The Modernization Resolution of Vietnam’s Education System by the Francophone Road in the East-West Cultural Conflict of the Late Nineteenth Century and the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Even though the colonial authorities tried to use education as a political tool to serve their ruling purposes, the francophone education system was an important bridge between Vietnam’s traditional Confucian education and mankind’s modern one. One of the greatest achievements of the francophone education system in Vietnam was the training of a modern westernized intelligentsia different from traditional Confucian intellectuals. Although the Soviet and other socialist educational models later replaced the francophone education system, the cornerstones of all existing modern educational models of Vietnam have originated from the very first settlements of the francophone education in the Far East Country. The fundamental elements of the francophone education therefore play an important role in the integration and development of the Vietnamese education into the modern world education system. The modernization of the Vietnamese education system in the colonial period under the decisive influences of the francophone model could, to some extent, be seen as a historical resolution to modernity of Vietnam’s schools in the circumstances of the East-West dispute that nearly all Asian countries experienced in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Received: 19 May 2022Accepted: 18 July 2022