Eroding Faces of Education

Education was about to ruin me before making me into a decent human being.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

My society is cruel and merciless when it comes to education.

Either you win the highest title, or you are the loser. There is no middle ground.

You should be humiliated for being dumb at school.

You are useless if you are not admitted into university. 

Parents brag about their kids’ achievement at school online and offline. Dumb kids are out of the picture, subdued and invisible.

I was lucky that my mom didn't care. She advised us to study "enough to move on to the next grade", which almost means "average is good". Her reason was that our family couldn't afford to pay for a repeated class, so we should try to be accepted to the next grade every school year.

To pass a class was not a problem. It was the problem with everyone else around. 

If I got a low score, my homeroom teacher would call me out on the lobby to "reason" with me about my meager effort, as if I had killed her out of having a five in chemistry.

I stood for 20 minutes to hear her nag me about being a "deserving child" and “developing some conscience”, while other people walked by and chipped their concerning look on my burning cheeks. I wanted to tell my teacher to fuck off, but I was a coward and didn't say anything. Years later I got an odd reflection that some adults claimed to do “a good deed” to children while they were just find an easy victim to trample on.

My neighbors were as harsh. 

They brought their kids' report cards to my home after dinner to discuss. It was clear that their children were better than me, especially if the kids were in the same class or school with me.

They subtly declared that I was a daughter of a fruit seller, there was no better future beyond selling fruit.

One neighbor shook her head , "You can't afford to send your kids to study in America like ours." She talked in details about how much she spent on her daughters in the US every year. She giggled and left the front yard, where she and my mom swept falling leaves together. 

Letting mom humiliated was not an option, or it was just me who had too much pride to lose. This anger forced me to study hard and get a head, but at the same time leaving me bitter and poisoned - by education.

Some teachers do not teach. They dictate.

In high school, chemistry, physics, and maths got serious.

Chemistry hour was a toxic cloud of numbers and capitalized letters. Our school didn't have a lab, and we learned all the formulas by theoretical explanation on the blackboard, imagining how this acid mixed with this chemical and what color and odor would be the result. It was a dumb way to study chemistry. How can I imagine a smell if I never smelled it before? 

One chemistry teacher yelled at the guy next to me when he asked her why the outcome of a chemical reaction didn’t include some hydro particles that he calculated according to the formulas. The class got quiet. None of us had ever seen a chemical reaction in our lives to have any clue to argue, we just let some particles slip.

Physics was equally absurd. How does one thing slow down or speed up another object, and how do we measure it with even seeing it or understanding how it moves ? Our teacher asked us to imagine the object's movement and then calculate it. Again, it required a high level of imagination.

Maths was the worst. Maths are divided into different branches: Geometry, Algebra, and Calculus. I was at the centre of the epic storm of numbers and figures which consumed me into a thick cloud of complete ignorance. Fuck this.

I argued with my geometry teacher that the triangle she drew in the 3D dimension needed to be corrected. It didn't cut the other square box properly as she drew.

Instead of figuring it out together or guiding me through, she gave me a zero for the 15-minute test out of being stubborn.

If I kept making fusses over chemistry and physics classes, maybe all the teachers would let me sink into invisibility. Teachers didn't like arguments or curiosity, so they left me alone for the sake of my ignorance.

… but some do love teaching

In my three years at high school, I hung out at my neighbor’s house, a maths professor tutorial hours. This short man, an established name in our provincial local college, promised to help me “get over” science classes.

All his students were from gifted schools specializing in maths, physics, or chemistry. The class was almost useless. All my classmates were far ahead. They were too good, too fast, too responsive.

I was the slow turtle withdrawing its head deeper into the shell not to hear all perfect answers and felt perplexed with its ignorance.

The professor didn't let me sink into the background. He dragged me to the front row. He started asking detailed questions, patiently waiting, and expected me to answer each of them clear. He grilled me over maths rules. It was nerve breaking. I had too little clue of what I was studying.

One time, he asked me to solve an algebra problem. I did. Well, I learned it by heart so I just poured it out on the board. Learning by heart was my talent back then.

He pushed more and more questions until he caught that I studied the whole problem by heart, symbol by symbol. He looked at me quirky, winked and laughed: “How long do you intend to remember all of this shit by heart?”- The whole class laughed. It was humiliating. I hated him.

