Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 481 - Why Was The Tonkin School Dangerous? - Viet History Makers

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481 - Why Was The Tonkin School Dangerous? - Viet History Makers · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_04]: Welcome to the Vietnamese Podcast.
0:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I have Kevin Fan today.
0:03
[SPEAKER_02]: How are you, Kevin?
0:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been a long time.
0:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It has been a long time.
0:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm doing very well.
0:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Despite the terrible things happening in the world.
0:13
[SPEAKER_02]: How are you?
0:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
0:16
[SPEAKER_04]: It's this doesn't start a way down on the as an American.
0:20
[SPEAKER_04]: And I know I don't want to get the politics in the things that we do with the academic subjects that we are approaching,
0:29
[SPEAKER_04]: you can't help but to think that it's all related and if we don't learn about this stuff, there's no recourse because as the information is becoming more and more limited, our real freedoms are really be inhibited and that's a hard thing to understand.
0:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think one of the things that we're doing is we're promoting learning and thinking and critical thinking.
1:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I think those things are needed more than ever.
1:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm glad we're doing it.
1:10
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and I think that that falls in line with the topic today.
1:12
[SPEAKER_04]: We're not sold to things today on one individual, but a broader idea, a broader concept of education.
1:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so today we're going to look at a really important school in Vietnam called the Tom Can Free School or the Dong Gengia, and it was a really short lived school that opened in 1907 in Hanoi and it closed in just about 10 months.
1:41
[SPEAKER_02]: However, it was so influential.
1:45
[SPEAKER_02]: in terms of Vietnam's modernization in the early 20th century.
1:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was inspired by Fen Boy Cho, who we've talked about.
1:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It was inspired also by Fen Chu Chin, who we talked about.
2:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm excited to talk about this.
2:02
[SPEAKER_02]: There's another reason why I wanted to talk about this school.
2:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And it also has to do with a personal reason, which is that you and me are Americans and right now in the United States,
2:15
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a fact that many, many books are being banned.
2:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's just a fact.
2:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I have many colleagues, professors from different universities around the United States who have had to pull, who have had to get rid of certain books.
2:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, they cannot teach certain topics.
2:34
[SPEAKER_02]: if they have a syllabus with the word race or gender in it, for example, even the word culture, they're not allowed to teach these things, especially in Florida.
2:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think it would be helpful for us to talk about education today and to use the Vietnamese case to help us think about education more broadly.
2:55
[SPEAKER_05]: So we're talking about living in the United States with your colleagues that are, you know, going through this whole bad book stuff.
3:04
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's so crazy that this is really happening in 2026.
3:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, in a country that claims to value freedom.
3:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's going to be one of the themes we'll talk about today.
3:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's jump right in.
3:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So, well, actually, before we turn to the talk and free school, I want to ask you a few questions, Ken.
3:28
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you think the purpose of a university is for a society?
3:35
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's, there's levels to it, right?
3:37
[SPEAKER_05]: There's certain universities are there for research, certain universities are there to train professionals.
3:44
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think certain universities are just really there to kind of educate the masses and produce teachers and produce people who are going to be a productive and society.
3:56
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think there's levels to it, but I think ultimately universities are there to share information.
4:02
[SPEAKER_05]: That's my belief.
4:04
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, critical thinking can be, you know, we can share ideas in a classroom and we can just go at it.
4:11
[SPEAKER_05]: We can debate the hell out of these topics.
4:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
4:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
4:16
[SPEAKER_02]: That sounds good.
4:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'll just start by saying that the person that invented the university as we know it in the West.
4:26
[SPEAKER_02]: What is really, Wilhelm von Humboldt, he was a German, and from 1808 to 1810, he was in charge of modernizing the Prussian education system.
4:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think this is important to talk about because what he intended the university to be, so he founded the University of Berlin, and he intended the university to be something very different from polytechnics.
4:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So polytechnic school is where you learn skills, you know, like practical, useful skills.
5:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So Napoleon, after the French Revolution, he wanted France to be a military economic powerhouse.
5:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So he made all these politics dedicated to engineering, applied sciences, but Humboldt was different.
5:14
[SPEAKER_02]: He wanted universities to play a different role.
5:17
[SPEAKER_02]: He wanted them to be dedicated to what the Germans
5:22
[SPEAKER_02]: which means the systematic pursuit of knowledge, not something useful.
5:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So, instead, we need people to study Sanskrit.
5:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We need people to study French philosophy, because
5:37
[SPEAKER_02]: universities educate the whole nation he believed.
5:40
[SPEAKER_02]: They sit at the top of the education system.
5:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So he believed that universities will produce thinkers who will enrich the culture of society.
5:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You know professors they get interviewed in newspapers and documentaries.
5:56
[SPEAKER_02]: University spread the conception of a good life.
6:00
[SPEAKER_02]: They also help cultivate
6:03
[SPEAKER_02]: the citizen, the view of what a good citizen is.
6:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Humboldt tells the king look, universities will supply society with lawyers, doctors,
6:17
[SPEAKER_02]: but also the price you have to pay for the production of lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats is that you have to put up with some annoying professors who might offend you, who might say things that make you unhappy.
6:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is very helpful for us to think about universities today because
6:39
[SPEAKER_02]: If rich people give us money for universities, that's a good thing.
6:44
[SPEAKER_02]: We need their money because we need universities.
