Educating children

Long gritted his teeth and held back his feelings as he watched the bandits drag Lân away. A volley of shots rang out. That was it: Long had lost his beloved younger brother. Tears blurred the whole scene, but Long kept his body motionless at the top of a very tall, dense tree. In the training camp, special-forces soldiers all practise the ability to stay motionless for a very long time to hide from the enemy when necessary. If you move your body you are easily detected by the naked eye or by machines. Often, when you see the enemy leave, two of them are still secretly lying in wait, and when our soldier moves, they detect it and shoot at once.
Long lay still, enduring the cold dew, enduring ant bites, urinating quietly where he lay, all through the night. Sure enough, at dawn two bandits crawled out of a bush and walked away with their guns. Only then did Long slide down to the ground and run very fast out of the danger zone.
The day before, the squad had fallen into an ambush and his comrades had all died; only Long had had time to leap into a tree and climb to the leafy crown to hide. Lân, hot-tempered and unable to hold out long, had sprung out of a bush and been struck down and dragged away at once. Before being dragged far, they had fired shots and killed Lân.
Long ran on until he picked up the signal of a relief team, and only then sent a signal to report himself to the rescuers. Back at the unit, he reported, and his chief expressed deep condolences but said quietly: we have a mole.
Three years later, news came from intelligence that bandits had appeared. The chief sent Long out to fight again.
This time, with experience, Long set bait for the enemy to create an ambush, then had the whole platoon hunt them down quietly, one by one. Long himself crawled around the area where enemies lay in wait and finished them off one by one. The last one was formidable: he noticed Long approaching and was about to raise the alarm, so Long had to fire his silenced gun repeatedly into both shoulders so that his two arms could no longer move. Then Long lunged and swung his knife at the neck. The enemy leaned back to avoid the knife at his neck, causing it to stick in his body armour. Suddenly the enemy cried out:

• Brother Long, it's me, Lân...
  Long, astonished, clamped his hand over Lân's mouth, pressed him to the ground, tore off the face covering, and it really was Lân. Not dead, but gone over to the enemy. Long whispered quietly in his ear:
• What is this all about?
  Lân told him between breaths:
• Three years ago they captured me and then forced me to serve as a soldier for them, and I couldn't escape.
• But I heard them firing as if they had shot you.
• Misdirection is their trade.
• Why didn't you escape back to the unit?
• They have a mole in our ranks, so news tends to leak.
  Long nodded and said:
• The chief guessed this, so several times he staged mock battles to probe the inside, and caught a few. This battle was to determine whether any moles remain. If this battle was not leaked, there are none left. But why did you fight so fiercely? Did they trust you?
• They trust no one, but they have a method of using the other side's people to fight the other side that leaves you no way to struggle free.
• I remember Father worrying about you and telling me so many things back then...
  Long, still whispering, bandaged Lân's wounds temporarily and told him:
• Father said Mother doted on you so much that you would go bad and lack mettle. He separated me out to teach me in his own way. Mother only pampered you with sweetness and praise, which threw your mind off balance. Father taught me in many ways, with praise and with criticism, with reward and with punishment, with love and with anger, so I became steadier. Luckily, Mother fell ill and died early; don't be angry with me. Then Father threw us both into the special forces to forge our mettle. Before he died he also told me to look after you, because your psychology, though it didn't look it, was not stable from having been spoiled by Mother from childhood.
  I asked Father why he was so pessimistic. He said he had trained special forces and so understood people's psychology well. It's just like raising a baby.
  For a baby's body to develop it must be fed all the nutrients. Meat alone and the baby falls ill at once; it needs vegetables and fibre. Sweet alone and the baby falls ill at once; it needs salt. Even adults need pepper or chilli as seasoning to enjoy the food.
  It's the same for psychology: with only praise, a child gradually goes bad; there must be criticism. With only love, a child goes bad at once; there must be anger and strictness too. With only caressing and carrying, a child goes wrong at once; there must be the rod and punishment. Only when a child is surrounded by many different attitudes like this can the child's psychology develop evenly and in balance.
  Perhaps our side has wiped out all the bandits in this battleground. I'll check the comrades' signals once more to be sure, then take you out. 👥

If we want children to grow into mature people, we must create for them a varied and balanced educational environment like this. A child who is only loved becomes dependent and then inept. A child who is only scolded and reproached will end up hating life. Love is essential, but reproach and punishment are also extremely useful. What matters is that the educator be clever in using both means suitably and skilfully. That way the child develops more strongly.

Children also have to grow up facing countless difficulties in life and meeting much opposition and insult. If a child is not prepared beforehand with a psychology that can endure, the child will give up. And what does giving up mean? It means not being able to integrate with life enough to earn a living. So who will feed you? We don't know. Parents will all pass away one after another. Elder siblings have spouses of their own.

Many chemical medicines are advertised noisily, and then after a few decades the results are checked and found to be terrible, causing new illnesses worse than the ones they treated. In the same way, some new educational views that regard themselves as civilised are promoted noisily, even written into law. Unexpectedly, a few decades later it is found that they have ruined the nation's human resources by producing citizens whose minds are off balance. If anyone speaks sharply to them, they commit suicide or beat and kill others.

Some people are crazy about foreign things: whatever is foreign is good and fine. That is truly foolish. If Vietnam were poor, how could it go from one victory to another? We must study again what is good in our own country, develop it, and then teach it to the world.
Nowadays many Vietnamese lecturers go as far as America to teach at universities. A great many. Because America lacks lecturers, because teachers suffer wretched psychological pressure from American law that allows students to look down on teachers. No one wants to be a teacher any more; there are very few, and fewer all the time. The fault lies with the lawmakers who sit dreaming in air-conditioned rooms without witnessing how harsh real life is.

Unless we are careful, we are throwing away our own jade and gems to take other people's gravel. Our national culture is excellent; it is only that we look down on it.