Keywords

7.1 Introduction

The reform and expansion of higher education was a priority for both of Vietnam’s postcolonial regimes, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the nation’s north and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south. “Vietnamization,” or the adoption of Vietnamese as the language of instruction, was seen as a central part of that reform. Symbolically, it would mark a break with the colonial era, where higher education had been offered exclusively in French; practically, it would democratize education by making it accessible to more Vietnamese and facilitating the expansion of the university system. Yet despite working from the same colonial-era base and sharing many motives and goals, the two regimes pursued Vietnamization by very different means and on very different timelines.

This chapter consists of five parts: the first part discusses relevant scholarship and the sources and methods used in this study. The second introduces the language policy during the colonial period, focusing particularly on university-level education. The third part traces the decline of instruction in Hán-Nôm and the rise of quốc ngữ. The fourth and fifth parts discuss the transformation of university education in the DRV and the RVN, respectively.

This chapter argues that the history of the Vietnamization of higher education reflects the different political systems of the two regimes. In the DRV, Vietnamization was initiated by the central authorities and carried out by decree; nevertheless, government policy did not always reflect reality as educators were challenged to translate vocabulary and curriculums into the new language of instruction. By contrast, in the RVN, Vietnamization was shaped by the efforts of individual educators and linguists, associations, and student participation. In this sense, policy followed the evolving reality in the classroom and on university campuses. Exploring the process of Vietnamization thus sheds light on a crucial aspect of the process of decolonization and highlights the very different paths to independence taken by the two Vietnams between 1945 and 1975.

7.2 Scholarship, Sources, and Methods

While much has been written on the colonial language policy established by the French in Vietnam, the problem of language in colonial higher education has received little attention. Short discussions of the topic can be found in works by Vũ (1985), Trịnh (2019), and Nguyễn (2020). In general, these works balance praise and criticism of the university system in Indochina. As such, they provide a useful baseline for the discussion of the reform efforts of the postcolonial regimes.

Scholarship on the DRV’s language policy in university education dates to the 1980s and 1990s, with much of it produced by educators and policymakers who participated in educational reform after 1954. Although these works exhibit a generally positive attitude toward the DRV’s educational policies, they also reveal the difficulties of the process of the nationalization of educational in the face of structural obstacles. However, they do little to analyze these obstacles, particularly the problem of developing new scientific terminology. Later work by Vietnamese linguists such as Lê (2015) shed light on the process of developing new scientific vocabularies, but does not go into detail for the RVN, with the result that important achievements and figures are ignored.

After the emergence in the 1960s and early 1970s of monographs about South Vietnam’s educational system, the 1980s saw almost no books on the topic. Increasing interest in the topic, however, was shown in the 1990s when scholars began to debate the merits and limits of education in the RVN. Researchers in Vietnam were generally critical of the RNV’s education and language policy while praising the development of education in Communist-controlled areas and the struggles of activists in the south’s cities. An example is Trần et al.’s (1995) A Rough Outline of 30 Years of Education in the South (Sơ thảo 30 năm giáo dục miền Nam), a collection of articles by educators active in the south before 1975. Outside of Vietnam, researchers have painted a more positive picture of education in the RVN. Olga Dror’s Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities (2018) takes an explicitly comparative perspective, highlighting the uniformity and ideological domination of DRV education, in comparison with the RVN’s republicanism and diversity. Her views echo those of scholars like Nguyễn (2006) and Trần (2014). In University Education in South Vietnam before 1975 (Nền giáo dục đại học ở miền Nam Việt Nam trước năm 1975), Nguyễn (2014) focuses specifically on university education, highlighting the autonomous and liberal nature of the RVN’s universities and aspects of superiority to its counterpart to the north. However, none of these studies focus specifically on language policy. At the same time, they emphasize the role of student protests and downplay the contributions of professors and scholars in driving educational reform.

This chapter is based on a mix of primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include government documents accessed online and through the national archive system, journals, memoirs and accounts by participants in the Vietnamization process, and interviews. Secondary sources include publications by the Ministry of Education and Training, publications by universities and other institutions, monographs, research articles, and dissertations. Sources are mostly in Vietnamese and translations are by the author.

