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The Triumphs and Failures of Mass Education in Vietnam
Author(s): Alexander Woodside

Source: Pacific Affairs , Autumn, 1983, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 401-427
Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2758190
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The Triumphs and Failures of
Mass Education in Vietnam*
Alexander Woodside
THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION which Vietnamese commun

ers have promoted in their country in the past half-century is
poorly known in the West; so poorly known, that it is well to begin its
historical study not with a master interpretation but with a tour of as
many of its important themes as possible. In public, Vietnam's Marxist-
Leninist leaders clearly believe that the differences among national
economies and national educational systems are merely matters of
historical stages, which will be gradually resolved in relatively similar
ways. Behind the scenes, it is not always obvious how much they may
privately feel that their educational options are also deeply conditioned
by unique cultural and historical circumstances. The compendious
parade of political, cultural, and economic factors examined in this
article is, therefore, deliberate. The Vietnamese educational revolution
has known extraordinary cycles of achievement and frustration, which
are not simple matters to understand.
On the one hand, between June 1946 and June 1950 Viet Minh
guerrillas, using night classes and "independence hours" (gio doc lap, the
name given to the rare tranquil periods when French airplanes were not
bombing them), taught basic literacy to some ten million previously
uneducated Vietnamese, while fighting a major war at the same time.
This feat was unprecedented in Southeast Asian history. Even French
newspapers acknowledged this.' Three decades later, in 1980, the
percentage of eligible children who were actually receiving some form of
education at age six in northern Vietnam was 90 per cent-a considera-
bly higher percentage than that generally found in "Third World"
schools. Again, this was a remarkable accomplishment for a war-ravaged
country which had one of the least productive economies in the world
and one of the least favorable ratios of land to people. (In southern
Vietnam in the same year, however, only 70 per cent of all six-year olds
were being educated.)2
*For helpful criticism of a first draft of this paper, my thanks to David W.P. Elliott.
See the summary in Nguyen Trong Con, "Vai net ve phong trao diet giac dot o Viet-
Nam trong 5 nam dau khang chien chong Phap 1945-1950" ("A few points about the
movement to eliminate illiterates in Vietnam in the first five years of resistance against the
French, 1945-1950"), Nghien cuu lhch su (Hanoi), 5-6 (1979), pp. 38-46.
2 Nguyen Ngoc Dung, "Nhin lai van de pho cap giao duc pho thong cho thieu nien"
("Looking again at the problem of universalizing general school education among youth"),
Nghwen cuu gzao duc (Journal of educational research) (Hanoi), 10 (1980), pp. 26-8.
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On the other hand, spokesmen for the Vietnamese government have

been almost equally inclined, since the second Indochina war ended, to
lament the unconditional qualitative decline of Vietnamese education, in
every one of its aspects: culture, science, technology, political indoctrina-
tion, and "socialist morality."3 And such root-and-branch condemna-
tions of the stagnation of mass education in Vietnam seem as justified by
the evidence as the earlier celebrations of legendary guerrilla school-
teachers. The communist state's exhaustive efforts have failed to rescue
Vietnamese schools from the internal inefficiencies which characterize
less formidable Asian and African school systems. According to the
World Bank's Education Sector Policy Paper of April 1980, only half of
all "Third World" primary-school pupils reached fourth grade; and
some 15 to 20 per cent of the pupils who did stay in school had to repeat
their grades. In northern Vietnam in 1979, a mere 52.1 per cent of all
pupils in fourth grade were of the appropriate age; every year, more
than half a million Vietnamese pupils have had to repeat their educa-
tions-5 per cent of all pupils in the north, 8 per cent in the south.4
This strange historical conflation of success and failure has surprised
the Vietnamese government. The resolution which the Hanoi Politburo
issued on January 11, 1979, announcing educational reforms, inevitably
stated that education was a "necessary factor" in economic growth. But
the resolution also pointedly invoked the Vietnamese people's "tradi-
tions" of a love of study and skill in studying, a therapeutic reference to
that heritage of centuries of Confucian booklearning, examinations, and
teacher emperors which, many Vietnamese have hoped, would ultimate-
ly help enable Vietnam to enjoy a post-Confucian renascence of the kind
pioneered by Japan.5 Hanoi educational journals regularly reinforced
this hope by publishing inspiring articles about medieval Confucian
soldier-scholars like Nguyen Trai (1380-1442). (One such article some-
what grotesquely pictured Nguyen Trai as a forerunner of Dale
Carnegie.)6
What, then, has gone wrong? Or, more fairly, why have the same
group of revolutionaries had such a mixed record with their experi-
ments in mass education, in a country where, as they themselves have
rightly emphasized, a preoccupation with the proper forms of teaching
and studying has pervaded politics for hundreds of years? There is a
natural explanation which might occur to any specialist in comparative
3 See Le Xuan Vu, "Ve moi quan he giua phat trien kinh te va phat trien van hoa hien
nay" ("On the relationship between economic development and cultural development at
present"), Tap chi cong san (The communistjournal) (Hanoi), 7 (1982), pp. 51-6, for a
example of such lamentations.
4 See the discussions of the World Bank report in Comparative Education, 17, 2 (June
1981). The Vietnamese statistics come from the article by Dung cited above.
' For the text of the 1979 Politburo resolution on educational reform, see Dai hoc va
trung hoc chuyen nghiep (Universities and specialized middle schools journal) (Hanoi), 7-8 (1979),
pp. 2-6. The invocation of tradition comes in the sixth section.
6 See Nghien cuu gzao duc, 10 (1980), p. 5.
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Mass Education in Vietnam
education. It is that revolutionaries, once they have gained power,

inevitably shift from the unpaid volunteer literacy teachers of their pre-
conquest base areas, to more formal and more bureaucratic schools; and
that such schools sooner or later undermine the further spread of mass
education by their rigid procedures, organizations, and curricula, and by
their greater costs. The difficulty with this explanation is that it mini-
mizes the many actual and potential contributions which such schools
make to the cultivation of a permanent literacy rather than an ephemer-
al one.
Prolonged poverty, magnified by many foreign invasions and moles-
tations, might be thought to be another simple cause of educational
stalemate. The failure to modernize agriculture means that peasant
pupils, scratching for a livelihood, have relatively little time to spend in
school. Yet the influence of poverty upon the fluctuations of Vietnamese
mass education is less simple and more pervasive than that, as I hope to
show. It involves, as one Vietnamese economist recently argued, the
general intellectual failure of Vietnamese leaders to pay sufficient
attention to the differences between developed and underdeveloped
economies, particularly with respect to their use of the labour force.7 It
involves the specific inability of the Vietnamese state to revolutionize the
psychologies of village leaders who still control many crucial rural
employment decisions-and, therefore, the failure to end at the village
level the old dissociation between the schools and the development of
vocations not based upon elitist literary culture. The more and less
obvious connections between poverty and education must be examined
historically, with reference to communist values and the Confucian past,
which Vietnamese leaders share with leaders of China and, perhaps,
North Korea. Significantly, mass education in China has also suffered
reverses. In 1982, almost one-third of China's 800 million peasants were
deemed to be illiterate or, at best, semi-literate. Although the percentage
of school-age children in China going to some form of school had
reached 90 per cent, only about 60 per cent of such children stayed in
school for very long (75 per cent in village primary schools in the Peking
area), and far fewer successfully graduated.8
THE EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE VIETNAMESE

REVOLUTION SUMMARIZED
There is no reason to distrust the Vietnamese communists' denuncia-