After that class, he asked me to stay 30 minutes later after and arrive 30 minutes earlier so that he could explain all basic maths rule for me from what I stopped studying, potential two school years before. He explained how the problem came to the solution step by step and reasoned that I didn't need to remember it by heart. "

"Stop learning by heart. It will eat up your brain, like melting tofu.”

Teaching is hectic if the learner is not willing to be educated.

My maths professor cornered me with questions when I was daydreaming about other worlds beyond the walls. He cut through my eagerness by demanding I explain things from scratch. My face got red. I got angry. He got upset. We were like dogs, one small and one big, threatened each other over territory.

Once he lost his patience, he threw a piece of chalk on the board and left. That day I didn't study before; I forgot completely what was taught in the last extra session. I was writing short stories for magazines and dreamed of being a writer.

I made him mad several times, but somehow he returned to his duty after cooling down and continued chasing me around my new tricks.

“Hey, are you hiding your tail again?” It was his common joke when I couldn't answer why I chose a certain method. Everybody laughed. Even I found that amusing.

*

It takes whole a village to educate a person.

His students were not mean like other gifted students I met at contests. They quietly did their homework when the teacher raided me with his questions. They slowly explained a way they came to a solution so that I could also keep up. I was the slowest one, but they didn't mind I was there. 

They were kind and helpful friends. I brought my chemistry and physics homework in the break time. They walked me through the steps to understand. I never got a good grasp of certain lessons, especially chemistry, each of them would try to explain it in their way. For their effort, I got over simple tests at school, above average. None of them pitied me.

When we hung out for ice cream or snacks after class, some of them kept saying “our teacher loves you, he loves us,” - I thought they were just bullshitting, but somehow those words were soothing and revealing. I was safe in tutor hours. No one wanted to win over or humiliate me.

A human, not a racing horse

In my last year at high school, the professor asked me to look at his bookshelf and choose what I wanted to read, and return them when I finished. Most of the books were in English, Russian, or Chinese, which were quite rare because we had no access to foreign books at the time. I took out some English stories and some translated Russian literature.

I could only read beyond some first pages of the English books. Too much vocabulary. The computer didn't exist back then, so I had to look up new words in the dictionary, a hectic task that discouraged me from reading at all.

I admitted to him I couldn’t read those difficult ones. He pointed me to the lower shelf, where there were shortened versions of classic literature, written in simplified sentences and vocabulary to encourage learners to read more and get more expression and vocabulary along the way. They were colored on different levels.

I started reading Mark Twain, Hemingway, Salinger, then Greek mythology,... all in simplified small books.

He had a pile of old National Geographic Magazines that I borrow to read photo captions and admired the far-flung places in pictures. The text was too complicated to discern. 

We discussed the books I borrowed. Once I asked him about the hanging tree in one of the story I read. He found a book on a high shelf and showed me the picture of black people being hung and a group of well-dressed white audience amusingly watching the cruel scene.

There was “mummy” in another story (I didn’t know what the word “mummy" meant). He gave me this beautiful magazine with all the vivid pictures of pharaohs and magnificent tombs. Last year when I stood in front of the Giza Pyramid in Egypt, I squinted my eyes and remembered I had seen all of this decades ago, at my teacher’s home.

Our discussion gradually became specific, narrowing down with reasons. What I wanted to do in some years to come. What I wanted to do with the English I learned. How I would help my mother. Why I wrote for magazines. Why I wrote a short story like that. If I want to write like this author or that author.

His simple questions directed me to some path I didn't know. I was walking blindly toward everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 

"This education path will lead you to nowhere if you don't know what you want for your life," He told us bluntly. What do I want for my life? How does education matter? Can education turn into rice and meat? Why did he spend so much time to educate us if he lacked belief in education? Those questions followed me into my sleep.

As a habit, he spent some last minutes of each class to discuss how we liked our lives to be, what we expected beyond studying, how we would spend our summer, why we liked some music, some bikes, or some books, how we moved forward to what we liked.

He talked about orchids, how he grew them and how fragile they were in the constant changing weather. If it was too sunny, the shade was needed to cover his garden. One summer, he forgot to pull the shade in before going for a short vacation. A white orchid plant were burnt in the scorching sun. Its flowers withered. Some leaves turned brown. When our class returned, we saw it not do well from the window.