7.3 Colonial Educational Policy

The first language school set up by the French colonial regime was the School of Interpreters (Collège des Interprètes/Trường Thông ngôn), founded in 1862 to train interpreters for the French Army. The school’s programs were taught in French and Vietnamese, with Vietnamese written in quốc ngữ, the Romanized script, rather than Hán-Nôm, the logographic writing system. 1906 saw the establishment of the University of Indochina (Université Indochinoise/Đại học Đông Dương). This institution was modeled on French universities and used French as the language of instruction. It reflected a consensus among both French and Vietnamese intellectuals and policymakers that primary and secondary education should be carried out in the vernacular, while tertiary education should be in French (Trịnh 2019). Lecturers were recruited from either the French School of the Far East (l’École française d’Extrême-Orient) or the University of Paris (Université de Paris). The French university education in its early days in Indochina has been criticized by recent scholars as “not better than high school education” (Nguyễn 2020). The university was closed after only a few years, perhaps because of its low enrollment rate (Legrandjacques 2018).

Almost a decade later, in 1917, university education in French Indochina was revived when Governor-General Albert Sarraut reestablished the University of Indochina, which would serve as the only university-level institution in French Indochina until the end of the colonial period. According to Nguyễn (2020), only the university’s College of Medicine taught at a level comparable to the metropole. She attributes this outcome to political considerations, noting that colleges were regarded with suspicion by the colonial authorities.

French remained the sole official language of university instruction throughout the colonial period. Trần Văn Chánh notes, “except for the first three grades of primary education, French was still the official teaching language; Vietnamese language just played a subordinate role” (2019: 19). Bùi Khánh Thế (1976) even claimed it was illegal for teachers and professors to speak Vietnamese in class, and that doing so could lead to severe consequences. However, I have found no historical evidence to support this claim. But whatever may have been the case inside the classroom, outside the University of Indochina, Vietnamese society was vigorously struggling to prepare for a national education system.

7.4 From Hán Nôm to Quốc Ngữ

The Vietnamese had a long-established higher education system, dating back to 1076 when the Imperial Academy (Quốc Tử Giám) was established. The feudal examination and education system was regulated and developed during the Trần dynasty, with a national exam held every ten years and the establishment of government and private academies for both nobles and commoners. The traditional education and examination system was developed further under the Lê dynasty and reached its apogee under the Nguyễn. While the system was abolished in Cochinchina after the French conquest, it remained popular in Annam and Tonkin well into the twentieth century. It is worth noting that in 1906, the first class of the University of Indochina had ninety-four students, while 6121 registered for the traditional civil service examinations (Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội 2019). Although the number of students enrolled in traditional education gradually declined in the years that followed, it was only in 1918 that the civil service examinations were officially abolished, leaving the field of higher education to the French language.

The termination of the traditional education system coincided with “a vibrant ambience of ideological struggles in the early twentieth century,” when government officials, traditionally trained scholars, French-educated intellectuals, the youth, and the masses vigorously debated educational reform (Vũ 1985). Progressive scholars such as Phan Bội Châu, Lương Văn Can, and others vigorously promoted educational reforms and novel approaches for education and the adoption of quốc ngữ through vehicles like the Duy Tân (Restoration) movement, the Tonkin Free School (Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục), and the Textbook for the New Learning of Civilization (Văn minh tân học sách). For such activists, quốc ngữ was a means to increase literacy and awaken a spirit of nationalism during a period of heavy feudal and colonial repression (Đào 2018).

At the same time, the French also promoted the use of quốc ngữ in the education system at the primary and secondary level. For them, popular literacy would serve to promote obedience and loyalty toward France (Nguyễn 2020). The popularity of quốc ngữ increased particularly during the period of the Popular Front government after 1936. That period saw communist activists like Võ Nguyên Giáp and Trần Huy Liệu collaborate with well-known intellectuals like Phan Thanh, Nguyễn Văn Tố, Trần Trọng Kim, and Đặng Thai Mai to establish the Quốc Ngữ Popularization Society (Hội Truyền bá Quốc Ngữ) in 1937 (Lê 2018b). In this way, quốc ngữ gradually became more popular as a language of instruction and in society more generally.