6:46
[SPEAKER_02]: We need the space.
6:48
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, how do we convince the rich people to not shut us down when we say things that they don't like?
6:58
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow, so this has been going on for hundreds of years.
7:02
[SPEAKER_05]: Not, this is not a modern phenomenon.
7:06
[SPEAKER_05]: As I always thought, I'm like, maybe in the last 20, 30 years in America, you know, this idea of fighting the universities is a new thing, but in fact, it's kicked into the business model.
7:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I will go back even further.
7:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if you've ever read Plato's Republic, but it is known as the first book in the history of Western philosophy.
7:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And in Plato's Republic, it starts by Socrates going to his friend's house.
7:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And the friend's, the house is owned by an old man named Seffolas.
7:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's a really rich old man who owns this house.
7:48
[SPEAKER_02]: asking Sephylis annoying questions like, what's it like to be old?
7:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I bet you're happy because you're rich, you know?
7:56
[SPEAKER_02]: But Sephylis says, oh, you kids, and he leaves and he lets Socrates debate with his friends.
8:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why we have the Republic.
8:04
[SPEAKER_02]: The whole dialogue happens in Sephylis's house.
8:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But Sephylis could have just kicked Socrates out because he was annoyed.
8:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, how dare you ask me these questions, you young man, you know?
8:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But he lets Socrates and Socrates friends there.
8:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And so my colleague Nick Tampeo, he's a political theorist, and he says this, this is the same thing with the university, Sepulic, it is like the rich donors who provide us the university.
8:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And we need those, the people who provide us the universities to let us stay, even if we say things that offend them, that annoy them.
8:39
[SPEAKER_02]: or that might be critical of them, because that's one of the jobs of a thinker of a university professor or scholar, it's to be critical of society, of those in power.
8:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Universities give scholars leisure, so we do teach, but they also give us leisure, so we can do research, so we can read and think.
9:02
[SPEAKER_02]: For a long time in the West, at least, this has been the model of education.
9:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, another question is, you've heard the term liberal arts, right?
9:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So, what comes to mind when you think of a liberal arts education?
9:18
[SPEAKER_05]: So, a really good question.
9:23
[SPEAKER_05]: I definitely don't think of STEM.
9:25
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't think of numbers.
9:27
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't think of science.
9:29
[SPEAKER_05]: I think of,
9:31
[SPEAKER_05]: subjects that expand our understanding of the world, hence the word liberal, it frees our thinking to kind of evolve society.
9:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
9:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So originally, I'll start with the ancient Greeks.
9:49
[SPEAKER_02]: It like always starts with the ancient Greeks.
9:52
[SPEAKER_02]: For them, the liberal arts literally meant the
10:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in Athens, the first democracy, for them they had seven skills.
10:08
[SPEAKER_02]: The first four were math, astronomy, geometry, and music.
10:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And because in Athens, it was a democracy, a direct democracy, where you had to persuade people in the public and use rhetoric.
10:22
[SPEAKER_02]: There were three other important skills, which was rhetoric, grammar, and logic that's called the truvium.
10:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And so these are the original liberal arts skills.
10:31
[SPEAKER_02]: But later, like today, when we talk about liberal arts, we mean a broad intellectual foundation to think critically.
10:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So learning about a lot of things is exactly what you said, like expanding our mind, thinking from different perspectives, thinking critically.
10:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Now this is really good to have this conversation because do you think that the liberal arts style of education fits in Vietnam as you know Vietnam?
11:01
[SPEAKER_05]: No, I don't think it fits.
11:04
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't think it fits the cultural construct of Confucianism.
11:07
[SPEAKER_05]: control.
11:09
[SPEAKER_05]: And you know, I always make this argument after all these years, months, you know, talking to you that it's not like it's really not even the communist structure.
11:20
[SPEAKER_05]: It's more, you know,
11:23
[SPEAKER_05]: baked into our culture of this top-down way of governing, and when you have a top-down way of governing, you can't open it up to younger people to kind of understand or to open up to give new ideas.
11:39
[SPEAKER_05]: It's, you know, it's our way of the highway, or we're going to persecute, or we're going to lack help.
11:45
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that that is, um,
11:49
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, I go back to Vietnam all the time.
11:51
[SPEAKER_05]: So I don't want to, I'm trying not to censor myself as much as I can.
11:57
[SPEAKER_05]: However, I do have respect.
12:00
[SPEAKER_05]: when I'm coming into Vietnam as a foreigner, right?
12:04
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't live there, I'm not part of the fabric of society there.
12:08
[SPEAKER_05]: So when I think about how they've organized, it's very different.
12:11
[SPEAKER_05]: However, all that being said, today we have full bright.
12:15
[SPEAKER_05]: And we have RMIT that are in Vietnam.
12:18
[SPEAKER_05]: RMIT not so much as full bright, but full bright is really interested in academic freedom, debate, liberal arts.
12:25
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think things are shifting and changing.
12:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
12:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, if there are listeners from Vietnam who are familiar with the education system, we would love to hear from you.
12:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I will talk about Fulbright in a little bit because Fulbright University Vietnam hides itself on being Vietnam's, one of Vietnam's first liberal arts education institutions, that's what they say.
12:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Now,
12:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I think you're right to say that Vietnam has had a culture of somewhat of being a top-down directive of a teacher-centered lecturing at you.
13:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are scholars who talk about this, how it comes from a confusion education.
13:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Now for many centuries,
13:13
[SPEAKER_02]: to be part of this civil service, you would study the Confucian classics, and then you would take exams.
13:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And for many of these exams, you had to memorize things by wrote memory.
13:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I was recently at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi.
13:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And there, you could see the little tense where scholars would take their exams.
13:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So this system of the Mandarin Confucian exams,
13:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It essentially dies out once the French come in, officially by 1919, it's done.
13:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And at this time period, in the first two decades of the 20th century, the Vietnamese intellectuals are having a debate.
13:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They're asking questions like, how did we get conquered by the French?
14:00
[SPEAKER_02]: How the hell did that happen?
14:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Some said, maybe it has something to do with the way we've been educating ourselves.
14:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Because all this time, our smartest people have been reading Confucian classics learning about how to engage in moral self-cultivation.
14:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, Europeans are learning math, science, and they're building
14:24
[SPEAKER_02]: better ships, better technology, no wonder they conquered us.
14:29
[SPEAKER_02]: It's our education that made us weak.
14:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what we're seeing in the early 1900s, our young intellectuals saying, maybe it's confusion, education that has been keeping us down.
14:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And in this mood, they are looking outside of Vietnam for inspiration.
14:54
[SPEAKER_02]: in the early 1900s, which country, China, I'm revsubosing Japan, Japan, Japan, Japan, in 1905 Japan defeats Russia in a war, Russia and Japan are fighting over some territory in Asia.
15:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Japan defeats for the first time these white people, so the Chinese, the Vietnamese,
15:24
[SPEAKER_02]: white people, the Russians.
15:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what you see in 1905, 1906, are hundreds of Chinese and Vietnamese students going to Japan studying abroad.
15:39
[SPEAKER_02]: We are talked about this in our episode on Fandroidjo and Fandroidjo.
15:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Fandroidjo and Fandroidjo and Fandroidjo and Fandroidjo, go to Japan together.
15:47
[SPEAKER_02]: in 1905, 1906, and they visit schools and they're like, how the heck did these Japanese people modernize so quickly?
15:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They were able to defeat the Russians, but also they were able to make massive improvements in terms of technology and institution building and organization.
16:07
[SPEAKER_02]: They have modernized through the Mejji restoration.
16:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You've probably heard of that.
16:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So the Medi Restoration Period is between the 1870s, 1880s, and this was hugely inspirational.
16:20
[SPEAKER_02]: When they were in Japan, they met with Chinese intellectuals, such as Liangchi Chao.
16:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We've talked about Liangchi Chao.
16:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Fanboy Chao says to Liangchi Chao, what do we do?
16:31
[SPEAKER_02]: What do we do?
16:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It means people do.
16:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And Liangchi Chao says, look,
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Right now, you're asking the Japanese for weapons, you're wasting your time.
16:39
[SPEAKER_02]: What you need to spend your time doing instead is enlightening the Vietnamese mind.
16:46
[SPEAKER_02]: You need to get the Vietnamese people to realize that step one, they're part of a country.
16:52
[SPEAKER_02]: At the moment, the Vietnamese people have no sense of nationalism.
16:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They have no sense of patriotism.
16:57
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't know that there's a country.
17:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what do you see, when the tongue can free school opens the Duncan yetto, there are stories of, for the first time, villagers come and they see a map of Vietnam for the first time, like the S shape of the map.
17:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they had never seen the shape of the country.
17:22
[SPEAKER_02]: How can you love a country when you've never seen the shape of it?
17:28
[SPEAKER_02]: You know like you need to see the shape and so one of the main things that the school was trying to do was number one inspire a sense of patriotism and nationalism.
17:40
[SPEAKER_02]: That was one thing.
17:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It was aimed at strengthening nationalism.
17:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the school would have students singing songs about the convoing resistors who had resisted the French early on.
17:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They had songs about colonial exploitation.
18:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And
18:02
[SPEAKER_02]: The style of education was also shifting.
18:05
[SPEAKER_02]: They were blaming confusion.
18:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So they were blaming conservatives.
18:09
[SPEAKER_02]: They said, look, we need to get smart.
18:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So before I jump in more, what else do you think this school was promoting?
18:17
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, at that point, it's looking at you.
18:26
[SPEAKER_05]: I think in the pendants, I think,
18:30
[SPEAKER_05]: This idea of, who are we?
18:32
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know, maybe because that's all I think identity.
18:36
[SPEAKER_05]: What makes us Vietnamese, other than that, maybe what been building or maybe engineering, I'm not sure.
18:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so what's really fascinating, and I think almost contradictory, and ironic, is that the school was clearly critical of,
18:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Confucian learning.
18:59
[SPEAKER_02]: The old school style of memorizing Confucian text.
19:03
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this quote that I want to read.
19:05
[SPEAKER_02]: So when some students were talking about, hey, maybe we should study the old Confucian texts to do the civil service exams.
19:12
[SPEAKER_02]: One man who had earned the Gwinyan, the equivalent of a bachelor's degree, he said, you still want that useless Gwinyan?
19:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Here, give me a penny, you can have my
19:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So they were like, away with this old degrees, they don't mean anything.
19:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But what I want to say is that what's fascinating is that the school was promoting free thought, but at the same time, it was very, it was still telling students what to think.
19:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So what I want to do in this episode today is to share with listeners what I've learned from reading these two textbooks from the school.
19:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's one textbook that's called a new method to study civilization.
19:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's another textbook called the School Book of Morals.
20:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And so these two texts are telling the students that's Vietnamese students how to think.
20:08
[SPEAKER_02]: But at the same time, it's telling them to think freely.
20:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Isn't that kind of funny?
20:12
[SPEAKER_02]: The style is not very free because it's very clearly you need to think this way.
20:17
[SPEAKER_02]: But so basically, they say, number one, we need to break from tradition, from the Confucian tradition.
20:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Number two, we need to become civilized.
20:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Vandenman, you hear that term.
20:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I was just in Vietnam a few weeks ago, and I was in the bathroom.
20:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you seen this when you go to Vietnam?
20:37
[SPEAKER_02]: The men's ear and all, it says,
20:40
[SPEAKER_02]: take one step forward and be civilized or take one step forward for civilization.
20:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Like so that you don't pee all over the place, you know, there's this discourse of we need to become civilized.
20:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what's really interesting is that you have these textbooks telling Vietnamese people the Europeans are civilized and we are not.
21:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason the Europeans are civilized are numerous.
21:07
[SPEAKER_02]: One of them is that they compete with each other.
21:10
[SPEAKER_02]: and we don't, we need to compete because it's only through competition that you have progress.
21:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And in one of these textbooks, it says like, if you compete, you struggle to be better and that's how progress is made.
21:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Whereas we Vietnamese, we don't care about competing and therefore we are static, we're stuck.
21:31
[SPEAKER_02]: The Europeans are dynamic.
21:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And then it says, and also, the Europeans always keep their words.
21:39
[SPEAKER_02]: They keep their promises.
21:40
[SPEAKER_02]: They never come late, even for a dinner or for a visit.
21:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But we Vietnamese were always late.
21:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the Europeans may treat everything like a business.
21:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So they're always prompt, they're always accurate.
21:52
[SPEAKER_02]: They attach great importance to it.
21:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm quoting now, how beautiful are these virtues and quote?
21:58
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you think of that?
21:59
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh my God, I have so much to say.
22:02
[SPEAKER_05]: I think this idea of competition is so important because if society is top down, there's no need to compete, right, where we are already placed in our position,
22:20
[SPEAKER_05]: we are put in a position.
22:22
[SPEAKER_05]: So there's no need to compete with your older brother, your older on you.
22:28
[SPEAKER_05]: It's already laid out for you.
22:30
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
22:30
[SPEAKER_05]: And if you compete with them, there's disrespect.
22:33
[SPEAKER_05]: So now it's already kicked in.
22:34
[SPEAKER_05]: I never thought it's seven.
22:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That's such a good point.
22:37
[SPEAKER_02]: You're right.
22:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Competition really only makes sense among relative equals.
22:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're only equals in a democracy.
22:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Because in a democracy you have political equality.
22:48
[SPEAKER_02]: The assumption is that in a democracy each person should have an equal voice.
22:53
[SPEAKER_02]: But in a hierarchical society, a confusion society, it's not quite, you know, equal voice.
23:01
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a good point.
23:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Another thing that this textbook says is that Vietnamese people need to study diverse subjects in different books, because for a long time Vietnamese people had just been studying Chinese history, barely any Vietnamese history, and almost no European history or anything else.
23:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this school is saying we need to read books about the world.
23:27
[SPEAKER_02]: This school is also saying we need to debate with each other and we need to publish, we need to make newspapers, we need to have freedom of thought.
23:37
[SPEAKER_02]: This school also said, we need to exercise and have good hygiene.
23:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So they had a lot of texts about literally how to improve your body.
23:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And to cut your hair short, there were songs that were about cutting your hair short because it was also very symbolic, you know, like the ancient Chinese way, yet the law of hair, the bun, and so it was very symbolic to cut it.
24:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, some would sing songs about that.
24:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And others would, it was too much for, it was too fast.
24:10
[SPEAKER_02]: They were saying, no, this is too much of a big change.
24:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And they said, it's not filial piety if we cut our hair.
24:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It's disloyal to our parents.
24:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But then some others would say, actually, if you cut your hair, you're cleaner and you won't get lice.
24:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And that would actually mean more filial piety because you're carrying about your body more.
24:35
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, all of these things are things that I worried about growing up as a kid.
24:40
[SPEAKER_05]: I thought about all this stuff about, like, we as Vietnamese, we don't, you know, as a young man, I remember comparing the thoughts that my father had.
24:52
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, because he said the very same things.
24:54
[SPEAKER_05]: He said Vietnam didn't really care to kind of expand their knowledge beyond the country.
25:00
[SPEAKER_05]: And, um,
25:02
[SPEAKER_05]: They didn't really understand cultures outside the country.
25:04
[SPEAKER_05]: He didn't really believe in this hierarchical system.
25:06
[SPEAKER_05]: He let us debate with him freely, even though he didn't really, he was never really happy about us debating religion with him.
25:17
[SPEAKER_05]: But anything else is fair.
25:19
[SPEAKER_05]: So I always grew up with this feeling that we were inhibited.
25:26
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think,
25:29
[SPEAKER_05]: the way that Vietnamese elders, as you grow up, you become okay with the inhibition because you gain power.