tions of the palsied state of education in colonial Indochina. In his
7 Phung The Truong, "Thu nhap quoc dan va phat trien kinh te o Viet-Nam: mot nuoc
kinh te chai phat trien" ("The income of the people of the country and economic
development in Vietnam: a country with a slow developing economy"), Nghien cuu kin/ te
(Journal of economic research) (Hanoi), 4 (1981), pp. 1-12.
8 Sources: Jiaoyu yanjiu (Educational research) (Peking), 2 (1982), p. 52; Renmin Jia
(People's education) (Peking), 2 (1981), pp. 10-13.
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famous study of education in all the Southeast Asian colonies in the late
1930s, J.S. Furnivall calculated that the French colonial regime supplied
a pinched and rudimentary schooling to a smaller percentage of the
population (2.06 per cent) it ruled than any other colonial government,
the next worst examples being the Netherlands Indies and Burma.9 Yet
the standard communist claim that 95 per cent of all the people in
Vietnam between the ages of eight and fifty were illiterate in 1945 must
be regarded as somewhat rhetorical. The communists' interchangeable
use of the terms "illiteracy" (nan mu chu) and "lack of studying" (nan that
hoc) indicates, indeed, the survival among them of a Confucian tenden-
cy to equate literacy with academic learning. Significant portions of the
unschooled population probably always managed to acquire a smatter-
ing of literacy informally, from relatives or friends or neighbours. And,
when a French colonial writer like Jean deLanessan, in a book (La
colonisationfran~aise en Indochine) published in Paris in 1895, commented
that "even the nhaques" (Vietnamese peasants) knew how to read and
write, and had a knowledge of the most minute rules of proper
behaviour at their fingertips, his romantic Orientalism was not entirely
unfounded. It seems incredible, for example, that in a province like Ha
Tinh-long a stronghold of the scholar gentry and their relatives and
clients-only 11 per cent of the population should have been "literate"
in January 1946, as communist educators proposed.'0 When Ho Chi
Minh launched his "war campaign" (chien dich) against illiteracy in
September 1945, he generously predicted that the nine out of ten
Vietnamese who were illiterate could learn how to read and write quite
adequately within three months. This implied an awareness that the
educational poverty of the people was not unduly awesome. (There is a
contrast, I believe, between Ho's optimism and the optimism of a radical
educator like the Brazilian Paulo Freire, who has said that a basic literacy
can be achieved within eight weeks; Freire merely seems to assume that
peasant cultures and their needs are relatively simple, linguistically and
economically.)
But, although they worked with a peasantry that was far from
culturally unskilled, the Vietnamese communists' dedication to mass
education is still one of the central missionary themes of their revolution.
The recollections of Tran Phuc and others have made it clear that, as
early as 1927-28, when he was in Siam, Ho Chi Minh was planning an
independent national school system for Vietnam, as a means of escape
from a colonial culture which "kept the people stupid."' 1 (In fact
newspaper commentary which Ho ever published, on June 1, 1969,
9 J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma an

India (New York: New York University Press, 1956 ed.), p. 211.
1 Con, "Vai net ve phong trao diet giac dot," p. 39.
1 See Cuu quoc (National salvation) (Hanoi), May 19, 1960.
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under the pen name T.L., also dealt with education.) Ho's words of
appeal when the Indochina Communist Party was founded, in 1930,
listed universal education as the ninth of the ten major tasks a commu-
nist government must try to perform. In 1938, a Tonkin party commit-
tee decree inspired the creation in Hanoi of an Association for the
Popularization of National Language Studies-a legal "front" organiza-
tion, permitted by the French-whose communist school teachers (such
as Vo Nguyen Giap and Dang Thai Mai) and non-communist intellectu-
als planned remedies for peasant illiteracy.'2 The influence of Chinese
communism at Yanan only magnified impulses which had long existed
in the Vietnamese movement. The "ten great policies" which the Viet
Minh announced in the early 1940s, patently reminiscent of the ten
policies which the Chinese party had proclaimed in August 1937, called
for the creation of a fully literate citizenry and for compulsory primary-
school education.
All this prepared the way for the mass education decrees of the Viet
Minh-controlled Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) at Hanoi in
September 1945. Within one year, all Vietnamese from the age of eight
years up were to be able to read and write romanized Vietnamese. To
that end, "common people" (binh dan) evening classes were to be
organized in every Vietnamese village and town within six months of the
decree (of September 8, 1945). The term "common people education"
was a device, borrowed from the Chinese revolution in which it had
originated (at about the time of the May Fourth Movement), which
allowed the practical transcendence of theoretical distinctions between
peasants and workers. Illiterates, who were to be "controlled" and
trapped by road blocks, were divided into three age-groups: those aged
eight to fifteen, those aged sixteen to forty-five, and those aged forty-six
or more. The politically crucial middle group-including monks in their
temples, fishermen at the river and seaside, and even prostitutes-were
to be instructed first. Literacy classes were also to serve as "political
clubs," whose socially unrestricted memberships were to be encouraged
to see through the "bourgeois" colonial myth that education was
politically neutral, and were to be taught their rights and duties within
the post-colonial republic.
The Viet Minh did not design a formal school system until 1949-50,
during their "training cadres and reorganizing government organs" (ren
can chinh co) movement. The previous years were dominated by what
Vietnamese communists now somewhat uncomfortably call their "guer-
12 Ngo Van Cat, comp., Viet-Nam chong nan that hoc (Vietnam fights against illiter
(Hanoi: Nha xuat ban giao duc, 1980), p. 20. See also the discussion in David G. Marr's
admirable new book, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1981), pp. 136-89. Marr does not mention the party decree
which preceded the association, and there are certainly grounds for questioning the
strength of the link between the communists and the assocation.
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rilla model" (kieu du kich) of education. Two and a half million people
had acquired literacy a year after the 1945 decrees were issued. This was
less than the original objective of the decrees; but it was still an
indispensable aspect of the subversion of French colonial control on the
eve of the first Indochina war.13 After their military triumph in the
south, in 1975, the communists made a nostalgic repetition of their past
drives against illiteracy there. They introduced the new campaign by the
mass burning of effigies of ignoramuses (in Long Xuyen); the holding of
street musical processions by propaganda groups, in which female adult-
education teachers held up the forms of words and performed songs
and dances about learning how to read (in Ho Chi Minh City); and the
burning of firecrackers and the staging of dragon dances by illiteracy-
fighting "armies," whose theatrical properties included gigantic replicas
of books and pens (in Vung Tau and other places). The south was said to
be "basically" free of illiteracy by March 1978, in the sense that about 94
per cent of the 1.4 million illiterates of working age who had been made
the targets of the drive had become literate. And at the end of the 1970s,
UNESCO came to Ho Chi Minh City to pay homage. It convened a
conference there, for the countries of Asia and the Pacific region, on the
struggle against illiteracy. The non-Vietnamese delegates to the confer-
ence expressed their admiration for such features of Vietnamese mass
education as the redemption of prostitutes by schooling; the large
numbers of females attending primary schools and literacy classes,
compared to other Southeast Asian countries; the fact that Vietnamese
teachers were not conspicuous outsiders in rural areas, but lived in the
same villages with their pupils; the "spirit of discipline" in Vietnamese
schools; and the closer visible connection in Vietnam between work and
schooling.
THE LIMITS OF PROGRESS AND THE WANING OF THE

INEXPENSIVE GUERRILLA MODEL
The very success of the southern literacy campaign of 1975-1978,

however, had a bittersweet edge to it. For it was revealed that the
southern campaign had achieved a greater superficial success reducing
illiteracy in the mountain regions of the south than decades of commu-
nist rule had managed to accomplish with respect to liquidating illiteracy
in the Tonkinese highlands.'4 The absorption and enlargement of the
cultural life of Vietnam's many ethnic minorities was always a crucial
feature of communist mass-education campaigns. The inculcation of
13 See the summary by Nguyen Trong Hoang, "Tim hieu gia tri cac sac lenh
1945 ve binh dan hoc vu" ("Towards understanding the value of the September 8, 1945
decrees on mass education"), Nghien cuu gzao duc 9 (1981), pp. 8-12.
14 Ngo Van Cat, comp., Viet-Nam chong nan that hoc, p. 179.
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literacy-both in Vietnamese and minority scripts-among the peoples

