalism of globalization
Local Insights from the Vietnamese Education System: the impacts of imperialism, colonialism and neo-liberalism of globalization
Author: Anh Ngoc Trinh
TAKEAWAYS
The forces of imperialism, colonialism, neo-liberalism and globalisation have been an integral in shaping Vietnamese education.
Due to suffering from multiple imperial and colonial powers, Vietnamese education is a complex hybrid of local and international influences.
The paper shows how local dimensions blend with internationalisation through outbound academic mobility, institutional mobility, model borrowing, and curriculum importation.
My two decades of close association with South East Asia have proved the most fascinating and illuminating decades of my life, with each ASEAN country casting its own unique spell upon my psyche.
The Thai spell caused me to fall in love with that country.
But the spell which caused me the most personal reflection, and confusion, was the one cast by Vietnam.
If you are a Westerner of a certain age, a person for whom Apocalypse Now is not just a brilliant movie but a potent symbol of a lived era, then it’s impossible to visit Vietnam today without being forced to reappraise one’s understanding of both Western and Asian histories and realities.
In short, don’t visit 21st century Vietnam for confirmation of what you think you know about Asia. Visit it in order to have those confirmations disabused.
Of all the ASEAN and East Asian countries, Vietnam was the last to encounter neo-liberalist globalisation. While the Asian Tigers - Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea - were undergoing rapid industrialisation and benefiting from remarkable growth rates during the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam was experiencing a devasting civil war, the impact of which is still reverberating in Asia and the West.
However, as this article by Anh Ngoc Trinh points out, if you look at Vietnam’s remarkable history then it is clear the country has been experiencing ‘globalisation’ for some time, and this is evidenced especially in its education system:
“Vietnam has evolved its social, political, cultural and economic structure from feudal, semi-feudal, colonial, socialist to socialist-orientated regimes under Chinese, French, Soviet and Anglo-Saxon impacts. Hence, the Vietnamese education system has been subjugated and internationally orientated for centuries.” (p. 68)
The aim of Trinh’s paper is to provide a critical analysis of local dimensions in the Vietnamese education system in the times of imperialism and colonialism: making the point that a thousand years ago the Vietnamese where forced by their Chinese rulers to embrace Confucianism, with this philosophy providing the ‘fundamental grounding of the Vietnamese education system’.
And thus began a millennia of Vietnamese attempts to minimise if not actively resist the impact of imperialism on their culture and sense of independence.
“The wave of criticism against the Chinese imperial regime and Confucian-based thoughts was evident in the work of Vietnamese intellectuals…it can be argued that such local responses showed an awareness of independence and a refusal to assimilate by the Vietnamese people in the face of imperialism.” (p. 69)
That stubborn and essential refusal of the Vietnamese to assimilate to imperialist values, served them well when France become Vietnam’s new colonial ruler in 1858. As with China centuries before, France too considered it had the right to impose its own form of education on these doughty Asian people.
“During the eighty years of French domination, the Vietnamese higher education system was designed as an elite public system, aiming to serve the children of local French colonialists and training people for the colonial apparatus…French was the main language of instruction in secondary and post-secondary schools as well as administrative bodies and the curriculums developed had little relevance to Vietnamese people and mirrored those of France.” (p. 69)
What gave the French (and British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch) the right to colonise most of South East Asia, and in the name of both alien royalty and/or alien religions, is altogether another story, one which writer’s such as Edward Said have examined at length. But alas for the Vietnamese, colonialism didn’t end with the defeat of the French Army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and nor did Western globalisation’s impact on Vietnamese education.
First the Russians got involved, with North Vietnam adopting the Soviet model of education in 1956, in which all institutions were public, specialised and mono-disciplinary overseen by a highly centralised government. While South Vietnam adopted the US model in which both public and private institutions delivered academic curriculums under a decentralised government, birthing neo-liberalism.