25:39
[SPEAKER_05]: If you're an elder and you keep gaining powers, you go on.
25:43
[SPEAKER_05]: Why the hell would you give it up?
25:46
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think it's just baked into our cultural sort of like evolution.
25:50
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like, why would you give up any of this sort of elder statesman power?
25:55
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
25:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so this school, the Tonken Free School, is a full-on attack on exactly what you're talking about on this hierarchical way of thinking, because they were convinced that it is that way of thinking that allowed Vietnam to be conquered by the French, because it created weak people, people who cannot think for themselves.
26:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this school also says, you need to travel, Europeans travel, and this is a funny quote I'm gonna read,
26:28
[SPEAKER_02]: group.
26:30
[SPEAKER_02]: We shed big tears when we must leave our people for 10 days and to go less than 100 leagues.
26:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Naturally, we have no ideals or knowledge is poor and society can expect nothing from us because we're scared to go beyond our village.
26:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
26:54
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean,
26:57
[SPEAKER_05]: we need to have a whole country that is, you know, this is what 100 years ago, over 100 years ago, I can really empathize with the fear.
27:08
[SPEAKER_05]: I really can't Kevin, I really can empathize with wanting to keep society intact and not liberate and not open up to more ideas.
27:18
[SPEAKER_05]: I understand that, I enjoy the comfort of my own families
27:26
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it's a make progress with, you know, you're losing, you'll lose people, you'll lose family.
27:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, for sure.
27:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing that seems more important than family at this moment is the fate of the country, you know, because it's these foreigners, these white people who are dominating, the Vietnamese who are forcing them to work in rubber plantations.
27:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if you're a young,
27:56
[SPEAKER_02]: unite the country.
27:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, one of the most important ideas at the time, one of the most important ideologies was social Darwinism.
28:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason for that is because probably the most influential European thinker at the time was a man named Herbert Spencer, who promoted this idea of social Darwinism.
28:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So we've all heard of Darwinism, the idea that there's natural selection and evolution in the natural world.
28:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Social Darwinism will essentially say, it's human races and human groups have
28:33
[SPEAKER_02]: competition and natural selection.
28:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're weak, you're just going to go extinct.
28:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And so
28:40
[SPEAKER_02]: you need to get strong.
28:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they explain colonialism by saying that the French were simply stronger than their Vietnamese.
28:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And if the Vietnamese want to survive, they need to get strong.
28:51
[SPEAKER_02]: This explanation for colonialism is very different from the one that Ho Chi Minh will adopt later, which is Lenin's explanation.
28:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So Lenin did not say colonialism is because some countries are strong.
29:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And other countries are weak.
29:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Lenin said colonialism happens as a logical,
29:08
[SPEAKER_02]: outgrowth of capitalist expansion, it is a monopoly stage of capitalism where the Europeans cannot exploit their own workers anymore, so they need to expand.
29:21
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that's a very different explanation than social Darwinism.
29:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But this is before Leninism as an idea comes to Vietnam, this is the early 1900s.
29:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So what we see in this school are actually interesting defenses of capitalism.
29:37
[SPEAKER_02]: is very interesting.
29:39
[SPEAKER_02]: So for example, I'm going to read this quote now where the school seems to actually, I'll read it to you.
29:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to know what you think.
29:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's talking about capitalism and it says quote,
29:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Suppose there's a waste land where a few hundred poor people live.
29:57
[SPEAKER_02]: If suddenly a capitalist comes to examine the place, spends his money to build houses and factories, and recruits hundreds of workers, then they will be well fed, while dressed and life will become good.
30:15
[SPEAKER_05]: There's truth to that.
30:18
[SPEAKER_05]: That's my initial gut reaction.
30:20
[SPEAKER_05]: There's truth to that.
30:21
[SPEAKER_05]: But there's also truth to the fact that it does only a few hundred people that are rising, 95 to 99% of the rest of the people are still living in squalor.
30:32
[SPEAKER_05]: They're still going to be held back, perhaps.
30:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I find that quote so interesting, because it sounds like a defensive capitalism,
30:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But it defends Apple from my fingernails, like right, the people that were there are better off than before because of this capitalist.
30:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So it doesn't defend capitalism as say in American wood by saying, we have a right to private property, you know, they're defending it by saying, oh, it helps those who are
31:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that that's an interesting rhetorical move.
31:23
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think that when we think about this in terms of Vietnam, I think I think it worked for some small percentage of the population.
31:34
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's how we have a lot of buy-in from people like my family who bought into the French bringing better culture and they serve the French.
31:47
[SPEAKER_05]: And my uncle served the United States.
31:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Does serve a small fraction of the population?
31:55
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, since we're talking about the population, it's interesting to keep in mind like
32:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So Marks talks about the proletariat or the working class.
32:07
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the Vietnamese population, the working class, maybe like 3% to 5%.
32:16
[SPEAKER_02]: about 90% of the population were pessimists.
32:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they were not the working class where they sell their labor for a wage.
32:24
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a capitalist production.
32:28
[SPEAKER_02]: That is really introduced by French colonialism.
32:33
[SPEAKER_02]: like people who work in factories, in textiles, in the cities.
32:37
[SPEAKER_02]: The cities were run by the French, you know?
32:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the working class, the proletariat was a very small percentage compared to the vast majority, which were peasants.