of the northern borderlands, or of the western highlands, was a
politically necessary show-case achievement. Its success could be used to
prove that there was-and had been for centuries-one Vietnamese
nation or civilization, whose diverse ethnic parts cooperated with each
other in historically progressive ways, contributing to what Nguyen
Khanh Toan called-in a 1975 book about north Vietnamese minor-
ities-the "great Vietnamese family of peoples." Back in the early 1940s,
therefore, Ho chose Cao Hong Lanh to prepare a syllabus of thirty
lessons for teaching literacy to minorities in the Viet Minh base areas.
One of the three training sessions for mass-education cadres which the
DRV Mass Education Office organized in 1946 was reserved for ethnic
minority cadres. Significantly, it was called the "Unity" (Doan ket) session,
and attracted 75 representatives from some 14 minorities, including the
Muong, the Tay, the Yao, the Hmong, the Chains, the Bahnar, the
Sedang, and the Jarai.
Apart from its possible odour of cultural imperialism, however, the
effort to reach ethnic minorities was one of the things which most cruelly
illumined the many Sisyphean traps in the new educational world. With
the ethnic minorities, the guerrilla model attained its climax. Teachers
and pupils in many areas had to use porcupine quills as writing brushes,
and the sheaths of areca palm leaves for paper. The image of revolution-
aries teaching minority peasants to read and write, late at night, by
torchlight in their small bamboo huts in the forest, was popularized by
political poets like To Huu and became a definite part of the revolution-
ary mystique. Mobile literacy classes were especially useful in the western
highlands, as a means of outwitting French repression; and, by the end
of 1949, Viet Minh "graduation examinations" certified that some 130
Bahnar, Sedang, and Rhade pupils could now read and write. The
communists' "Central Committee mountain region teachers' school,"
established by 1950 as a clandestine rival to the old French superior
primary school for mountain minority clerks in Lang Son, soon pro-
duced hundreds of new minority literacy instructors. 15 In spite of a
activity, a quarter of a century later the north's 1974 census revealed that
about 10 per cent of the population in an arc of nine provinces west and
north of Hanoi were still invincibly illiterate. In some districts, like
Hoang su phi in Ha Tuyen Province, as many as one-third of the people
were illiterate, and almost one thousand children each year were falling
back into illiteracy, after being rescued from it. In eighteen years,
according to one survey, some one thousand primary-school teachers in
15 Ngo Van Cat, comp., Viet-Nam chong nan that hoc, pp. 23-4; and Do Thi Ngu
Quang, "Vai net ve qua trinh phat trien su nghiep giao duc o cac vung dan toc it nguoi"
("Some points about the process of developing educational work in the minority people
regions, 1945-1954"), Nghien cuu lich su, 7-8 (1981), pp. 63-9.
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six districts of Ha Tuyen Province had produced fewer than one
thousand grade-four graduates.'6
Indeed, it had become clear by the 1980s that mass education in
Vietnam, particularly among the minorities, had become subject to
cycles of growing and declining literacy. The notion of a simple, secular
upward progress in the promotion of schooling was no longer warrant-
ed. The first obvious cyclical negation of the work of mass education
appeared in 1952, while the war with France was still being fought. The
numbers of school classes, teachers, and pupils, all dwindled "considera-
bly" in Viet Minh-ruled zones. Illiteracy made a serious comeback in
such places as the mountain villages of Nghe An Province, where 88 per
cent of the peasants who had been freed from illiteracy lapsed back into
it.17 This first regression was blamed upon the climactic violence of the
war, as well as upon a lack of linguistic "egalitarianism" on the part of
communist cadres in dealing with minority peoples. But a second and
more serious cyclical decline in mass education, less plausibly explained
by warfare, manifested itself in the 1960s and 1970s among Vietnamese
peasants as well as among minority ones. The foundations of adult
education in the north began to erode in the early 1960s, and had not
shown signs of full recovery two decades later. The absolute numbers of
pupils in northern adult-education classes diminished from 1.8 million
in 1960-61, to one million in 1963-64, to 500,000 in 1970-72, to a
yearly average of 400,000-450,000 pupils after 1973. The decay oc-
curred chiefly in the villages. What it portended was the inability of
Vietnamese educators to capture the interest of a "rather large" number
of peasants, once such peasants had acquired a rough literacy.'8
It is patent that decolonization, in itself, was not enough to open the
gates of a mass educators' paradise-in Vietnam or anywhere else. Ho
Chi Minh's hope of 1945 that he could diffuse a fully serviceable literacy
among all Vietnamese adults and teenagers within one year is compara-
ble to the equally ill-fated anticipation of the Chinese National Program
for Agricultural Development of 1956-that primary school instruction
could be extended to all school-age children in China, even in backward
areas, by no later than 1968. Apparently, in neither country was it
remembered that it took the leaders of the Meiji Restoration in Japan
more than forty years to impose a mandatory primary-school education
on all Japanese children. No doubt the changing political contexts of
revolutions has played a part in exploding their most extravagant
original hopes. Early mass-education initiatives, before and immediately
16 Nguyen Cong Thanh, "Van de xoa mu chu cho dong bao cac dan toc o mien nu
("The problem of eradicating illiteracy among ethnic compatriots in the mountain
regions"), Nghien cuu giao duc, 10 (1980), p. 1 1.
17 Do Thi Nguyet Quang, "Vai net ve qua trinh phat trien," pp. 66-7.
18 Ngo Van Cat, comp., Viet-Nam chong nan that hoc, p. 150.
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after revolutionaries have won power, will seek to change peasants from
"objects" to "subjects," as part of their conversion into warriors with a
critical political consciousness. Later mass-education programmes, di-
rected by revolutionaries who, long in power, have lost something of
their populist inclinations-as reflected in an aged, purge-racked party
whose members do not wish to share their political privileges with
newcomers 19-may be far less enthusiastic about instilling a critical
consciousness among the people they reach; and mass education may
thereby lose its appeal. The problem for the historian is to try to decide,
as fairly as possible, whether popular political apathy, or certain inevita-
ble structural changes, or the effects of poverty, have had more to do
with the "noteworthy" circumstance that, although the percentage of
children attending school in northern Vietnam has been high-by Third
World standards-since the end of the 1960s, the work of completing
the universalization of elementary primary education, even in the Red
River Delta, is nevertheless taking "rather long."20
As to the structural changes, the introduction of schools and of paid
professional teachers after 1950, whatever its other results, undoubtedly
began the reversal of the relationship between education and economics
in the Vietnamese revolution. As long as education used volunteer
teachers and makeshift facilities, it could seem to enjoy an illusive
ascendancy over mere economics. Once education came to depend upon
more costly permanent schools, the scale and the rate of development of
such schools quickly exceeded the Vietnamese economy's capacity to
support them. In the first five years (1976-81) after peace came to
Indochina, the number of general school (elementary and middle-
school) pupils in Vietnam increased at a rate of 260,000 pupils per year.
By 1981, there were almost twelve million such pupils, or almost one-
quarter of the entire population. (There were, however, almost seven-
teen million children in the then relatively narrow general-school age
category, out of a total official population of 52.7 million people in
1979.) The state budget increased its allocations to education every year.
The rate of pupil increase was so extreme that the increases in the state
budget were all absorbed by the need to build additional classrooms, and
by the equally important need to prevent the desperate living conditions
of Vietnamese teachers from degenerating even further. (The average
postwar expenditure per pupil per school year by the Vietnamese state
was about thirty piasters; but 90 per cent of this money was consumed by
teachers' wages.) The crux of the matter was that there was no economic
19 For an official assessment of the postwar decay of the party, see the editorial in
chi cong san, 7 (1979), pp. 1-11, especially pp. 5-6. For an unofficial assessment by an
eminent overseas Vietnamese exile and opponent, focussing more upon high-level
nepotism, see the essay by Truong Nhu Tang in New York Review of Books, October 21,
1982, pp. 31-6.
20 The words of Nguyen Ngoc Dung, "Nhin lai van de pho cap giao duc," p
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surplus available to improve the quality of school instruction. The visible

decline in the quality of Vietnamese general schools, for its part, only
reinforced the economic strains. The wastefully large numbers of pupils
who had given up school, or who were asked to repeat their grades,
drained the economic system of "billions of piasters.",21
But the gospel of planned social and economic development which
Vietnam's revolutionaries embraced precluded any retreat to the primi-
tive economic enchantments of "guerrilla education," which Ho Chi
Minh himself had denounced at a March 1956 conference. The econom-
ically troublesome school system was not annulled, but enlarged. The
January 1979 educational reform expanded compulsory school educa-
tion in Vietnam, on paper, to a full nine years-from age six to age
fifteen-in what was both a radical break with the ancient tradition of
Confucian educators (obeyed, significantly, by Ho and the Vietnamese
communists in 1945) that elementary education should begin at age
eight, and a high-flying defiance of the fact that, between 1950 and
1979, many rural children in Vietnam delayed entering primary school
before the age of ten or eleven. The 1979 reform also promised to create
special schools and school classes for the first time for children with
special aptitudes in foreign languages, art, physical training, literature,
mathematics, biology, physics, and chemistry; separate schools for
handicapped children; and abbreviated short-cut schools for children
who had failed primary school.22 In one sense, the reform of 1979 was a
realistic revision of the revolutionaries' early underestimation of the
amount of education the Vietnamese people needed, and a realistic
revision also of their overestimation of the ease with which literacy could
be achieved. The reform of 1979 was also realistic in its assumption that
it might take twenty years before Vietnam's existing general schools
could be upgraded. But its blueprints provided no real balm for the
conflict which tormented all Vietnamese educators-the conflict be-
tween the steadily increasing demand for schooling and the inability of
the Vietnamese economy to support any further educational growth
without risking a total collapse in teaching and learning standards.
Popular political apathy in the aftermath of the war and the schisms
in the party are less easy to probe. But there has been a lack of
widespread popular faith in the purposes the Vietnamese government
has set for its schools: the promotion of a technical revolution in the
villages, and the closer association of education with economically
productive labour. One sure sign of this was the survival in Vietnam's
21 Dang Quoc Bao, "Mot so van de ve kinh te giao duc" ("Some problems with resp
educational economics"), Nghien cuu kinh te, February 1982, pp. 44-53, 79; see, also, the
report by Bui Thanh Khiet in Nhan dan, April 7, 1981, p. 3.
22 Nguyen Thi Binh, "Ve he thong giao duc pho thong moi" ("On the new general
education system"), Nhan dan, May 11, 1981, p. 3.
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schools of the ancient ethos of mandarin careerism. In the 1970s and

