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Explore the profound emotional landscape of education in our deep dive into Nguyễn Khoa Đăng’s masterpiece, "Cài hoa vào quá khứ." We analyze the transformative power of "pedagogical flowers"—the lessons learned from both heartbreaking failures and silent triumphs. From the tragic death of an ostrich to the lifelong impact of writing a number backwards, these stories reveal how a teacher's every action is scrutinized. Discover why national identity starts with a song and how humility prevents the "interrogation" of a child's soul. Join us as we unpack the philosophical foundations that turn historical educational struggles into modern-day wisdom for everyone.
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00:00Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Today, I want to take you on a journey into a space that
00:06we have all inhabited, a space that has shaped the very architecture of our minds,
00:11yet one we rarely analyze with the depth and the reverence it truly deserves.
00:16I am talking about the classroom. But we aren't just going to look at education from the sterile,
00:22bureaucratic perspective of policy and test scores. No, today we are diving deep into the messy,
00:29beautiful, tear-soaked, and profoundly human reality of teaching.
00:33We are going to explore a remarkable book, a collection of pedagogical stories from Vietnam
00:39titled Tsai Hoa Veo Khoa Khoa, which translates beautifully to Pinning Flowers on to the Past,
00:45written by the educator and author Nguyen Khoa Dang. This book is nothing short of a masterclass
00:52in human development. It is a mirror held up not just to the education system, but to society itself.
00:59capturing the transition of a nation from the fervent. Discipline days of its resistance era
01:05to the dizzying, chaotic, and often hollow realities of the modern market economy.
01:11Let's start with that title, Pinning Flowers on to the Past. It's a poetic image, but what does it
01:17actually mean? To explain this, the author opens with a brilliant metaphor drawn from an old African
01:23folk tale called, The Gift of Tet. In this story, a father passes away, leaving behind his sons.
01:32Through their various extraordinary skills, the older sons manage to physically put their father
01:37back together, but he remains lifeless. It is only when the youngest son asks a simple,
01:43profound question. Where is my father? That the man is resurrected. The author uses this tale to
01:50establish the foundational philosophy of his entire book. The past is dead until the present
01:56generation asks about it. The past only truly, lives, when we interrogate it. Think about that for a
02:03second. Every mistake a teacher makes, every triumphant breakthrough, every moment of cruelty or
02:11grace in a classroom. It all just fades into the ether unless we drag it back into the light,
02:16analyze it, and transform those raw, often painful experiences into, flowers, that can beautify the
02:24educational landscape for the students of today. And make no mistake, this landscape is watered with
02:31tears. The prefaces of this book emphasize that the relationship between a teacher and a student is
02:37inherently filled with salty tears. Education is not an assembly line, it is a greenhouse,
02:44and growing human beings is an agonizingly delicate process. The author approaches this with what he
02:51calls a lens of humanity. Offering a searing critique of the education system's flaws while fiercely
02:57maintaining a bright, almost stubborn belief in the future. This brings us to the first major theme the
03:04author tackles, the terrifying decline of civic duty and national identity in modern education.
03:10He tells a story called, Singing the National Anthem, and the contrast he draws is staggering.
03:17He asks us to look back at the resistance era in Vietnam. He describes a time when even illiterate
03:24soldiers, people who had nothing, who were fighting for their very survival, would freeze in absolute.
03:31Solemn respect the moment they heard the national anthem. It was a communal, visceral understanding
03:37of identity and sacrifice. Now, fast forward to a modern anecdote. The author tells of a contemporary
03:45Vietnamese contestant competing in a prestigious music competition in Paris. This contestant had all
03:51the technical skill in the world, the polished voice, the modern training. Yet, they were the only one
03:57who failed. Why? Because they did not know how to sing their own national anthem. Imagine the shame
04:05of that moment. The author uses this stark juxtaposition to sound an alarm. When schools stop
04:12prioritizing the rituals of national pride, when we treat the anthem as just another outdated formality
04:18to be skipped over. We aren't just saving five minutes at a morning assembly. We are severing the
04:24root of who we are. Why does this matter? Because an education system that produces technically
04:31brilliant citizens who have no tether to their own history is producing mercenaries. Not patriots.
04:37But the classroom isn't just a battleground for national identity. It is the front line in the fight
04:43against human cruelty. In a deeply unsettling story titled, The Death of the Ostrich, the author explores
04:51the dark side of childish mischief. We often wave away the bad behavior of children with the phrase,
04:57Oh, kids will be kids. But Nguyen Kwa Deng argues that childish mischief, if left unchecked by a vigilant
05:04teacher, mutates into something he calls, mischievous cruelty. To illustrate this, he tells a true,
05:12heartbreaking story about an ostrich at the Saigon Zoo. A group of students, visiting on a field trip,
05:18thought it would be funny to throw their scarves into the bird's cage. The ostrich, not knowing any
05:24better, swallowed them. It swallowed 26 scarves. The bird died an agonizing death because it could
05:32not digest the fabric. The author draws a straight line from this modern ecological tragedy back to
05:38classic pedagogical texts. Like the old textbook story of a little girl pulling a cat's tail.
05:44He is telling educators, You are the firewall. Children are born with a certain chaotic,
05:51unrefined energy that can easily tip into sadism if they are not taught empathy.