32:49
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, this is off topic, but the communists are going to say that the peasants need to ally with the working class, but the working class
33:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone, like the working class or lead the communist revolution while the peasants are of course important, but they need to guide the peasants.
33:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, so one of their interesting thing about this these textbooks are how they talk about colonialism.
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So on the one hand, they're very anti-colonial, I'm gonna read another quote.
33:29
[SPEAKER_02]: The Europeans are coming to conquer our territory.
33:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Their ambition is boundless and the contempt they have for us is immense.
33:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Also, since we're under their domination, they try to change our writing and our language.
33:45
[SPEAKER_02]: and destroy our patriotic spirit.
33:48
[SPEAKER_02]: The imposed taxes, taxes on us as heavy as possible to eradicate or write to freedom.
33:54
[SPEAKER_02]: There are the masters of the country, the occupies the highest offices, the award themselves generous salaries while we, their slaves, have to bear the heaviest burdens.
34:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Once the fatherland is lost, the people immediately lose their soul, what a pity.
34:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a lot of like,
34:13
[SPEAKER_02]: trying to get the people to realize that they're being screwed over.
34:18
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, like wake up, you are being humiliated.
34:22
[SPEAKER_02]: They're abusing us, they're enslaving us.
34:25
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of that.
34:27
[SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, and this is where it gets interesting, they almost sound like they promote colonialism, like they wish they could be colonizers.
34:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to read another quote.
34:39
[SPEAKER_02]: 500 years ago, no one knew that America was a continent that Africa had an unhealthy climate.
34:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet the Europeans did not hesitate to go there, to clear land and build buildings and houses there.
34:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Their attachment to the family and to the village did not prevent them from seeking their fortune in regions, located thousands of leagues away from their homes.
35:00
[SPEAKER_02]: and where the habits and customs were completely foreign to them.
35:04
[SPEAKER_02]: This is what makes them powerful as for us, we are used to thinking away from home, one loses his profession.
35:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So no one wants to go far.
35:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's nothing strange that our knowledge is limited in our country as poor.
35:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So isn't that fascinating?
35:20
[SPEAKER_02]: They're basically saying it's admirable that the Europeans are colonizing the world.
35:30
[SPEAKER_05]: They're literally saying that and that makes sense too because I don't think that they can, I don't think that they're condemning colonization as it exists in the free and natural world.
35:45
[SPEAKER_05]: They're just saying why shouldn't, why can't we be that?
35:49
[SPEAKER_05]: Why don't we adopt these practices to become that?
35:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
35:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
35:55
[SPEAKER_02]: They want to do what the Europeans are doing.
35:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, I think this is relevant here.
36:00
[SPEAKER_02]: You also find quite a lot of racism in these texts against Africans.
36:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a poem that's I wish I had the poem with me.
36:11
[SPEAKER_02]: But it essentially is saying I'm paraphrasing here.
36:18
[SPEAKER_02]: the white and the yellow are strong and intelligent, the brown and the black are weak and silly.
36:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And so essentially they're saying, we can understand how they got colonized, but it's extra humiliating that we are being loved with them.
36:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we need to stand on our own feet and they say that the white and the yellow
36:44
[SPEAKER_02]: are no different.
36:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So they are putting themselves on par with whites, and that's why it's humiliating that they're being colonized by whites, but they're saying they understand why black people would be colonized.
37:01
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow, start thoroughly.
37:03
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow, I do have a question they'll have and yeah, why you could you you opened up by saying the school of Tonkin this I this school was only around for ten months With such like really Groundbreaking ideas.
37:18
[SPEAKER_05]: Why did it only exist for ten months?
37:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so It was shut down by French authorities and there were a series of events that happened so in 1908
37:32
[SPEAKER_02]: a revolt broke out.
37:34
[SPEAKER_02]: for it against demands for forced labor for unpaid labor.
37:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And the French authorities have discovered a plot to poison French troops.
37:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And as a result, the French sentenced 13 Vietnamese people to death and many, many more to prison.
37:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And they saw the school as part of this larger anti-colonial plot.
37:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So they arrested most of the school's leadership.
38:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I had said that he had inspired the school.
38:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Fantuccine was sent to prison, the prison island of Gondau, of Pula Condor.
38:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was there until 1911, and then a French human rights activist helped him get out and then he went to France.
38:23
[SPEAKER_02]: for 14 years.
38:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So the simple answer is that the French thought that the school was, I mean, the school was the anti-plodial.
38:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it was to have French colonial power.
38:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, I mean, that's the short answer though.
38:40
[SPEAKER_05]: And once the school folded, was there any extension of the school's people, disciples that carried on this tradition into the future?
38:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
38:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I mean, Fentry Trin is a good example.
38:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So, he goes to France for 14 years.
38:57
[SPEAKER_02]: He comes back in 1925, and he gives these really influential speeches about what the Vietnamese should do.
39:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So, he said, they should adopt democracy.
39:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But also, the school, one thing that I didn't talk about yet, that's really important is, this school was one of the main places that was advocating the development of Gutner.
39:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think we've talked about this, and definitely you have talked about it with the John Fend, but so there was a debate at the time what language should the Vietnamese use, because for many centuries they were relying on Chinese characters, classical Chinese, or Vietnamese with Chinese characters, and the Portuguese introduced the Romanized alphabet,
39:45
[SPEAKER_02]: revive it.
39:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And so at this time, you had many Vietnamese intellectuals advocating Gua Knu.
39:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Number one, because it's cheaper to print than Chinese characters.
39:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Number two, it'll help people get littered more quickly because it's easier to learn than Vietnamese characters.
40:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So you had to anti-colonial activists, Ho Chi Minh being one of them, and others Fem Quynh is a famous one.
40:14
[SPEAKER_02]: They really promote this at the school.
40:17
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a text, I'm going to quote now from one of the textbooks at the Tonging Free School.
40:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It says quote, quote, no is the saving spirit in our country.
40:29
[SPEAKER_02]: We must take it out among our people.
40:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Books from other countries, books from China, each word, each meaning must be translated clearly.
40:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's also interesting because the French colonizes also promote glutinous because they see that Chinese characters are antithetical to progress.
40:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you have this weird situation where Vietnamese nationalized anti-colonialists but also reformers and also conservatives and French colonizers are promoting glutinous.
41:07
[SPEAKER_05]: but it all plays into this model of competition.
41:10
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's equalize the language.
41:13
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's make everybody sort of on the same page.
41:16
[SPEAKER_05]: So that way we could, they're still going to, the French is still gonna do what the French, what they do.
41:23
[SPEAKER_05]: They're still gonna extract.
41:27
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think having a more elevated and more educated society to extract from is still going to be worth more than extracting from a bunch of people who are not educated.
41:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
41:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not even just about being educated.
41:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, in order to have a strong national identity,
41:45
[SPEAKER_02]: You need to read stories about your country.
41:49
[SPEAKER_02]: You need to feel like there exists Vietnamese literature.
41:53
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why Tham Gwynn is today heralded as the savior of Vietnamese culture, because he was saying that the tale of Giu is the essence of Vietnamese culture.
42:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you're only a people when you have a literature to draw on a tradition, an intellectual tradition.
42:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And he says that we need to build guikno, so I'm going to quote from him.
42:17
[SPEAKER_02]: He says today, our country must study guikno and French, but neither must Chinese writing be a banan.
42:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So he actually wants the Vietnamese to learn French, Chinese, and others to build a new intellectual culture.
42:33
[SPEAKER_02]: and the National Literature.
42:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So also there was a lawyer named Fonventio and he gave an important speech in 1925.
42:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It was titled Educational Efforts, among the animate people.
42:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And the animites were Vietnamese people.
42:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the speech, he says that education, language,
42:54
[SPEAKER_01]: our education.
42:59
[SPEAKER_01]: If you talk with the right example, that's how the education is done, right?
43:04
[SPEAKER_01]: People need to read these and say, it is free work, you need to have education on our own and it's free, and you need to have it in your own way.
43:15
[SPEAKER_05]: Kevin, let me ask you, how do you think,
43:20
[SPEAKER_05]: Standing from where you are today, how do you think Vietnam is approaching this whole ecosystem of education, raising their citizen as the balances, are they walking the walk when it comes to elevating creativity and this abundant way of processing information.
43:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so this is where I'll turn to Fulbright University.
43:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So as listeners, hopefully no, my co-host Ian Vue is a professor at Fulbright University Vietnam.
43:59
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been there many times.
44:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I've had many conversations with students there.
44:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll tell you this, they are brilliant.
44:06
[SPEAKER_02]: They are really wonderful, critical thinkers, and to be honest,
44:13
[SPEAKER_02]: much better than, I mean, my students are great.
44:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I love my students, they really are, but what I'm trying to say is that they are very, very impressive students.
44:23
[SPEAKER_02]: They're really thirsty for knowledge.
44:27
[SPEAKER_02]: My students are great, by the way.
44:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I've just stopped me right here.
44:30
[SPEAKER_05]: I have to stop you in real quick.
44:33
[SPEAKER_05]: And I have to just jump in.
44:36
[SPEAKER_05]: OK, if they are really that great, that amazing,
44:43
[SPEAKER_05]: they are going to change Vietnam in the future and why with the government of Vietnam allowed that kind of progress.
44:52
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm not putting a judgment on the country or Vietnamese government.
44:55
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm just wondering, what is in it for the Vietnamese government to put a Harvard seed full bright inside of the country to create academic freedom and free thought?
45:09
[SPEAKER_05]: Why would they do that?
45:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So there are different ways to reply to this.
45:16
[SPEAKER_02]: You make me think of one thing called the dictators dilemma.
45:20
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if you've heard of this, but this is a... What's up, what is it?
45:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's something very common to any authoritarian regime, which is that a dictator needs people around him, like a committee, you know, like advisors.
45:41
[SPEAKER_02]: a dictator needs smart advisers.
45:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the dictator will send the advisers to the best schools around the world.
45:49
[SPEAKER_02]: But that creates a dilemma because when the advisers go to smart schools, they're going to get smart.
45:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they're not going to want to follow the dictator.
46:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like for a dictator to be powerful, you need intelligent people.
46:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But the moment people start getting intelligent, they're going to think for themselves.
46:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think that might be somewhat of a dilemma that the Vietnamese Communist Party might be experiencing now, because they want to become a strong country.
46:23
[SPEAKER_02]: They want the best scholars.
46:25
[SPEAKER_02]: They want to improve higher education.