1980s, for example, Vietnamese students aggressively avoided vocation-
al schools and the specialized middle schools beloved of the government.
In 1981-a typical year-there were far more general middle-school
students (about 700,000) than there were vocational-school pupils
(54,000) or specialized middle-school students (55,400). The remarkable
and continuing scarcity of the latter meant that Vietnam was not training
the workers and technicians its government believed it needed in the
future: the proper "stockpiling" (du tru) of necessary skilled labour was
not occurring.23 The reason for the imbalance between the te

schools and the general middle schools was only too clear. The former
were thought to foreclose entry to high-status occupations. The latter
were thought to be an indispensable part of the ideal educational
odyssey through university and into the upper bureaucracy-the mod-
ern equivalent of the old Vietnamese Confucian quest to become a
metropolitan examination graduate (ong nghe) or imperial tribute stu-
dent (ong cong), as Vo Nguyen Giap bitterly acknowledged in January
1982.24 That relatively few middle-school graduates were really gaining
access to Vietnam's 91 institutions of higher learning in the early
1980s-only about one out of every ten-nevertheless failed to divert
hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese youths from their pursuit of an
admittedly neo-traditional general education.
THE INCOMPLETE DISAPPEARANCE OF MANDARIN INSTINCTS
The mandarin ethos of the schools may have thickened after the end
of the second Indochina war, in conjunction with the stagnation of
elementary education for the masses outside the south. It would be hard
to prove, but there is some suggestive evidence. An important survey of
graduating grade-seven pupils, carried out between 1976 and 1981 in
Thanh Oai District in the Red River Delta province of Ha Son Binh,
southwest of Hanoi, showed that the percentage of children who
entered general middle schools in this district increased in those years
(from 25 to 29 per cent), while the percentages of primary-school
graduates who turned instead to the study. of specialized vocations
sharply declined (from 6 to 1.5 per cent), as did the percentages of those
who went into the army (from 11 to 5 per cent) or to jobs in factories and
mines (from to 6 to 0.7 per cent).25 Whatever the secular trends, it was
23 See the article by Bui Thanh Khiet in Nhan dan, April 7, 1981, p. 3.
24 Vo Nguyen Giap, "Van de giao duc huong nghiep cho hoc sinh pho thong" ("The
problem of career-guidance education for general school pupils"), Nhan dan, February 11,
1982, p. 2.
25 Pham Huy Thu, "Huong nghiep cho hoc sinh pho thong tren dia ban huyen"
("Career guidance for general-school pupils based upon the ambit of the district"), NMan
dan, January 15, 1982, p. 3.
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clear that the communist government, after more than two decades of
agricultural collectivization, had failed to dissolve one of the most
notorious features of the old educational heritage. This was the gap
between education and farming, so reminiscent of the old Confucian
patriarchy with its leisured male scholars and labouring, uneducated
farm women. The 13,600 chairmen of the north's agricultural coopera-
tives were men and women who were required to manage a production
unit of many hectares, hundreds of workers, and millions of piasters of
capital investment. As of the early 1980s, fewer than 10 per cent of such
chairmen had a middle-school education or its equivalent, and fewer
than 1 per cent had an education beyond the middle school.26 The
divorce between education and farming could be dramatized in another
way: only about 1 per cent of all the agricultural-college cadres trained
in Vietnam were actually working in agricultural cooperatives at this
27
time.
Such facts could hardly be regarded as apocalyptic. They may simply

mean that Vietnamese villagers, like those of Burma or Ghana, have
continued to think of education as a road to a white-collar job and as a
release from the regimentation of farming. Legions of specialists on the
world educational crisis would explain it as just another example of the
commonplace conflict between the new values of the postcolonial rulers
(who saw education as the engine of industrialization and of a scientifi-
cally run society filled with productive workers) and the old values of the
village population (which connected manual labour of any type to low
social status, and saw education as a means of avoiding this).28 Vietnam-
ese educators publicly conceded that village pupils were looking for
opportunities to abandon the countryside, and were discontented with
agricultural labour. One investigation in Vietnam even showed that 60
per cent of the pupils in schools training technical workers were not "at
peace" (yen tam) with the vocations for which they were being trained.29
The real historical interest lies, in part, in the interaction of communist
values with a Confucian past. Of the three formerly Confucian societies
of Asia which now have Marxist-Leninist governments, Vietnam may
well be the one which has the purest and most compulsive traditions of
mandarinism. In traditional Korea, greater social rigidity limited the
mystique of the civil-service examinations. Traditional China eventually
produced an urban bourgeoisie of salt merchants and bankers whose
aspirations for power and prosperity did not have to be immediately
26 See the article by Dao Van Kinh, of the Jose Marti Agriculture University
Hanoi, in Nhan dan, February 2, 1982, p. 3.
27 See the article by Tran Dinh Mien of the Agriculture Ministry in Nhan dan, March
1982, p. 2.
28 For such an explanation of the survival of mandarinism, see P.H. Coombs, The World
Educational Crisis: A Systems Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 91-7.
29 Bao, "Mot so van de ve kinh te giao duc," p. 51.
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satisfied through educational channels. But the educated classes of pre-

modern Vietnam, neither frustrated by the existence of a closed
aristocracy like Korea's nor distracted by a more diversified economic
structure like China's, concentrated their energies most closely of all
upon the quest for bureaucratic positions. Communist values were
supposed to be part of the antidote to a phenomenon of this sort, as
Lenin had hoped; but they may be part of the problem.
Some modern sociologists, basing their arguments upon the experi-
ence of the Soviet Union, have proposed that communist societies are
peculiarly vulnerable to the worship of educational certificates, precisely
because their economies have no proper private sectors. In a country
where the only employer is the government, or state-run organizations
like collective farms, the irresistibly bureaucratic atmosphere soon sees
to it that academic degrees are required for appointments to all positions
of real responsibility.30 Drawing upon the somewhat cynical Georgescu-
Roegen theory that the "service class" will dominate any economy
because it can exaggerate the intangible qualities of its services, in a way
that manual workers cannot,31 one might further suggest that the service
class or intelligentsia in a Marxist-Leninist society can and will exploit the
prevailing shibboleths of "science" and of managerial planning to
consolidate its supremacy over the nominal ruling class. Even in the
early years of their war against the French-the most heroic epoch of
their mass literacy crusade-the Vietnamese communists were torn
between the desire to create a relatively egalitarian semi-"guerrilla"
school system, whose pupils laboured as they studied, and the desire to
train elitist "people of talent" (nhan tai, the old Confucian term) in
medicine, commerce, agriculture, and foreign relations, who could
become the civil service of a postcolonial nation-state. The April 1947
educational resolution of the party Central Committee characteristically
tried to satisfy both desires,32
Nevertheless, however appropriate theories about diploma-worship
in an economy without any large private sector may be to the history of
mature industrial states like the Soviet Union, they cannot yet be the
main explanation for the social patterns associated with Vietnamese
education. One difficulty with a purely structural explanation of the
ineradicability of mandarinism is that it ignores the special influence of
traditional cultural factors. (It does not explain, for example, why in
Vietnam women should have found it harder to enter the universities
than men. Although female general-school pupils were almost half the
30 I am simplifying somewhat the research conclusions of Merwyn Matthews, "Sovi

Students: Some Sociological Perspectives," Soviet Studies, (Glasgow), XXVII January
1975), pp. 86-108.
31 See N. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 309-10.
32 Do Thi Nguyet Quang, "Vai net ve qua trinh phat trien," p. 64.
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total number between 1975 and 1980, a mere 37,000 of Vietnam's
159,000 university students in 1979 were female.)33 Yet to suggest that
the imprint of Confucian manners upon Vietnamese villages is eternal
and tyrannical does less than justice to the non-Confucian side of village
history, to the genuinely revolutionary achievements of the Vietnamese
government, and above all to the practicality of contemporary Vietnam-
ese peasants. Struggles within Vietnamese communist thought-
between education for the sake of a state-building utilitarianism, and
education for the sake of cultural and social salvation-have probably
had a greater effect than Confucianism upon recent Vietnamese
diploma-worship.
On one side of such struggles, Vietnamese specialists in mass
education strongly argued that education in a communist state was based
more upon the fulfillment of non-economic human rights than was
education in capitalist countries. The latter had been compelled to
broaden their compulsory schooling for crude economic reasons, as a
response to the "sudden explosion" (bung no) of the second global
revolution in science and technology after the Second World War. But
capitalist countries still had a "not small" group of people who were
illiterate (an odd representation of the situation in Vietnam's nearest
fully capitalist neighbour, Japan); and the purposes of such nations
could not be compared with those which prevailed in a country like
Vietnam, whose people, even before state finances could afford it, were
to be given a "total" education rather than a manipulatively technical
one.34 On the other side of the fray, and as a means of modifying any
educational millenarianism before it got out of control, the anthology of
75 translated Marxist-Leninist works on education (the majority of them
by Lenin), which Hanoi published in 1976, carefully included Lenin's
chilling 1920 broadside against Soviet education cadres who had unwise-
ly dreamed of quick transitions to communism and of the rapid
appearance of "paradises of proletarian culture." They had forgotten,
said Lenin, that the Soviet Union was poor, that it still needed carpenters
and plumbers, and that the transition to communism would be a "long"
one.
However, the tension between statist utilitarianism and the moral
and social rescue of the uneducated has been especially sharp among
East Asian communist educators. Their common Confucian past cannot
be dismissed. After all, Confucian societies were based upon the princi-
ple of chinh giao ("government" merged with "teaching"), the belief that
33 Source: Tong cuc thong ke (The General Statistical Office), comp., So lieu thong ke
cong hoa xa hoi chu nghia Viet-Nam (Statistical data of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam) (Hanoi,
1980), p. 106.
34 Nguyen Ngoc Dung, "Pho cap giao duc" ("Universalizing education"), Nghien cuu
giao duc, 1 (1978), pp. 19-20.
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political leadership and the power of moral and intellectual indoctrina-

