In Vietnam, education is sacrosanct
My dear friend and colleague Julia recently moved to Hanoi with her family. When I told her I’d be in Asia for part of my sabbatical, she invited me for a visit. I’m a huge fan of Julia’s work. Her most recent book, Conscripted to Care: Women on the Frontlines of the COVID-19 Response, calls attention to many factors that were troubling me about the gendered response to the pandemic.
I visited Julia earlier this month. She is working at VinU, which is Vietnam’s first private (non-profit) university. I gave a seminar talk (about conversion therapy, of course) and guest lectured for a psychology course while visiting VinU. Before my guest lecture, Julia had mentioned to me how seriously Vietnamese people take education. Despite the warning, I was stunned by my classroom experience. When I teach at home, I am accustomed to students scrolling social media on their phones, chatting with their friends, or simply getting up and leaving in the middle of a lecture. In Hanoi, students closed their laptops and phones, took hand-written notes, and repeatedly raised their hands to pose questions mid-lecture (this is good!—it’s a sign the students are engaged). I was blown away.
I shared these reflections with a colleague and conjectured: in Vietnam, I think education is sacred. She corrected me: I think you mean sacrosanct. Sacred is religious. Sacrosanct goes beyond religion to suggest that something is respected even if not in a religious context. Indeed, most Vietnamese identify as atheist. And yet they treat education with near-holy appreciation.
One of my favorite sites in Vietnam (Julia’s too, she told me!) was the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. The frequency with which Vietnamese students (including adorable, robed kindergarten students walking in graduation ceremonies) visit this temple is a testament to how seriously they take their studies.
The Temple of Literature was built in the 11th century and served as Vietnam’s first national university. The temple is primarily dedicated to Confucius, but it includes monuments honoring other important teachers. My favorite was Chu Văn An, who was basically Vietnam’s patron saint of education and an all-round badass in several respects. First, he is famous for having submitted the Thất trảm sớ, or “The Petition to Behead Seven Mandarins.” Mandarins were professors in Vietnam’s feudal era. Chu Văn An saw corruption among Mandarins who were trying to curry favor with the emperor. When the king refused the petition, Chu Văn An resigned and withdrew from his academic work. He espoused an approach to education that was inherently egalitarian, if not equitable. He believed that education should be accessible to all and worked tirelessly to make it so. For these reasons and more, Chu Văn An is a hero even among contemporary cohorts of Vietnamese students. Seven hundred years after his death, he is still celebrated in a way that can inspire those of us in this profession (at least, it does for me) to be better teachers. When the Vietnamese celebrate Teacher’s Day each November, images and stories of Chu Văn An are used to remind people that education is not just about credentials or job preparation but also about a moral tradition that Chu Văn An embodied.
At the Temple of Literature, I saw young students praying for success on upcoming exams—typically the national high school graduation exams. My guide explained to me that the vast majority (74% is the statistic I found later) of Vietnamese high school students complete these exams—a prerequisite for going to university or college—but only half of those applicants are admitted. This scarcity of opportunity is one key difference between the drive for higher education in Vietnam, as compared to Canada (and the US, for that matter). In Canada, students of course compete for spots across universities with varying acceptance rates (a given university may admit only 30-60% of applicants, for example), but ultimately, almost every student who seeks postsecondary education is given access. This explains why Canada has among the highest university degree rates globally—Statistics Canada reports that in 2021-22, half of 18-24 year olds were undertaking some degree.
While my guide was explaining all this, I approached a row of turtle sculptures—turtles representing longevity, learning, and wisdom in Vietnamese culture. Collectively, the stone tablets above these turtles record the names and birthplaces of over 1,000 graduates who passed royal exams held at the temple in centuries past.
Walking around the temple, I saw the reverence on the faces of Vietnamese school children, and I felt the weight of Vietnam’s first national university, now one of the most visited sites in Hanoi, by locals and foreign tourists alike. I thought about increasing scrutiny of the “value” of postsecondary education back home in North America (in Canada, too!). Statistics showing that folks in the US see college degrees as having less importance today than in decades past. Politicians like Vance calling for “aggressive attacks” on universities in response to “wokeism” and leftist politics run amock—an observation notably not shared by university students themselves, irrespective of political affiliation. Even more troubling than politicized attitudes toward academia is the systemic underfunding of universities; in Canada, public spending on postsecondary institutions per GDP has decreased by about a third over the past 16 years.
As we were leaving the Temple of Literature, we came across a 300-year-old banyan tree that has been allowed to grow into and around the 1,000-year-old temple walls. My guide explained that this was not by chance; as with the turtles, banyans represent longevity, vitality, durability.
Speaking of old trees, the same week I visited the Temple of Literature, Trump visited China. President Chi took Trump to Zhongnanhai, an ancient compound that is politically important, protected, and therefore far-less visited than the Temple of Literature. A US-based Asian studies scholar interprets this moment in the gardens of Zhongnanhai: “... a hot mic captured Xi drawing Trump’s attention to the age of the trees around them—some centuries old, some said to be more than a thousand years old. When Trump asked whether Xi had taken other presidents on similar walks, Xi replied that he had only rarely… the Zhongnanhai walk reveal[s] a recurring logic in Chinese-American diplomacy: America’s fast-moving economy is invited to look at China’s sense of tradition.”
Later this month, I explored the ancient temples near Siem Reap, Cambodia, with my friend Keval, who is also a professor. Before this visit, I hadn’t appreciated that there are actually thousands of temples in the region, most constructed between the 9th and 15th centuries CE. While Angkor Wat is the most famous, Keval and I loved Preah Khan, which means “holy sword” in the Khmer language. It was a highly important and well populated Buddhist university; when it was established in the 12th century, there were almost 100,000 teachers, attendants, and dancers working within it.
At Preah Khan, I also came across banyan trees with roots allowed to grow around the ancient walls—similar to what we saw at Ta Prohm, aka the “tomb raider temple”, so-called because parts of the movie Tomb Raider (as well as Indiana Jones) were filmed there. Ta Prohm is way more popular, and it is certainly beautiful. But as an academic and a nerd, I far preferred Preah Khan. Also, while both temples have been preserved in a way that allows nature to take over the ancient ruins, Preah Khan has maintained more structure and detail from its original construction. I liked the mixture of old and new, human-made and natural, academic and holy.
At this point, I thought there has to be something going on with ancient trees in these temples. Our guide confirmed: in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions (the religion of the Khmer empire changed in the 12th and 13th centuries), certain trees serve as sacred conduits between the underworld, the earth, and the heavens. In older indigenous and animistic religions—which are still observed alongside Buddhism in Cambodia today—some trees themselves can be spirits. For Khmer people, banyans are neak ta, or spiritual entities. Of course, the banyan immediately reminded me of the ceiba, or grandmother tree I encountered in Peru. When I got back to my computer to research the parallel, I learned that ceibas and banyans are both very large tropical trees with massive canopies and buttress roots. Banyans start their lives as epiphytes, or plants growing on trees, while ceibas frequently host suspended epiphytes. Both are critical to their respective ecosystems in dominant ways—what biologists call keystone species—and both are locally regarded as sacred. And, thus, both are teachers: they create the conditions for organisms around them to connect to roots, move between worlds, and thrive.
You should submit a version to a university (alumni?) magazine.