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Indoctrination Replaces Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Gérard Tongas
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Extract

The cultural level of North Vietnam is undoubtedly one of the lowest imaginable. Eighty per cent, of the population is illiterate, ignorant to an incredible degree and subject to the most extraordinary superstitions. Apart from the masses there remains the élite—and the hopes that one should be able to place in the youth. But here, also, we find the same deep division that was created in the population as a whole by the war—on the one hand the members of the Resistance and on the other those who remained outside it.

Type
North Vietnam
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 9 , March 1962 , pp. 70 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1962

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References

1 I have given a detailed account of these facts in my book, L'Enfer Communiste au Nord Viet-Nâm (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Debresse, 1961).Google Scholar [Reviewed on p. 210 of this issue—Ed.] Readers of this book will know of the privileges that I enjoyed as an official of the DRV—(I was professor of French at the Lycée Chu-Van-An in Hanoi, whilst my wife taught English there)—and of the many secrets that were entrusted to me, and the valuable documentation I was able to obtain there.

2 Readers will find fuller details in my book.

3 Cadres.

4 By the “former régime” I am referring to that which was in existence before the Geneva Agreements.

5 The latter also participate in the teachers' meetings for discussion of the pupils' work and they have plenty to say for themselves there!

6 For there still remain illiterates, in spite of their official promotion to the ranks of the educated, in order to swell the statistics.

7 The most important secondary school in the DRV, where my wife and I were teaching.

8 The pupils who were enrolled in the Chinese and Russian classes had the impudence —unimaginable a few months previously—to boycott these lessons. They remained in the yard, and refused to enter the classrooms. They demanded that these classes should be replaced by French and English lessons, and their demands were granted.