tion must always be fused together. At the same time, such educators
inherited the approach to education of such not-so-long-departed Neo-
Confucian radicals as Gu Yanwu in seventeenth-century China, or Ngo
Thi Nham in eighteenth-century Vietnam, who believed that the object
of learning was sublime and unlimited: the total development of one's
goodness, and, beyond that, the "salvation of the age" (cuu the). Whatev-
er significance historical influences have had, Ho Chi Minh himself
deeply feared that the effort to combine schooling with labour in
Vietnam might lead to the degeneration of Vietnamese schools into
mere centres of economic production. Ho was so sensitive to the danger
that the utilitarian perspective in education might triumph in Vietnam
that he even warned against the curious possibility, peculiar to the
Vietnamese, that there might be a linguistic confusion between the term
for "peasant school" (truong nong) and the term for "state farm" (nong
truong).3
Yet, even when they have dominated, it is not clear that the advocates
of education as a means of social salvation have really furthered
educational equality and reduced elitism in Vietnamese life. The pres-
sures of the war with the Americans did heighten "egalitarianism" in the
north. This was particularly true with respect to such measures as
income distribution in the agricultural cooperatives. There was a strug-
gle in the countryside between the still orthodox principle of distribution
of goods according to labour, and the advancing but unlicensed princi-
ple of distribution of goods according to need. After 1975, Vietnamese
economists denounced such wartime "egalitarianism," believing it to
engender laziness and a slackening of work discipline.36 Yet the 1960s
were also the last great decade of primary-school expansion in the north,
with an average increase of primary-school pupils of 9.1 per cent per
year; in the later period of retrenchment-and of reactions against
egalitarianism-this expansion faltered. What makes it difficult to draw
unambiguous conclusions is that village egalitarianism may also have
discouraged sustained school attendance among many pupils-with a
firm synchronization of grades and age groups-by making the progres-
sive acquisition of school credentials appear less necessary for the
preservation or improvement of living standards. The propaganda of
Vietnamese mass-education campaigns in the north in the late 1970s, in
an undoubted reaction to this, tried to link rural egalitarian sentiments
quite specifically to the proper timing of school attendance. For instance,
educational propaganda in the province of Nghe Tinh, which had the
best school enrollment record in Vietnam in 1981, worked to encourage
35 Ho Chi Minh, Ve van de giao duc (On educational questions) (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban giao
duc, 1977 ed.), p. 105. See Bao, "Mot so van de ve kinh te giao duc," pp. 46-7.
36 Phung The Truong, "Thu nhap quoc dan va phat trien kinh te o Viet-Nam," p. 7
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parents to acquire a "permanent consciousness" of education which

would become a "habit," so that, as soon as their children reached school
age, parents would not just demand that they attend school, but would
see to it also that they not move through school more slowly than the
other members of their age group.37
The paradox, therefore, is that popular material egalitarianism
during the war may have strengthened educational elitism as much as
weakening it, by preventing everybody, or even a majority of the
population, from acquiring a full awareness of the importance of
schooling as a competitive, year-by-year ascent. More schools were built
and more pupils entered them, but with little successful attention to the
linking of ages to grades characteristic of an industrializing society. (In
Thanh Oai District, the crucial 1976-81 survey revealed that only 42.6
per cent of all ten-year olds were in the grade [four] where they
belonged in 1979.)38 All this raised more difficult issues. Were schools
themselves-with their academic cultures, based upon examinations,
annual promotions, and standardized curricula, all very obviously inher-
ited from an earlier, more elitist era-obstacles to the easy perfection of
mass education? And, although the question seemed to reek of Maoism,
were Vietnamese schools, standing against a background of eight-and-a-
half centuries of civil-service examinations, particularly resourceful
obstacles to such a development?
THE EFFECT OF FORMAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS UPON

EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION
School systems themselves have increasingly been condemned for

being, in effect, the natural enemies of certain social and economic
revolutions in Asia and Africa. Gunnar Myrdal, as one famous example,
has pointed to the ways in which schools almost inevitably represent the
strong vested interests of their administrators and teachers and of pupils
from upper-class or educationally sophisticated famlies.39 Using a differ-
ent but in some ways equally alarming perspective, the political scientist
David Abernethy has argued that the expansion of primary-school
education in Nigeria may have had more "disintegrative" effects than
"integrative" ones. Government sponsorship of such schools induced a
decline in local voluntarism. Even worse, school expansion manufac-
tured destructive new generational tensions, as between the young, well-
37 See Cao The Lu, "Ve cong tac chi dao pho cap giao duc pho thong co so" ("On the
work of guiding the universal spread of elementary general education"), Nghien cuu giao
duc, 3 (1981), p. 21.
38 Nguyen Ngoc Dung, "Nhin lai van de pho cap giao duc," p. 27.
39 Gunnar Myrdal, The Challenge of World Poverty (New York: Vintage Books, 1970),
p. 176.
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educated principals of such schools and the older, less well-educated

villagers who were asked to support and advise them.40
Yet it may be time for a reaction against the notion that the school, in
Vietnam or in other Asian countries, is an enigma which revolutionaries
cannot decipher or bend to their purposes. The architects of the January
1979 educational reform in Vietnam did concede that the Vietnamese
school system was capable of an astonishing inertia, or of resistance to
demands from outside. Structures of government, forms of agriculture,
provincial names and boundaries, and even currency, were changed in
the reunified Vietnam between 1975 and 1981; but in the same years,
the north and the south still serenely preserved their separate education-
al worlds. (The north had eight years of primary-school education and
the south, nine; the reform of 1979 hoped to make nine years uniform.)
Mass organizations which had been designed to prevent schools from
becoming self-contained enclaves-the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth
League, the Vietnamese Education Workers' Union, the Vietnam Wom-
en's Federation, the Association of Pupils' Parents (Hoi Cha me hoc sinh)-
were all discovered to have failed as "instruments" by which the people
could "truly" participate in the management of the schools and could
develop the "social nature" of their education. In a new assault upon the
schools' organizational and moral separateness, the 1979 reform looked
to the creation of "people's education councils" (hoi dong giao duc nhan
dan) at every branch of government, from provinces to villages and
street wards, as a fresh means of focussing outside influences upon the
schools.
But the separation of the schools from the most immediate concerns
of their communities was not entirely the fault of the schools, or of the
people inside them. There were the far from simple values of the leaders
of Vietnam, which were and are decisive. It is not fanciful antiquarian-
ism to see the shadows of centuries of Confucian literati sometimes
falling over the Hanoi Politburo, as over their counterparts in Peking.
But the shadows cast are not the same in both countries. One of the
striking national differences between Chinese and Vietnamese Confu-
cianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that, whereas
Chinese Confucian philosophers worried about the qualitative inade-
quacy of the transmission of their cultural and ethical heritage (so that a
Han Studies master like Ruan Yuan, for example, might think that the
more remote in time an interpreter of Confucius was from Confucius
himself, the more likely he was to have been corrupted by the excessive
layers of scholasticism which had intervened between himself and the
sage), Vietnamese philosophers, in contrast, worried about the quantita-
tive inadequacy of the transmission of their heritage. Writers as diverse
40 David B. Abernethy, The Political Dilemma of Popular Education: An African Case