Nevertheless, to serve as a language of higher education, Vietnamese had to incorporate the entirely new vocabularies embedded in modern education. Southern Breeze (Nam Phong tạp chí), a journal established in 1917, was the first to take up such responsibility, publishing scientific discussions and debates in quốc ngữ. It is worth noting the existence of two opposing positions, with some scholars advocating the translation of new terms from the French, and others like Dương Quảng Hàm, Vũ Công Nghi, Nguyễn Ứng, and Nguyễn Triệu Luật promoting the translation of terms from Chinese (Trần 2002). The 1930s saw the appearance of the first two scientific journals in Vietnamese, one in Tonkin and the other in Cochinchina: Science Journal (Khoa học tạp chí) and Popular Science (Khoa học phổ thông) (Hà 2018). At the same time, the publication of dictionaries like Đào Duy Anh’s Chinese-Vietnamese Dictionary (Hán Việt từ điển) in 1932 and the French-Vietnamese Dictionary (Pháp-Việt từ điển) in 1936 helped build a bridge between traditional and modern education (Kiều 2019). 1942 saw the publication of Hoàng Xuân Hãn’s Scientific Vocabulary (Danh từ khoa học) as well as a work of the same name by Đào Duy Tiến. Other important publications include Plant Vocabulary (Danh từ thực vật) by Nguyễn Hữu Quán and Lê Văn Căn published in 1945 and Medical Vocabulary (Danh từ y học) by Lê Khắc Thiền and Phạm Khắc Quảng published in 1951. Of these, however, it is Hoàng Xuân Hãn’s Scientific Vocabulary that had the greatest influence, providing the foundation for using Vietnamese as the sole language of instruction (Lê 2015; Dương 2000).

The first opportunity came during World War II. On 9 March 1945, the Japanese initiated a coup d’état, ending French authority and returning nominal independence to Emperor Bảo Đại and a government under the authority of Trần Trọng Kim. As Minister of Education and Fine Arts, Hoàng Xuân Hãn designed and executed the first educational program in quốc ngữ. For the first time, the Hoàng Xuân Hãn or “I-tờ” program allowed students to study and take exams for the Baccalaureate in Vietnamese. Although the reform only applied to primary and secondary education, nevertheless, it is a milestone in the process of establishing and nationalizing a Vietnamese education system, setting the stage for educational reforms to come.

7.5 Language Policy in Higher Education in the DRV

Even before independence in 1945, Vietnamese communists had already established the principles of national education. A key document was the Outline of Vietnamese Culture (Đề cương về văn hóa Việt Nam), approved at a meeting of the Party Central Standing Committee in February 1943. The document established three guiding principles: “nationalization (against all subjugating and colonizing influences in order for Vietnamese culture to develop independently), popularization (against all activities and policies aimed to make the culture counterproductive to or isolated from the masses), and scientification (against all things causing the culture to be reactionary and unscientific).” On the issue of language, the Outline called on academics to “Fight for the spoken language and script,” and specifically to “(1) unite and enrich our spoken language; (2) set the rules of grammar; and (3) reform quốc ngữ” (Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam 2000). The Outline guided the formulation and implementation of education policy for the new state.

The fledgling state moved immediately to turn plans into action. Six days following the declaration of independence, on 9 September 1945, President Hồ Chí Minh signed three important directives related to the new national education. Directive No. 17-SL established a General Education Department (Nha Bình dân Học vụ). Directive No. 19-SL established nighttime classes for the working class. Directive No. 20-SL declared that while waiting for the establishment of compulsory elementary education, the learning of quốc ngữ would be mandatory and free for everyone (Trần et al. 1995). In the weeks that followed, President Hồ Chí Minh worked with Minister of National Education Vũ Đình Hòe and prominent French-educated intellectuals like Nguyễn Văn Huyên, Ngụy Như Kontum, and Hồ Hữu Tường to develop a three-point plan: (1) eradicating illiteracy in one year; (2) abolishing teaching in French and, instead, use Vietnamese as the language of instruction at every educational level including university; and (3) quickly executing the educational reform plan.

A key element of the plan was the reopening of universities and colleges. The government established a Department of University Education with Nguyễn Văn Huyên at its head. In November 1945, the government officially reopened the University of Medicine, Faculty of Pharmacy, Faculty of Dentistry, College of Science, College of Fine Arts, College of Agriculture, and the Veterinary College. A series of decrees in late 1945 and early 1946 granted universities financial autonomy and improved their administrative capacities. While implementation sometimes lagged, and no new students were enrolled in 1945, nevertheless, the evidence is clear that the DRV made educational reform a priority, developed clear guiding principles for reform, and moved decisively to create a new national education system.

Another element that emerges from the meetings of August and September 1945 is the determination to use Vietnamese as the sole language of instruction. This was reflected not only in the decrees that followed, but also in the 1946 negotiations, ultimately fruitless, held to find a means of accommodating an independent Vietnam within a French-led Union. Vietnamese delegates, notably Nguyễn Văn Huyên, fought vigorously for the right to administer their own universities and academies, with Vietnamese as the only official language of instruction (Vũ 2015: 287).