This educational division in Vietnam’s education system was merely the harbinger for even greater divisions in Vietnam’s culture, economics, politics and society, leading within a decade to the Vietnam War and the nightmare of ‘Apocalypse Now’.
Chinese, French, Soviet, American, what all these (and other forms) of colonialism have in common is that they claim superiority over the local, in this case the Vietnamese. At the same time, the local never entirely disappears but gets co-opted into the global, and in ways which can easily be overlooked and underappreciated.
“The forces of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-liberalism of globalization have been an integral part of and interactive with local dimensions in driving and shaping the Vietnamese education system. On the one hand, I acknowledge the inevitable effects of such powers; on the other hand, I argue for the significance of the localization and individualization in relation to globalization.” (p. 68)
However, as Trinh goes on to explain…
“Due to suffering from multiple imperial and colonial powers, the local dimensions within the Vietnamese education system and the society as a whole cannot be purely local but hold a complex hybridity.” (p. 72)
It was this ‘complex hybridity’ that struck me most forcefully in my trips to Hanoi in 2015, during which I had the fortune to link up with senior academics at the National Institute of Education Management (NIEM) where I delivered several lectures on developments in international education.
The tension between Western globalisation and the need of the Vietnamese to retain and protect their own unique (educational) culture/identity was palpable, made more so by the fact that even I, a Westerner, could see the discrepancies between Marxism and capitalism getting played out in front of me – in conversations, meetings, actions, things said, much left unsaid.
During one of my visits to NIEM I got caught up in a big university celebration; one of the brightest young women academics at NIEM had just been awarded a Fulbright scholarship and was thrilled to be soon off to the USA to do her MA. Her grandfather had been killed fighting the Americans during the war. If anyone at NIEM was reflecting on this ironic change of history in one Vietnamese family, then they didn’t share it with me. What they did share with me, and only too willingly, was their pride in the fact that ‘one of their own’ had been accepted into the highest echelons of USA higher education.
And who would deny that young Vietnamese academic her success? Not me. I too congratulated her on her achievement. Indeed, I had no doubt that upon her return to Hanoi, and NIEM, following her success in the States, she would be moving rapidly up the Vietnam Higher Education career ladder.
There is no singular Vietnamese education system, something pure and aloof from its history as a colonised nation. But nor is there an overwhelming globalising hegemony, reducing the Vietnamese to merely puppets of a rampant neo-liberalism.
‘Hybridity’ seems the most appropriate way, maybe the only way, to describe where the Vietnamese education system is today. And ‘outbound academic mobility’, demonstrated so aptly for me by the NIEM academic, is an expression of such complex hybridity.
“Among the large volume of scholarly voices against imperialism, colonialism, and the neo-liberalism of globalization, the local dimensions have been highlighted as both concerns and potential resolutions. The paper examines how local dimensions have been demonstrated and fostered in the Vietnamese education system under such impacts before and after 1986…[they]…have also been presented in national reforms and internationalization policies for higher education, such as outbound academic mobility, institutional mobility, model borrowing, and curriculum importation for the past decades of the 21st century. They hold complex hybridity resulting from a mixture of imperialism and colonialism over the centuries.” (p 76)
Like many Westerners who’ve spent time in Vietnam this century, during my travels around the country and especially in my encounters with fellow academics, I found myself wondering just where I was in terms of geopolitical space and history. At one level, the emotive, the hybridity I was facing confused and disorientated me. At another level, the intellectual, I felt inspired by the sheer energy and drive of the Vietnamese people, leading me to respect them simply for having come out of the colonial mincer with their localised identity more or less intact.
Just don’t ask me to explain or define 21st century Vietnam.
This is a country and a people still emerging from and defining themselves after a millennia of imposed colonialism.
reference
Trinh, A.N. (2018) The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives Vol. 17, No. 3, 2018, pp. 67-79
Photo by Georgios Domouchtsidis on Unsplash
link
openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/IEJ/article/view/13072/11835