(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 274-7.
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as Le Quy Don (1726-84) and Phan Huy Chu (1782-1840) lamented the
disappearance or destruction of medieval Vietnamese histories, statutes,
and compendia of rituals. They passionately tried to revive the broken
flow of information and inspiration from the past. The Vietnamese
communist movement, having inherited this patriotic obsession, hardly
had the same freedom as the Chinese have had to dispense with
academic classicism. It made even its primary schools the citadels of a
booklearning which might prevent any more of the past from slipping
away.
According to the primary-school curriculum established in the north
in 1956, and still in effect at the time of the 1979 reforms, Vietnamese
pupils began studying history in grade one. They grappled with it as a
major school subject, unsparingly filled with dynastic-year periods and
complex political events, from grade four. The one lesson on "Great
Vietnamese uprisings in the period of Chinese domination" for grade-
four pupils, covering nine centuries, quite typically contained the names
of at least six medieval personages, four different medieval localities,
and three different dynastic-year periods.41 The new alphabetical stud-
ies textbook introduced into Vietnamese primary schools in 1981, as
part of the effort to develop and preserve literacy more dynamically and
to make the teaching of the written language easier, ended the old
practice of pedantically linking the symbols of written letters to their
sounds, and replaced it with the introduction of letters and sounds
together through lively sentences and lines of poetry. But the lines of
poetry which were to "stimulate young children" were taken from the
fifteenth-century works of Nguyen Trai, as well as from the writings of
classical nineteenth-century poets like Nguyen Du, Nguyen Khuyen,
and the wife of the district magistrate of Thanh Quan.42
This insistence upon the rigorous transmission of the classics to even
the youngest of pupils was an obvious part of the historicism and
scripturalism of the Vietnamese revolution, qualities which in turn had
provided some of the most powerful motives for literacy campaigns in
the first place. Nevertheless, the schools' love affair with the past blocked
them from full communion with the village cultures of the present. Of
the 442 classroom periods throughout the year devoted to Vietnamese
literature in general middle schools, as of 1981, only 35 concerned
themselves with popular literature.43 The 1979 reformers, struggling to
rescue the school system from some of its old Confucian formalism,
reserved 15 per cent of all school time in the primary schools, and 17 per
cent of all school time in the general middle schools, for the perform-
41 See the comments by Nguyen Cao Luy in Nghien cuu giao due, 6 (1978), p. 22.
42 Nhan dan, September 8, 1981, p. 3.
43 See the article by Nguyen Ngoc Phuc in Nhan dan, November 23, 1981, p. 3.
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ance of manual-labour education and of practical economic techniques.

This seemed a modest antidote.
But although the spirits of Le Quy Don and Phan Huy Chu have not
fled from Vietnamese village schools, it is clearly necessary to reject the
extreme belief that such schools by their very nature slow down the work
of mass education. Makeshift literacy campaigns alone are unlikely to
change traditional social and economic attitudes fully, or even to cause a
permanent disappearance of the habits of an oral culture. (In the
northern borderlands of Vietnam, which had experienced many literacy
drives but where school attendance itself was chronically low, a Hanoi
Ethnology Institute survey in 1980 showed that fewer than 5 per cent of
the peasants "regularly" read books, and only 26 per cent of them even
occasionally read newspapers; but more than 60 per cent said they liked
listening to radio news broadcasts.)44 Real attitude changes among the
people of the sort which would permit mass education to endure-a
constantly re-experienced need to read and write, a greater loyalty to
new political and economic institutions and programmes-are more
likely to be induced by, apart from economic change, the teaching and
socialization methods of permanently organized schools. In this respect,
schools are indispensable to mass education. But in the period between
1954 and 1982, Vietnamese schools almost certainly devoted themselves
more to that particular transformation of attitudes which was required
by the needs of the Vietnamese state, as opposed to the needs of a
greater equality of opportunity.
In practice, this meant that the schools had to attack, not so much the
reflexes of the old mandarinate, as the reflexes of village factionalism
and of secret societies. The latter were undoubtedly regarded as a
greater threat to the government's security, once private property had
been abolished. Imitating peasant adults, "groups of rotten pupils"
(nhom hoc sinh hu) at such northern schools as the Sa Dec primary school
in Vinh Phu Province had been regularly forming illicit "societies" (hoi)
behind their teachers' backs. They pledged old-fashioned alliances
among themselves, and were directed by "leaders" (thu linh) who were
capable of wandering about the countryside, attracting more recruits
and amassing and dividing up illegally earned sums of money, and even
successfully challenging the precarious authority of the pupils who led
state-sanctioned scouting organizations such as the Ho Chi Minh Young
Pioneers. In order to counteract this phenomenon, the schools had to
resort to such time-consuming stratagems as repeatedly staging plays
about the evils of factionalism and of traditional sworn-oath alliances,
and then seeing to it that the pupils who had actually been involved in
such activities were cast in the most negative starring roles. A typical
school play of this sort might end with the rebellious "leader" leaving
44 See the article by Nguyen Van Huy in Nhan dan, June 22, 1980, p. 2.
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school; being given a kettle and some cups by his angry father and told
to go to the nearest railway station to make money selling tea; and then
encountering a group of his former classmates at the station who
ignored him while they happily talked about their own more promising
futures at technical or trade schools.45
A guerrilla-style literacy campaign not based upon permanent
schools would have lacked the power to attack traditional social faction-
alism, and itinerant factions, so thoroughly. But the more elusive point is
that the schools could not make an assault upon mandarinism their top
priority, even if their curricula had not been captured by the classical
past for the peculiarly Vietnamese reasons we have mentioned. Discon-
tented vagrants were one of the two most powerful groups (landlords
being the other) in a pre-revolutionary Confucian society like China or
Vietnam, according to some writers.46 Confronted with the choice of
effacing either the legacy of the traditional mandarins or the legacy of
the old rural vagrants with their underground organizations and subver-
sive socialization techniques, the Vietnamese school system seems to
have been more or less compelled to deal with the latter first.
All this suggests that the survival of a white-collar ethos in Vietnam,
after decades of populist diatribes against it in the name of a coming new
order of socialist workers, had many causes. A conventional shorthand
formula like "the persistence of traditional hierarchical values" hardly
begins to describe them. Some causes were idiosyncratically Vietnamese.
Some were shared with many other Asian societies which had changed
far less than Vietnam. But historic educational inequality was not just a
matter of inequalities among individuals or families. The educational
salvation of relatively deprived ethnic populations was, as has been said,
a critical aspect of the self-justification of the Vietnamese communist
revolution. This was so true that in May 1982 the Hanoi government
even suspended middle-school "transfer" examinations for Khmer pri-
mary-school pupils, in order to encourage their numbers to increase and
to reduce the alienation of the Khmer minority from the Vietnamese
educational system.47 (There are almost one million Khmers in southern
Vietnam. Historically, Khmers have supplied "heterodox" ideas to the
leaders of southern religious sects.) Yet the enterprise of ethnic-minority
education has produced a particularly sharp demonstration of the limits
of schools as cultural and economic equalizers. Only 3.5 per cent of the
communist party cadres in Vietnam in 1981 with a university education
or better belonged to minority peoples.48 By the 1980s, illiteracy was
45 All this is described in the fascinating account by the principal of the Sa Dec pr
school, Nguyen Van Suyen, in Nghzen cuu giao duc, 8 (1980), pp. 20-4, 29.
46 For example, Sa Mengwu, Shuihuzhuan yu Zhongguo shehui (The novel "Tales of the
Marsh" and Chinese society) (Macao: Wanyou shudian, 1966), p. 145.
47 Nhan dan, June 4, 1982, pp. 1, 4.
48 Van Tao, "Ve tri thuc Viet-Nam trong cach mang xa hoi chu nghia" ("On
Vietnamese intellectuals in the socialist revolution"), Nghien cuu lich su, 1 1-12 (198 1), p. 12
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reappearing among the youths of northern mountain minorities. In the