Meanwhile, DRV officials had already begun to realize the policy. The new National University opened on 15 November 1945, staffed by eminent scholars like Nguyễn Văn Huyên and Nguyễn Mạnh Tường. Other faculty, such as Ngụy Như Kontum, Nguyễn Văn Thiêm, Đào Duy Anh, Đỗ Xuân Hợp, Hồ Đắc Di, Đỗ Tất Lợi, and Đặng Vũ Hủy had only just returned from France (Vạn 2017). Courses on the ancient history of Vietnam and Vietnamese literature were taught for the first time ever in Vietnamese, arousing great excitement among students (Lê 2018a, b). The Law University was reformed, and an entirely new University of Literature was founded. However, this period of rapid progress was interrupted when negotiations between the DRV and France collapsed, triggering the outbreak of hostilities in late 1946.

Wartime put serious constraints on the development of national education. The DRV’s universities and colleges were moved out of Hanoi and relocated to rural or mountainous areas. While the University of Medicine continued to operate and new classes in general mathematics were opened, the University of Literature and the College of Sciences were closed. By 1951, higher education had been consolidated in three locations: Việt Bắc (the DRV’s resistance base in the north), Liên khu IV (Inter-Zone IV), and Khu Học xá Trung ương (Central Campus) in Nanning, China (Bộ giáo dục và Đào tạo 1995).

Officially, Vietnamese was the language of instruction for all general and higher education (Ngô and Đỗ 2008). However, the lack of qualified instructors and the challenge of translating vocabulary into Vietnamese meant the reality was more complex. The issue is illustrated by the College of Medicine, which, as one of the few surviving tertiary institutions, brought together the majority of Vietnamese professors at the time. The college’s courses continued to be based on the French curriculum. Professors found it hard to use Vietnamese to teach, so most of them lectured in French, or code-mixed, using a few words in Vietnamese. According to the memoir of Associate Professor Trần Quang Vỹ, clinical teaching and medical record teaching were conducted in French, and students and instructors only spoke Vietnamese with patients. Similarly, surviving class notes of students were written 100% in French (Đại học Y Hà Nội 2003). One exception was an anatomy textbook compiled by Professor Đỗ Xuân Hợp in 1952. His textbook, the first of its kind in Vietnamese, remains the foundation for the current system of Vietnamese medical terms (Đại học Y Hà Nội 2017). Thus, despite government decrees, new institutions, and the best efforts of scholars and educators, higher education in Vietnam in the period 1945–1956 remained deeply influenced by its French colonial predecessor.

The end of the First Indochina War in 1954 and the DRV’s consolidation of control over the country’s north set the stage for the expansion and reorganization of the existing university system. On 4 June 1956, the government issued Decision No. 2184/TC establishing five universities: Polytechnic University (Đại học Bách khoa), Normal University (Đại học Sư phạm), Medical University (Đại học Y Dược), University of Agriculture and Forestry (Đại học Nông Lâm), and General University of Hanoi (Đại học Tổng hợp Hà Nội). These new institutions in turn developed new programs and courses: the number of higher education programs offered rose from ten in 1955 to 184 in 1971 (Bộ giáo dục và Đào tạo 1995). This inevitably exacerbated the problems of translating vocabulary and compiling textbooks. While programs in the humanities and social sciences could often function without recourse to foreign languages, programs in science and technology continued to pose a challenge. Typical was the Polytechnic University where its academic staff consulted and translated foreign materials to compile textbooks to immediately support learning and researching activities (Khoa Toán-Cơ-Tin học 2011). Lecturers and students alike encountered many new terms that they had to study and “figure out by trial and error” (Hội Cựu sinh viên toán Bách Khoa 2016). Once again, much of the burden fell to individual instructors. The field of geology in Vietnam, for example, is indebted to the work of Professor Nguyễn Văn Chiến, who not only taught most of the program’s courses, but also compiled a dictionary of geological terms that, like Đỗ Xuân Hợp’s anatomy textbook, continues to provide the foundation for studies in geology in Vietnam (Dại học Quốc gia Hà Nội 2008).