46:28
[SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, the communist party wants to stay in power, and so what's really interesting about Fulbright is that they say that they will offer full freedom of speech, and I do believe them on that, and I think it's true of seeing it.
46:45
[SPEAKER_02]: at the same time.
46:46
[SPEAKER_02]: In and I have talked about this, in full by there are a set of mandatory courses that you have to take.
46:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is the same for all universities in Vietnam.
46:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'll talk a little bit about this.
46:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So in Vietnam there's something called the Ministry of Education and Training.
47:04
[SPEAKER_02]: M-O-E-T. And so all Vietnamese university students are required to take these three sets of courses in politics, military training, and physical education.
47:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And so these courses are past no cast, but they all have to take these courses.
47:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So let me just name the courses.
47:23
[SPEAKER_02]: What I find very interesting is that the political courses are number one, you have to take your course on Marxism and
47:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And I remember when I told my friend, I grew up with a friend in high school.
47:39
[SPEAKER_02]: He's very Marxist.
47:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And I told him that, and he was like, that's awesome.
47:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, me personally, I think everyone should take a course on Marxism, Leninism.
47:49
[SPEAKER_02]: You certainly don't have to be a communist.
47:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You could be very critical of communism, but you should know what the arguments are.
47:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I think everyone should.
47:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
47:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And another course is the political economy of Marx and Lenin.
48:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Another course is scientific socialism.
48:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Another course is history of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
48:08
[SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting.
48:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's a mandatory course.
48:10
[SPEAKER_02]: History of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
48:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the last mandatory course in the politics is Ho Chi Minh thought, Dut Dung, Ho Chi Minh.
48:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So, those are the required courses.
48:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, it's an interesting question of, let's say you have these required courses, but then you could take any other course.
48:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that academic freedom?
48:34
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you think?
48:38
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't even think it's in the coursework.
48:40
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's what is being shared inside classrooms are real out to openly converse.
48:48
[SPEAKER_05]: Are we allowed to write what we want to write?
48:52
[SPEAKER_05]: Are we allowed to think what we want to think and really have open discourse?
48:56
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't even think it's about the mandate of your coursework.
49:00
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's really about the critical thinking that happens.
49:03
[SPEAKER_05]: in free society as you can debate with your fellow students and your instructors.
49:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
49:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
49:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So freedom of thought is an interesting topic.
49:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's a hot topic.
49:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Recently I was teaching a philosopher named Spinoza and he argues that a state has the right to
49:34
[SPEAKER_02]: to censor its citizens, because if a state wants to survive, and if you censor your citizens, then the citizens will get angry, and they might rebel, and then the state will crumble.
49:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's actually not in the state's benefit or interest to censor its citizens.
49:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But I find it very interesting that these courses are taught, and I would love to know from young Vietnamese people, what their experiences are and these courses are they allowed to ask critical questions about Ho Chi Minh thought, or the history of the Vietnamese Communist Party, is it really just a passive like they sit there and they learn and they take in everything from the lecture or does the lecture ask questions?
50:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, yeah, but I think like 460 show up that's the room that fits, but it's still it's a lot of students, but I always invite input, you know, I always invite critique and criticism of the thinkers that we're reading.
50:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I always say, do you agree with this?
50:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Does this sound right to you?
50:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I don't want you to just accept it.
50:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I want you to know why you agree, and I want to know why you disagree, and I think that is a good education.
50:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's because I grew up in the West with this liberal, critical thinking.
51:02
[SPEAKER_05]: But hey also, can I ask you, I'm going to publicly ask you, if we could do an episode with your podcast partner in to talk about her experience of Fulbright, if she's open to it, I'm going to I'm asking right now and if it's a no from her, I'm okay with that, but you know, because we've had her on with you in the early days to talk about your podcast, but
51:28
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, I would love to dedicate an actual episode to Fulbright, because I think that this is the next extension of this tonguekin sort of, you know, a club session.
51:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
51:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
51:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Sounds good.
51:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the proposal sounds good.
51:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, one thing that I just want to say here is that there has always been attention between philosophy and politics.
51:58
[SPEAKER_02]: philosophy, in philosophy you have to ask questions, you have to criticize, you have to think critically, you have to ask annoying questions, you have to seek the truth, in philosophy you should not conform, you should think for yourself.
52:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But on the other hand, in politics, sometimes you've got to conform, you know, sometimes you've got to go along with the group, that's if politics demands that you have to go along with the group.
52:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And politics, that's also important.
52:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes you do have to shut up and go along with the group.
52:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Stop asking so many questions, right?
52:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that has always been a tension throughout history and any society.
52:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's not just Vietnam, but it's also the United States like for conservatives in the United States.
52:52
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they have certain values, certain traditional values that they think are important, and they think that if certain books are being read, or that might endanger those values, and I can empathize with that, but then are they willing to give a freedom of thought for that?
53:17
[SPEAKER_05]: Kevin, thank you so much.
53:19
[SPEAKER_05]: I think we can actually do another hour of this subject because I think we're just scratching the surface because it's so relatable to our United States and it's relatable to Vietnam.
53:32
[SPEAKER_05]: And it is definitely a topic that bleeds out into the rest of humanity at this moment.
53:39
[SPEAKER_05]: Indeed.
53:39
[SPEAKER_05]: Thanks for having me.
53:42
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you, we'll see you at the next episode.
53:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
53:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
53:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.