As Vietnam’s educational culture was sparked by Chinese influence, the roots of education come from the country’s belief in Confucianism (Mongabay, 1987). Confucius taught that man is at the center of the universe, but that man cannot be alone; he finds happiness in community with others. He also taught the belief that everyone has the same potential to be educated, and therefore education should be available to everyone. Vietnam was therefore constructed to be a collectivist country, meaning that individuals are less important than the whole (Yee, 2002). Community is extremely important, so education is seen as a way to create a community of good citizens instead of a way for one to advance personally.
The Vietnamese believe that One of the traditional values of the Vietnamese people is the promotion of learning and the respect for teachers. In the Feudal and Colonial periods, teacher’s were seen to have more importance than parents; their position was “only lower than the king” (Worldbank, part 1.paragraph 1, 2010). The report by the WorldBank in 2010 explains that teachers would often be invited to live in the homes of wealthy villagers to teach the family’s children as well as other children in the village. To become a teacher, the mandarins requested that candidates have excellent learning achievements and have high marks in competitive exams. The first exam was conducted in 1075, and the first Confucian university was constructed in 1070, called the Temple of Literature. For about one thousand years, the Vietnamese people learned Chinese characters and used them to write but pronounced them in a Vietnamese way. This was done in order to preserve a certain national independence from the Chinese.