The rapid expansion of higher education underlined the need for a centralized and systematic approach to the problem of translation. One turning point was the creation in 1959 of the Governmental Science Committee (Uỷ ban Khoa học Nhà nước). The Committee, which had authority and duties equivalent to a ministry, provided the government with guidance on all matters related to science and technology. Its Terminology—Dictionary Team (Tổ thuật ngữ—Từ điển) would provide impetus and guidance for translation efforts in higher education. In 1960, the History-Geography-Literature Committee (Ban Sử Địa Văn) published the document “Temporary Regulations on the Rules to Compile Terms in the Natural Sciences” (Quy định tạm thời về nguyên tắc biên soạn danh từ khoa học tự nhiên). These regulations served as a framework until 1964, when a national conference on scientific terminology produced the authoritative “Rules for Translating Foreign Scientific Terms (of Indo-European origin) into Vietnamese” (Quy tắc phiên thuật ngữ Khoa học nước ngoài [gốc Ấn-Âu] ra tiếng Việt), hereafter referred to as “the Rules.”

The publication of the Rules was followed in May 1965 by the Conference to Consult Opinions about the Use of Scientific Terminology (Hội nghị trưng cầu ý kiến về việc sử dụng thuật ngữ khoa học) and the creation of the Council of the Science of Terminology and Dictionaries (Hội đồng Thuật ngữ—Từ điển khoa học), chaired by Professor Nguyễn Khánh Toàn and including eminent scientists such as Tạ Quang Bửu, Nguyễn Văn Chiển, Quang Đạm, Trần Văn Giàu, and Ngụy Như Kontum. On 10 October 1965, the Council announced a project, hereafter referred to as “the Project,” that would see the Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences (Viện Khoa học Xã hội Việt Nam) rapidly and systematically apply the Rules to Vietnamese scientific vocabulary. The results were immediate. The following year, in June 1966, the Institute announced the initial application of the Rules, consisting of fifteen groups of terms with roughly 25,000 words. Thus, these two important initiatives, the Rules and the Project, paved the way for the rapid building of Vietnamese scientific terminology in the mid-1960s.

At the same time, the state also moved to nationalize and standardize the textbooks and curricula used in higher education. Using the heuristic of Minister Tạ Quang Bửu’s “Three Best Principles” (Chủ trương ba nhất; “most basic, most updated, closest to the reality of Vietnam”), Ministry of Education officials convened dozens of meetings to examine how to modernize the curricula of programs in basic science and technology. Their efforts eventually resulted in the Ministry’s Course Secretariat (Ban Thư ký môn học) with the responsibility of developing curricula, compiling and reviewing textbooks, and developing human resources. The Course Secretariat played a vital role in maintaining and improving the quality of teaching and learning despite the escalating war (Bộ giáo dục và Đào tạo 1995).

Taken together, the centralization and standardization of vocabulary, curricula, and textbooks transformed education in the DRV in the 1960s. This is seen most clearly in the change in academic publishing. Whereas from 1956 to 1965, most textbooks had either been based on French originals or were translated versions of Soviet undergraduate textbooks, from 1965 onward, the output of the Ministry of Education’s publishing house consisted primarily of texts compiled by Vietnamese universities, supplemented by selective translations of well-known textbooks from the USSR, France, and the USA (Bộ giáo dục và Đào tạo 1995).

In short, using top-down, centralized control, between 1945 and 1965 the DRV was able to create a truly national education system, taught entirely in Vietnamese. It may be that the system was shaped by ideological concerns and suffered from rigidity and conformism which, as Dror (2018) argues, may have produced “disastrous” results after 1975. Yet the achievements of early generations of Vietnamese officials and academics in the face of enormous challenges remain undeniable and worthy of study.

7.6 Language Policy in Higher Education in the RVN

Much like its counterpart to the north, the RVN government sought to create the basis for an independent, anti-colonial, and national education system. Yet here, change would be led from below rather than above. Initial progress toward building a truly post-colonial education system was slow. In 1949, following the establishment of the State of Vietnam (État du Viêt-Nam), a bilateral cultural agreement on 30 December 1949 resulted in the University of Indochina being renamed the French-Vietnamese Joint University (Université Mixte Franco-Vietnamienne), also known as University of Hanoi (Université de Hanoi). Little changed, however. The university was headed by a French rector directly appointed by the French president. In Saigon, an affiliate was created under the authority of a Vietnamese vice rector. The teaching staff was largely French, though the figure for Vietnamese faculty members showed a considerable increase (Nguyen 1965). After the signing of the Geneva Accords, and the withdrawal of French and pro-French forces to the south, the French-Vietnamese Joint University moved to Saigon and merged with its Saigon-based affiliate. On 11 May 1955, the French-Vietnamese Joint University was transferred to the jurisdiction of the government of the State of Vietnam and renamed the National University of Vietnam (Viện Đại học Quốc gia Việt Nam). Under the RVN government, in 1957 it was renamed Saigon University (Viện Đại học Sài Gòn). The same year also saw the establishment of Hue University. Even so, French influence in higher education remained strong. Decree No. 1 (Nghị định số 1), issued on 20 October 1955, set out the principles of university administration during the transitional period: in essence, French enrollment policies, the organization of the university-faculty system, and the examination and grading system remained. Initially, academic staff were mainly French and would be gradually replaced by French-educated Vietnamese counterparts (Nguyễn and Lưu 2021; Bộ Quốc gia Giáo dục 1960).

