explain the arguments
by the french to educate the people of vietnam
Answers
Hey dude,
There were several reasons:
There were do-gooders among the French colonial government who truly believed in the “mission civilisatrice” (civilization mission) that the French embarked on in Indochina. These people did work hard to educate Indochinese to become true subjects of the French Empire.
More pragmatically, to rule a country/a land, one needed administrators. As the number of French colons in Indochina was small - about 34 thousands in the 1940s, the French colonial government needed the natives to work for them. Early on, the educational programs that the French government built in the colonies were designed specifically for this purpose. The curriculum was exclusively French as the educational goal was to serve the French Empire’s interests. The French colonial government did not emphasize higher degree programs as they feared there would be too much competition for French-born colons.
The people in the colonies pushed hard for more education: as old-school anti-French movements died out, many Indochinese especially Vietnamese wanted to either Easternize (following Japanese model) or Westernize (following French model) to fulfill the dream of liberating their country. They founded private schools (“tư thục” in Vietnamese) to accommodate ambitious individuals who for various reasons couldn’t get in the French programs. The most famous but short-lived was Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục (1907) which the French shut down quickly due to fear of it serving as incubator for subversive activities. By the end of the 1930s, there were many of these private schools throughout Vietnam.
Despite all of the efforts, the French colonial era education system was very lacking. In 1944, there were only 4000 high-school students in the entire Vietnam - a country with 22 million people.
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