northern hill country, the phenomenon of children who went to school
two to three years late was "pervasive."49 The official reaction to this was
a denunciation of the shallow "whirlwind style" or blitzkrieg model of
illiteracy elimination which guerrilla teachers had practised in the
mountains since the 1940s, and proposals that it be replaced by more
prolonged and ambitious boarding-school educations and by the combi-
nation into one "bloc" (khoi) of general-school teachers and adult-
education teachers. The supremacy of the formal school would be
enhanced. But the tragedy of formal schools in the northern mountain
areas-which are inhabited by hundreds of thousands of bilingual or
multilingual peasants living at close quarters with each other, but
belonging to at least six different linguistic groups (Tay-Tai, Hmong-
Yao, Muong, Han, Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer)-has been that such
schools have sometimes magnified inequalities as much as overcoming
them.
A crucial survey of education in twenty-one villages in two strategic
border provinces-Son La, a mountainous province west of Hanoi on
the edge of Laos, and Tuyen Quang, now part of Ha Tuyen, a province
north of Hanoi on the Chinese border-was carried out by the Hanoi
Institute of Educational Sciences in 1972 and 1973. It revealed an
extraordinary unevenness in local educational facilities and interests
among different ethnic groups, as well as more generally between
villagers belonging to "big" ethnic groups (such as the Vietnamese, the
Tay, the Nung, and the Tai) and those belonging to "small" ones (such as
the Yao, the Hmong, and the Khmu). Although the smaller minority
groups had the lowest rates of attendance at the Vietnamese-speaking
primary schools which the Hanoi government had introduced, there
were great diversities of competence among single ethnic groups as well
as among the multi-ethnic bodies of pupils in the schools of single
villages. In Tai-dominated highland villages in the one province of Son
La, for instance, after twenty years of communist rule, the percentages
of school-age children who could speak some Vietnamese still ranged
widely, from 40 per cent to just 2 per cent. Less surprisingly, a typical
school attendance chart for a single village in Son La Province showed
that 44 per cent of the village's eligible Tai children were in school, 25
per cent of the eligible Khmu children, but only 6 per cent of the eligible
Hmong children.50
No great prescience was needed to work out the implications of this
survey. As common educational standards were being applied in multi-
ethnic villages for the first time, and Vietnamese, Tai, Hmong, Yao, and
49 Nguyen Ngoc Dung, "Nhin lai van de pho cap giao duc," p. 27.
50 Do Ngoc Bich, "Tinh hinh phat trien giao duc o ba loai xa thuoc Tuyen Quang va
Son La" ("The situation of educational development in three types of villages belonging to
Tuyen Quang and Son La"), Nghien cuu giao duc, 6 (1976), pp. 3-8.
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Pacific Affairs
Khmu children were being urged to compete with each other to pass the
same examinations in the same written language, disadvantaged ethnic
groups were likely to become aware-for the first time-of their
inequality. This would not necessarily displease the Vietnamese govern-
ment. It has often taken the high-risk view that, when ethnic minorities
become aware of their comparative backwardness, by being placed
beside other ethnic groups with superior skills, they will be encouraged
not to resent it but to improve themselves. In introducing agricultural
cooperatives into the province of Gia Lai-Kontum, for instance, the
Vietnamese government attacked the presumed economic incompe-
tence of such peoples as the Bahnar, Jarai, Stieng, and Sedang, by
deliberately seeing to it that each new collective production group in the
western highlands had both Vietnamese and "minority" members.5'
(The province of Gia Lai-Kontum received more than 120,000 Vietnam-
ese migrants alone from the provinces of Hai Hung, Ha Nam Ninh,
Nghe Tinh, and Quang Nam-Da Nang, between 1976 and 1981; its total
1979 population was about 595,000 people.) Nevertheless, the village
schools of the north and northwest mountain provinces, by transmitting
a new literacy and high culture to some members of the village but not to
others, were undoubtedly widening formal cultural differences-and
the consciousness of them-among the multi-ethnic residents of single
villages who had previously coexisted without any acute awareness of
their different levels of competitiveness within the same educational
milieu. In this respect, the apparently waning demand for a school
education among certain mountain minorities, as the enthusiasm of the
early revolution faltered, suggested a relatively passive reaction to these
widening differences. To use the explanation commonly given to
educational officials, Yao children simply preferred to stay at home
studying Chinese, so that they could learn to offer the proper Taoist
sacrifices, rather than go to school to study Vietnamese so that they
could become cadres or engineers.52 But a passive reaction may be as
troublesome to the purposes of the Vietnamese state as a more ag-
grieved and less passive one.
THE CRUCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF POVERTY TO THE SURVIVAL

OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONS
The introduction of universal primary education into an unrevolu-

tionary, highly stratified society is often considered, by scholars, to be a
dangerous sham. It is thought to stir up great expectations among the
poor, but to do nothing to change unequally distributed political and
economic power-and the inequalities among home environments and
51 See the article by Nam Vinh in Nhan dan, March 16, 1981, p. 2.
52 Do Ngoc Bich, "Tinh hinh phat trien giao duc o ba loai xa," p. 6.
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parental cultural backgrounds which accompany this power and which

ultimately frustrate the hopes of the disadvantaged. What the Vietnam-
ese revolution so far suggests, despite its remarkable educational
achievements, is that even a radical transformation of the social struc-
ture, through the abolition of private landlordism, is not enough to
make universal education as talismanic in practice as it sounds in theory.
It is not just that such a transformation does not in itself guarantee the
intellectual effort necessary to understand the almost infinite linguistic
and cultural variety of Southeast Asian villages, or to compile the
textbooks which their variety demands. A social transformation which
does not fairly quickly increase wealth also leaves the post-revolutionary
state without enough centralized economic resources to overcome the
effect of centuries of uneven accumulation of cultural resources and
interests in the different regions it governs.
This seems to be the lesson of the educational history of the north
Vietnamese hill country. In just the one province of Ha Son Binh,
southwest of Hanoi, for example, the Vietnamese state supplied about
one-third of the capital used to build new schools in lowland villages
between 1975 and 1977, with the rest of the money coming from village
budgets, cooperatives funds, and other local sources. The state supplied
about one-half of the capital required for the construction of new
schools in the province's mountain areas in the same period. The state's
slightly greater investment in highland schools was not enough to
dissolve the conspicuous contrast between the brick and tile school
buildings of the lowlands, and their thatched-hut equivalents in the
highlands.53 Even so, it was probably the best contribution that could be
managed in a country in which only fifty districts out of more than four
hundred could remit as much as five thousand tons of foodstuffs per
year on an obligatory basis to the state,54 and in which there was,
therefore, no real agricultural surplus with which a centralized authority
could finance comprehensive educational modernization.
The economic anaemia of the Vietnamese state prolonged the
existence of notable and historic regional differences in the acquisition
of effective schools, for the state had to rely upon the existing local
desire for education to produce much of the new educational infrastruc-
ture, as under the old dynasties. This local desire varied. It was not
necessarily linked to economic progress so much as to the pre-revolu-
tionary cultural and political map of the country. It was suggestive that
the province of Nghe Tinh should have had the best general school
53 The budgetary estimates are those of Tran Trong Chi, "Vai kinh nghiem ve xay
dung truong pho thong o tinh Ha Son Binh" ("A few experiences with the building of
general schools in Ha Son Binh province"), Nghien cuu giao duc, 11 (1977), pp. 17-18.
54 As in the period 1979-82: see the speech by Nguyen Dinh Nam in Nhan dan,
February 12, 1982, p. 3.
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attendance in Vietnam in 1981 (91.8 per cent of all children eligible).

Nghe Tinh was not one of the more agriculturally advanced parts of the
north, like Thai Binh and Hai Hung; but it did have one of the most
creative and ambitious regional intelligentsias in pre-revolutionary Viet-
nam, the people whom the French perceived as the fearsome lettres
frondeurs who created the communist soviets in 1930-3 1. Equally sugges-
tive, the province with the worst general school attendance in the same
year (Minh Hai, with only 60.7 per cent of all children eligible) was at the
extreme southern tip of Vietnam, the province most remote in space and
in spirit from the heartlands of the old Vietnamese Confucian culture.55
The poverty of the post-revolutionary period is the real source of the
failure of Vietnamese schools to change as much of Vietnam's educa-
tional past-the pre-revolutionary cultural map, the mandarin elitism,
the relative non-participation of ethnic minorities-as the leaders of the
revolution originally hoped they could. The other factors which have
been assessed so far-the conservatism of schools as contrasted with
"guerrilla education," the peculiarly intense Vietnamese use of such
schools to protect the transmission of the nation's classical heritage, the
ambiguous signals sent out by wartime rural "egalitarianism," the
worship of diplomas as a reflex of indirect withdrawal from certain
revolutionary ideals-all compound the "decline" (giam sut, the term
most commonly used in Hanoi) of Vietnamese education, but do not
really explain it. In 1945, the Vietnamese communists clung to the
somewhat simple faith that educational growth would produce economic
growth. Ho Chi Minh declared in that year that with the spread of a
"new learning" among the Vietnamese population, "the people would be
strong and the country rich" (dan manh nuoc giau); he deliberately
reversed the order of the commonplace phrase "the people are rich and
the country is strong" as a way of demonstrating the importance of
education in economic development.56 But, as the world has more
recently begun to appreciate, economic expansion and educational
progress are interdependent. And peasants whose economic tasks do not
constantly require them to use their literacy may lose it.
Of all the communist and formerly Confucian societies in eastern
Asia, Vietnam began to build "socialist schools" in an economic setting
which perhaps least justified them. According to Vietnamese historians'
own calculations, modern industry accounted for 17 per cent of the total
industrial and agricultural output of China after 1949, for 42 per cent of
the general value of the output of North Korea in its early years, but for
only 1.5 per cent of the value of the output of northern Vietnam in
55 The statistics (but not the conclusions) are from Bui Thanh Khiet's report in Nhan
dan, April 7, 198 1, p. 3.
56 Or so we are told in Bao, "Mot so van de ye kinh te giao duc," p. 45.
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1954.57 In the communists' own scheme of things, the great risk of