Against the backdrop of gradual change, however, the RVN was establishing the basic principles of a new national education. The 1956 Constitution generally placed an emphasis on the universal, compulsory, and gratis nature of South Vietnam’s general education and created a favorable legal framework for the development of private universities and professional colleges (Quốc hội lập hiến Việt Nam Cộng hòa 1956). Nonetheless, it was not until under the administration of Minister of National Education Trần Hữu Thể (1958–1960) that principles of a new education for the Vietnamese were established. On the occasion of the First Congress of National Education (Đại hội Giáo dục Quốc gia lần thứ nhất) held in Saigon in 1958, the “humanistic, nationalistic, emancipatory” motto was introduced, becoming the basic tenets of the Republic of Vietnam’s educational system. Following the 1963 coup d’état, these guiding principles were modified into “humanistic, nationalistic, scientific” (nhân bản, dân tộc, khoa học). This modified version was maintained in Article 11 of the second Constitution of the Republic of Vietnam in 1967 (Quốc hội lập hiến Việt Nam Cộng hòa 1967). However, the Educational and Cultural Policy (Chính sách văn hóa giáo dục) published by the Republic of Vietnam’s Council of Culture and Education in 1972, returned to the former tenets of education—humanistic, nationalistic, emancipatory—with clear explanations for each principle (Việt Nam Cộng hòa Hội đồng Văn hóa Giáo dục 1972).

Whether emancipatory or scientific or both, the question remained how exactly to translate these ideals into reality and to forge a truly national university system, taught by Vietnamese in the Vietnamese language. As in the DRV, the problem of translating foreign scientific vocabulary, in this case mainly French, into Vietnamese was an enormous challenge. However, unlike in the DRV, the work of translation would occur largely free from central control. Before 1955, the National University of Vietnam still used French as the instructional language in all faculties, except the Saigon College of Literature (Đại học Văn khoa Saigon) and the Teachers College (Cao đẳng Sư phạm). At the College of Law (Trường Luật), thanks to the efforts of Acting Dean Professor Vũ Quốc Thúc and his colleagues such as Nguyễn Cao Hách and Professor Vũ Văn Mẫu, Vietnamese was used as the instructional language from the 1955–56 academic year (Lê 2010). However, other courses and programs remained taught in French, often by French professors. To be specific, along with 300 French professors and teachers serving in seven secondary schools (Lycée) and a community of 17,000 French citizens across the South, forty French professo rs still taught at universities in Saigon and Hue at least until the late 1950s (Annunziata 1967). The overwhelming influence of French colonial education probably began to attenuate when the RVN sent its officials and students to the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries to study (Lê 2011). However, the Ministry of Education of the RVN continued to delay the switch of languages at the tertiary level until 1961–1962 and required more time for a consensus on translated scientific nouns to be reached (Bộ Quốc gia Giáo dục Việt Nam Cộng hòa 1965: 2803).

In response, Vietnamese professors and scholars took the lead in building up the Vietnamese system of scientific nouns. In 1960, the Scientific Vocabulary Compilation Committee (Ủy Ban Soạn Thảo Danh Từ Khoa Học), led by Professor Lê Văn Thới of the College of Science, Saigon University, was established (Tiểu ban Mỹ thuật 1973). There were sub-committees for each discipline: mathematics, physics, chemistry, flora, fauna, etc. As a result, in 1962, the first volume of the series Scientific Vocabulary (Danh từ khoa học), supervised by Professor Lê Văn Thới, was published. It can be said that it was Professor Lê Văn Thới who furthered the legacy of Vietnamese progenitors like Hoàng Xuân Hãn and Đào Văn Tiến and established the general principles for establishing Vietnamese terminology in the RVN.