“They are vulnerable, I forgot to take care of them, they are fragile,” he shook his head and murmured quietly several time that day.

He reminded us that we were future adults - humans - not racing horses or cold numbers on the achievement boards, exhausted on the gruesome education exams that our society destined us into.

If we dreamed of something, we should talk about it and see how it shaped us. We should not let anyone feed us illusion or shame us.

When I wrote my university applications, I already knew what I wanted to do in the coming years thanks to aimless discussions on various topics.

I wonder why he dedicated hours to guide an unenthusiastic student out of the teenage years of confusion?

I imagined him teaching me to pass the final exam as a steel-making process. The blacksmith hits his hammer countless times until oxygen gets out and the tool takes shape. I was that unshaped thing, stubbornly resisting to be educated.

Surrounded by the envy and disparagement from the education system, I survived.

Even with some self-respect left.

Photo by Artem Podrez

I sincerely believed that education could help a person earn a living and become an independent adult. 

Until it didn't.

When I was a journalist, I visited a floating village in Can Tho. The houses floated on the Hau Giang River. Every morning, rowing and machine boats wove each other's paths on the water to the famous floating market. The songs of fruit sellers gleamed on the river surface's reflection. Fruits were piled and hung. Yellow as mangoes. Green as coconut. Bruised brown sweet potatoes. 

My colleague introduced me to a young woman on a colorful boat. She was the first child from the floating village graduating from The Education University. Most of children there dropped out after elementary or middle school out of poverty and the nomad lifestyle. The girl was then qualified as a high school teacher.

However, to secure a teaching job, she had to bribe the education officers with a big chunk of cash. Her family couldn't afford it. She returned home and became a fruit seller in her family's business.

She went through a rough path of education to go back to zero. She looked at me, hanging there a dimming question: Can education change a life? Or is it just a made-up statement by bureaucratic people?

I would agree with the girl that education is a scam. The first graduated kid in the floating village couldn’t become a teacher without corruption. Asking someone to pursue education with a promise that their lives would be better is a lie. The rotten eggs breeds inside the education system itself.

After the floating market girl, I met many other children growing up with the same empty hope, finding out the reality by themselves, mostly late into adulthood, and blaming parents, teachers, and education for fabricating false promises. 

To guide a child out of the foggy childhood, adults need to do so much more beyond providing food and time and asking them to study hard.

Fragile, as my teacher said about his burnt orchid. Disorientation can turn into a sinking swamp muddling their paths, leading them to poverty or anxiety later in life.

Future does not work out by itself with the cold-hearted system.

Education was a fabricated shade.

At the age of 20, my teacher was the top maths student in a prestigious university in Saigon. He got accepted into a famous science institute in the US before The Vietnam War ended. 

The peace came like an explosion to the usual existence of anyone involved or not involved, piercing through or throwing them into the void.

He was one of the side victims, suffering consequences of change. Anyone who had "ties" with the Americans was fired, excluded, and dismissed. His "tie" was winning a maths scholarship. 

The maths genius was expelled from the university, straying into a bicycle keeper in the market to earn dimes. His mother told me that he carried a pocket dictionary to learn English while working at the market and that his workmates laughed at him as a book weirdo for learning a useless language.

The books he lent me were his longing for a failed dream. He had prepared all his youth for an education path, which never materialized. 

Discipline and smart, he became a top professor in our provincial college. His school trained lecturers for the province, which made him some kind of powerful in his field.

His house was often visited by education officials coming to beg him let them pass a test without doing it. They gave him generous cash piles to pass his test. He refused, sweeping them off his house, yelling noisily among the neighborhood.

They could give him anything, just look away. He didn’t look away. It was a hectic job to constantly deal with bribery and indecent people.

He became alcoholic. He was always depressed and good at hiding it with rice wine.

He suffered from liver failure. He didn’t recovered.

He passed before seeing me get my path clear.

I visited his wife, seeing his photo smiling from the high altar. Behind him, the old bookshelf I read in my senior years, where I alchemized myself through the imagination of many worlds.

Now I know that losing vision made a person hopeless. He was exhausted, struggling to survive, be educated and protect the shrine of education.

Is it fabricated?