opting for "socialist" agriculture without waiting for any modern indus-
try to appear was that, without a strong contribution from industry,
Vietnam could not achieve enduring large-scale agricultural production,
or stable "new productive relationships" in farming. From a more
agnostic perspective, the absence of any visible industrial occupational
structure meant that schools which were designed to produce masses of
"socialist workers" and scientists soon found themselves helplessly laps-
ing into the bad old world of peasants and non-labouring elites. Average
per capita income actually declined in Vietnam in the late 1970s, from
405 piasters in 1976 to 401 piasters in 1978.58 All this made it impossible
to change popular incentives sufficiently to make school-goers wish to be
farm technologists rather than bureaucrats, or non-school-goers wish to
go to school.
But it is important not to look at this problem through the wrong end
of the telescope. The usual procedure, honoured by many excellent
scholars, is to scrutinize only the would-be mandarins who leave their
villages after completing primary school there. The villagers who are left
behind are ignored. Myrdal writes of the "deep prejudice" of the
educated people of Asia against any form of manual labour, and of the
ways in which school pupils and their parents resist any curriculum
changes which might emphasize technical and job-directed training.
Even Martin Carnoy talks of how "anyone with schooling attempts to
flee the countryside" in poor agrarian societies.59 But the notion that
school graduates always deliberately and spontaneously flee from their
villages is far too simple-minded. Sometimes they are pushed out of
their communities-by their neighbours, and by the force of village
opinion.
The failure of the Vietnamese revolution, between 1954 and 1982, to
create a significantly greater diversity of village occupational roles,
meant that the primary-school graduates who did remain in their
villages often became an embarrassment to village leaders. In 1982, the
head of the education bureau of Vinh Phu Province (northwest of
Hanoi) finally pointed out that one of the real if hitherto unadmitted
reasons for the sense of decline in Vietnamese mass education was that
society had not "received" general primary-school and general middle-
school graduates in a "responsible" manner, by giving them appropriate
57 Pham Xuan Nam, "Thu nhin lai nhung buoc chuyen bien lich su cua quan chung
nong dan lao dong nuoc ta tren con duong tien len chu nghia xa hoi" ("Reviewing the
historic changes of the labouring peasant masses of our country on the road of socialist
advance"), Nghien cuu lich su, 1-2 (1977), pp. 5-23.
58 Phung The Truong, "Thu nhap quoc dan," pp. 1-12. In American dollars, from
$101 (1976) to $100 (1978).
59 Myrdal, The Challenge of World Poverty, pp. 172-4; Martin Carnoy, Education as
Cultural Imperialism (New York and London: Longman, 1974), p. 322.
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Pacific Affairs
work to do. Rural society's refusal to absorb the products of its own
schools had begun to disillusion pupils who were still at school, and to
cause them to abandon their schooling.60 In 1977, Nguyen Phu Boi, a
middle-school teacher in Ha Bac Province, carried out a survey-rare
for Vietnam-of the fates of pupils with a grade-ten education who had
remained in their villages, instead of going into the army or into higher
education. His survey covered the decade between 1966 and 1976, and
looked at graduates in ten villages in Boi's own Red River Delta province
northeast of Hanoi. The survey discovered that in many villages the local
organizations which were responsible for deciding village employment
practices-the village people's committees, the cooperatives' manage-
ment boards, party organs-had publicly disowned such youths, claim-
ing that the village labour force was already very crowded, and that
grade-ten graduates by definition were not a group of workers who
belonged to the villages at all. Those graduates who still insisted upon
remaining in the villages were not allowed to make any real contribution
to village cultural and social life, Boi found. Instead, they were generally
given common agricultural labour of the sort performed by uneducated
peasants. 61
All this makes it easier to see that the principle of a middle-school
education representing an "escape" from the villages is not just some
demonic relic from the Confucian past, embraced exclusively by the
socially incorrigible descendants of old mandarin families. The principle
enjoyed a customarily unvoiced popularity among village leaders who
were not escaping from the villages, precisely because it signified the
existence of a safety valve, a dependable outflow of surplus labour from
desperately overpopulated communities, and, at the same time, an
arrangement which prevented the distribution of statuses within the
village from becoming unstable and confused. Its popularity was likely
to continue as long as the rural population grew (the north's annual
population increase-rate was lowered from 4.6 per cent in 1960 to 3.1
per cent in 1976, still a very high rate); as long as the rural economy
remained stagnant; as long as the Vietnamese state failed to exercise
sufficient power in the villages to change their employment patterns (by,
for example, placing school graduates in special scientific and technical
teams in the agricultural cooperatives); and as long as traditional rural
occupations which had required some learning dwindled, or were even
repressed. (To cite the most extreme example, the traditional specialists
of the popular religions, many of whom had been called "teacher" or
"master" [thay]-such as diviners, physiognomists, soothsayers, fortune
tellers, and shamans-had sometimes attracted moderately educated
people into their ranks. The Vietnamese revolution has compelled such
60 See the article by Nguyen Kim Tran in Nhan dan, April 23, 1982, p. 3.
61 Nguyen Phu Boi, "Vai suy nghi ve van de hoc sinh lop 10 o nong thon" ("S
reflections on the problems of grade-ten pupils living in the villages"), Nghien cuu giao d
11 (1977), pp. 19-21.
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people to renounce their occupations.) As of 1982, some 30 per cent of

all primary-school graduates in Vietnam went on to middle school. This
compared with 27 per cent of all primary-school graduates in Bulgaria,
19 per cent in Hungary, 18 per cent in Poland, 13.9 per cent in
Czechoslovakia, and 11.4 per cent in East Germany.62 The implication
seemed to be that, the more multi-faceted and advanced the economic
structure of a communist country was, the greater and the more diverse
the incentives were to become a specialist or a technical worker rather
than simply a modern-day generalist. Elitism survived, but had a more
modern flavour at least. What looked like the greater social accessibility
of Vietnamese middle schools was deceiving-the tell-tale sign, in fact, of
poverty and of a primitive employment structure.
In the early stages of the Vietnamese revolution, peasants were
taught how to read and write, partly in order that they could understand
the politics of an unusually book-dependent group of revolutionaries.
"Libraries for the masses" (tu sach dan chung) of the 1940s were full of
tracts which taught the meanings of such things as "New Democracy,"
democratic republics, fascism, and socialism. But after the revolutionar-
ies seized power, a new expectation came to dominate Vietnamese
education: that in a society where production materials were publicly
owned, in which the economy could be planned on a nation-wide basis,
education and the economy, through such planning, could be made to
harmonize with each other, unlike the situation in capitalist countries.
Most non-communist scholars would consider the notion that future
labour needs can be perfectly predicted, or that education can be made
to prepare people perfectly for their future work, to be utopian.
Utopian or not, these notions are part of a legitimacy myth-hence, the
sensitivity of the relationship between economic life and mass education
in twentieth-century Vietnam. The palpable malcontents of the 500,000
annual Vietnamese primary-school and middle-school graduates who, as
of 1981, were neither able to go to university nor prepared to work well
in the real economy, amounted to more than just a social problem.63 The
failure to achieve a satisfactory marriage between the economic planners
and the schools would suggest the practical invalidation of some of the
theories upon which the Vietnamese state is now based. Too prolonged a
gap between the Vietnamese government's most recent educational
reforms, of 1979, and the fascinatingly diverse society of peasants,
workers, monks, novel-writers, orchid-cultivators, peddlers, and Yao
priest exorcists, at which these reforms were aimed would threaten the
morale of exalted theoreticians as well as ordinary students.
University of British Columbia, Canada, May 1982
62 Vo Nguyen Giap's statistics, in his article in Nhan dan, February 11, 1982, p. 2.
63 Nguyen Truong Khoa, "Buoc di cua cai cach giao duc" ("The pace of educational
reforms"), Tap chi cong san, 8 (1981), pp. 34-7, 44.
427

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The Triumphs and Failures of Mass Education in Vietnam

Author(s): Alexander Woodside

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2758190

Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

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THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION which Vietnamese commun

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On the other hand, spokesmen for the Vietnamese government have

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education. It is that revolutionaries, once they have gained power,

THE EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE VIETNAMESE

There is no reason to distrust the Vietnamese communists' denuncia-

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9 J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma an

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THE LIMITS OF PROGRESS AND THE WANING OF THE

The very success of the southern literacy campaign of 1975-1978,

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literacy-both in Vietnamese and minority scripts-among the peoples

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surplus available to improve the quality of school instruction. The visible

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schools of the ancient ethos of mandarin careerism. In the 1970s and

not occurring.23 The reason for the imbalance between the te

THE INCOMPLETE DISAPPEARANCE OF MANDARIN INSTINCTS

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Such facts could hardly be regarded as apocalyptic. They may simply

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satisfied through educational channels. But the educated classes of pre-

30 I am simplifying somewhat the research conclusions of Merwyn Matthews, "Sovi

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political leadership and the power of moral and intellectual indoctrina-

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parents to acquire a "permanent consciousness" of education which

THE EFFECT OF FORMAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS UPON

School systems themselves have increasingly been condemned for

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educated principals of such schools and the older, less well-educated

40 David B. Abernethy, The Political Dilemma of Popular Education: An African Case

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ance of manual-labour education and of practical economic techniques.

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reappearing among the youths of northern mountain minorities. In the

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THE CRUCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS OF POVERTY TO THE SURVIVAL

The introduction of universal primary education into an unrevolu-

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parental cultural backgrounds which accompany this power and which

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attendance in Vietnam in 1981 (91.8 per cent of all children eligible).

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1954.57 In the communists' own scheme of things, the great risk of

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people to renounce their occupations.) As of 1982, some 30 per cent of

University of British Columbia, Canada, May 1982