In 1967, the government finally recognized the work of the Scientific Vocabulary Compilation Committee when it created the Committee for the Compilation of Specialized Vocabulary (Ủy ban Quốc gia Soạn thảo Danh từ Chuyên môn). This new committee officialized and extended an earlier body (Tiểu ban Mỹ thuật 1973). The central committee included twelve disciplinary committees further divided into thirty-two sub-committees, with each of the latter responsible for compiling a list of scientific terms for the relevant discipline. In 1970, Lê Văn Thới and Nguyễn Văn Dương published a set of guidelines for translating disciplinary terms in the Internal Jounal of Specialized Vocabulary (Nội san Danh từ Chuyên môn). In this sense, their publication lagged five years behind the publication of a similar framework by their counterparts in the DRV. Every week, Committee President Lê Văn Thới, the two vice presidents, the chairman, and selected outside scholars reviewed a list of nouns submitted by a panel. The process was described as “very difficult” and that “Sometimes the committee had to spend hours or the whole meeting to review just a few nouns” (Ủy ban Quốc gia Soạn thảo Danh từ Chuyên môn 1972).

Altogether, the Committee for the Compilation of Specialized Vocabulary published nine issues of the Internal Journal of Specialized Vocabulary between 1969 and 1975. Each issue was comprised of various articles on linguistic problems or the activities of the committee. More importantly, each issue introduced a list of collectively authorized terms used within a particular academic discipline. At the same time, the Ministry of Culture, Education, and Youth (known earlier as the Ministry of Education), together with the Committee for the Compilation of Specialized Vocabulary, published three important works: Terminology of Atomics (1969); Terminology of Pharmacy (1973); and Terminology of Fine Arts (1973) (Ủy ban Quốc gia Soạn thảo Danh từ Chuyên môn 1975: n.p.). Nevertheless, it must be noted that much of the committee’s work remained at a preliminary stage. In many disciplines, the committee had only completed and published the list of scientific terms beginning with the letter A. Clearly, a sizable workload remained to be completed.

At the same time that the RVN’s scholars labored in committee rooms to translate and standardize scientific vocabulary, outside, members of society at large were taking their own steps to build national education in the Vietnamese language. On 12 January 1950, as part of the demonstrations to mark the killing by French police of Trần Văn Ơn, a student from the Petrus Ky School, demonstrators called for the use of Vietnamese in education. Another important event was the founding by prominent Cochinchinese intellectuals of the Quốc Ngữ Popularization Society (Hội truyền bá chữ Quốc Ngữ) in 1952, not to be confused with the society with the same name founded in Hanoi in 1937. This organization led a grassroots movement to spread the use of quốc ngữ throughout the Cochinchinese population (Hồ 2003).

By 1953, a broad movement of students and teachers, supported by intellectuals and other elites, was calling on the government to require all education in the Vietnamese language, ensure the nationalistic and popular character of curricula, and end years of dependence on foreign culture in education (Hồ 2003, 2001). In part, student activism stemmed from the high failure rate that resulted from studying and taking examinations in French, effectively making higher education inaccessible to all but the children of wealthy families (Hồ Hữu Nhựt, personal communication, 17 December 2019). This helps explain the demonstrations, protests, and declarations that characterized the following years. One of the most significant occurred in February 1958, when 200 students from fifteen public and private schools in Saigon marched to the Bureau of Academic Affairs (Nha Giám đốc học vụ) to make demands under three main heads: (1) use Vietnamese as the instructional language at university; (2) tackle the problem of the shortage of schools and classes, improve the living standard of teachers, subsidize poor students, leverage the budget for education; and (3) modify the curricula to make them more appropriate for an independent and national education, and conduct democratic reforms in schools (Trần 2017). Nor was the movement confined to Saigon. Students in Hue founded the Letters and Arts Group (Nhóm văn nghệ) in 1961 at the College of Literature (Trường Đại học Văn Khoa), and the Language Change Group (Nhóm chuyển ngữ) in 1960 at the College of Sciences (Trường Đại học Khoa học) to demand the use of Vietnamese in university-level education.

Student demonstrations for the use of Vietnamese in higher education were bound up with politics more generally. The student groups at Hue University were the outgrowth of “revolution-developing grassroots organizations” (tổ chức cơ sở phát triển cách mạng) and were effectively communist-controlled (Trần 2017). Americans as well attempted to turn student activism to their advantage. According to Nguyễn (2013), the first president of the General Union of Saigon Students (Tổng hội Sinh viên Sài Gòn), after the coup d’état of 1963 “many political forces behind the scenes motivated students to do street protests, opposing the neutralization option and denouncing the cultural domination of the French, particularly the problem of trường Tây [French-modeled schools].” The attempt may ultimately have backfired, as it highlighted the issue of cultural imperialism more generally. Nguyễn Hữu Thái suggested that “opposing French-modeled schools raised the awareness of Vietnamese students about the issue of national sovereignty” (2013), which later, by the same token, would motivate Vietnamese students to oppose American involvement in Vietnamese politics.

Leaving aside the complicated politics behind student activism, the 1960s saw steady, if uneven progress in the use of Vietnamese in higher education. By the mid-1960s, only a handful of courses at the Saigon College of Science were still taught in French (Bình 2016). At the end of 1966, students at the College of Medicine began agitating for the right to study in Vietnamese at schools, coming up with the slogan “Vietnamese people learn Vietnamese.” The movement spread to other universities, colleges, institutes, and schools across South Vietnam. An advocacy committee was set up at the College of Pedagogy, and a newspaper representing the movement was established: Language Change (chuyển ngữ). As a result, from the beginning of 1967, all universities in South Vietnam switched to teaching in Vietnamese except for the University of Medicine. There, according to Professor Lê (2010), “the prolongation of the transition was evident with the Medical University in the last years: the teaching staff included Vietnamese, French, and American professors. However, some Vietnamese professors still mixed Vietnamese and French while teaching, and the lectures were written in French, typed, and copied for students to memorize for year-end exams.” As in the DRV, theory was one thing, practice another.

In short, while we must acknowledge the complex nature of the student movements in South Vietnam, student activism undoubtedly played a major role in driving the Vietnamization of higher education in the RVN. Student activism was matched by the efforts of individual professors and scholars to develop a new vocabulary for teaching in Vietnamese. Over time, the initiative shifted from students and individual scholars to the state-run Committee for the Compilation of Specialized Vocabulary as its committees sought to systematize and standardize the translation of scientific terminology. Despite being left unfinished due to the collapse of the RVN in 1975, the project demonstrates how the enthusiasm and activism of students and scholars combined in a bottom-up manner to create the conditions to realize the state’s policy of adopting Vietnamese as the language of instruction in higher education.

7.7 Conclusion

The project of developing a modern, scientific, national system of education taught in Vietnamese has its origins in the colonial period. Intellectuals and activists across the political spectrum, from conservative intellectuals to communist radicals, all embraced the project of teaching in Vietnamese using the quốc ngữ script. Thanks to their efforts, by 1945 important progress in general literacy and curriculum development had been made, setting the stage for rapid change under postcolonial governments. Particularly during the period 1945–1975, quốc ngữ can be regarded as the primary tool of decolonization and nation-building. The DRV’s commitment to the Vietnamization of education manifested itself from the very first days of independence in 1945. Meanwhile, in French-controlled territory, the slow progress of Vietnamization and the continued use of French in higher education was a source of popular discontent and protest.

It was after 1954 and the establishment of de facto control by the two governments over their respective territories that the process of nationalizing education in the two Vietnams entered a crucial period. Although both governments set out clear principles for the creation of a national education system, the results varied. In the DRV, the top-down management of higher education reform and the development of scientific vocabulary achieved major advances despite the immense challenges presented by the war. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that at least some of the advances were more theoretical than real and did not reflect the reality of the classroom. In the RVN, much of the early impetus for change came from the student struggle movement, combined with the contributions of South Vietnamese intellectuals and scholars. There, it was only in 1966–1967 that the RVN government put the idea of an independent national education into practice by changing its language policy for higher education and officially supporting the development of Vietnamese terminology. In this way, the process of Vietnamization in the RVN reflects the greater degree of academic freedom and the tradition of student activism.

On 30 April 1975, Vietnamization was still very much a work in progress in both Vietnams. The triumph of the DRV and the dissolution of the RVN marked a new era in Vietnam’s education, but we should not assume that higher education in the unified Vietnam was immediately dominated by the system of Vietnamese terminology developed in the DRV. Many features of the RVN’s educational system, particularly in tertiary and professional education, were perceived as desirable by communist leaders (Nguyễn 2014). More concretely, articles published in the Journal of Linguistics (Tạp chí ngôn ngữ học) during the years after 1975 demonstrate the participation of scholars from the south in debates over new terminology. Arguably, the standardization of Vietnamese terminology in the reunification era was the result of discussions and a consensus among all relevant Vietnamese scientists and scholars regardless of whether they were from the north, south, or center. However, given that many well-known scholars from the RVN had fled the country, in the end, scholarly forums were mostly dominated by scholars from the north. In this way, the language of instruction in Vietnamese universities and colleges today is the outcome of a complex political process, reflecting in microcosm the complex political process that has produced the contemporary nation.