05:56A teacher's job is not just to teach math. It is to actively suppress the inherent cruelty in
06:02unguided human play. And yet, to guide a child, a teacher must possess profound humility,
06:08a trait that is often learned the hard way. The author shares a deeply personal,
06:14self-deprecating story from his days as a young trainee teacher, titled, A Lifelong Memory.
06:20He describes how he noticed a student acting out, and in his youthful arrogance, he assumed he knew
06:26exactly what was going on. He pulled the student aside and decided to play the role of the tough,
06:32omniscient interrogator. He tried to, trap, the boy into admitting that he was a bully at home,
06:39tormenting his younger siblings. He pushed and pushed, and when the student remained stubbornly
06:45silent, the author lost his temper and shouted at him. And then, the student broke down.
06:52Through his tears, the boy revealed that he was the youngest child in his family.
06:56He had no younger siblings to bully. He was the one at the bottom of the pecking order.
07:02The author describes the crushing wave of shame that washed over him.
07:06This is a masterclass in pedagogical humility. It is a warning to every educator, every parent,
07:14every person in a position of authority. You must never assume you know the reality of someone's
07:20inner life without listening first. The interrogation, style of teaching, built on presumption and power,
07:27shatters the fragile trust required for genuine learning.
07:31This extreme vulnerability of the teacher is further explored in what I think is one of
07:35the most fascinating concepts in the book. The burden of example. When you stand at the front
07:42of a room, you are living under a microscope. Your students don't just hear your words,
07:47they absorb your being. In a story called, The Hole in the Teacher's Shirt, the author describes a
07:54classroom where a student is completely zoning out. The student isn't listening to the lesson at all.
08:00Instead, he is fixated on a tiny, frayed hole in the teacher's shirt.
08:05From that one visual flaw, the student's imagination runs wild, projecting an entire narrative about the
08:12teacher's domestic life, his poverty. His struggles, completely derailing the educational process.
08:19And it's not just visual flaws, it's behavioral habits.
08:24In The Backwards Number Six, the author suddenly realizes that he writes the number six from the
08:30bottom up. Where did he get this quirk? He traces it back to his own teacher in 1956.
08:38He absorbed it, internalized it, and then unconsciously passed it on to his niece,
08:43who then passed it on to her son. This is a staggering realization.
08:49A tiny, insignificant motor habit survived for decades, jumping from generation to generation,
08:55simply because a teacher did it at the blackboard. Why does this matter?
09:00Because it proves that pedagogy is practiced as much through appearance, posture,
09:05and unconscious habit as it is through the official curriculum.
09:09The influence of a teacher is indelible, and that is a terrifying and beautiful responsibility.
09:15But of course, teachers do not operate in a vacuum. They operate within institutions,
09:21and institutions can be incredibly absurd.
09:24Nguyen Kwa Dang provides a hilarious and biting critique of historical school management in a story
09:30called, the meditation drum. He takes us back to the 1960s,
09:36a time when pedagogical methods in Vietnam were often steeped in what he calls a,
09:41naively romantic, and overly rigid ideology. Picture this, at a particular school,
09:47the administration implemented a, meditation drum. Every single night, precisely at 9.45 pm,
09:55the drum would sound. At that moment, all the teachers were required to lie in their beds,
10:01perfectly still, and reflect on their contributions to the people and the state.
10:06Can you imagine the absurdity? Mandated, synchronized state-sponsored introspection.
10:12The author uses humor to look back at this infantile stage of school management,
10:17but the underlying message is serious.
10:19You cannot legislate the soul of a teacher. The system has thankfully evolved from forced
10:26reflection to more practical methods. But the story serves as a reminder of how
10:31suffocating institutional overreach can be. This institutional pressure brings us to the
10:37absolute necessity of professional integrity. When the system fails, it is the individual teacher
10:43who must hold the line. The author gives us two contrasting stories here. First, a story of failure,
10:51a teacher named M.S. Thursday has become so lazy, so compromised by the erosion of grading standards,
10:58that she barely looks at the papers she grades. It gets to the point where a student accidentally
11:04submits a geography essay in her literature class, and she gives it the highest grade anyway.
11:10When caught, she absurdly defends it, claiming the student was. Writing literature using geographical
11:16methods. It's comical, but it's a tragic comedy about the death of standards. Contrast this with
11:24the story of the author's own wife, who was working as an exam proctor. During a crucial exam,
11:31a powerful local official tries to cheat. The pressure to look the other way is immense.
11:37This is a person of influence, someone who could make her life very difficult. But she refuses.
11:44She stands her ground and stops him, arguing that if teachers do not uphold the rules,
11:49if they bow to local power, the dignity of the entire teaching profession collapses.
11:55Education becomes a farce. These stories brilliantly highlight the tension between the lazy path of
12:02least resistance, and a courageous defense of the classroom's sanctity. And this sanctity is under
12:08constant threat from what the author identifies as the modern, market-driven, culture. He tells a
12:14story called, The Notebook Cover. That perfectly encapsulates this cultural erosion. Remember when you
12:22were a kid, what was on the back of your notebooks? The author reminisces about old notebooks that had
12:27multiplication tables or grammar rules printed on the back. The physical object of the notebook was an
12:34extension of the learning environment. But today? The author looks at modern notebooks and sees them
12:40plastered with foreign pop stars, actors from shows like Princess Pearl, or characters like the Monkey King.
12:48The commercialization of school supplies has turned a pedagogical tool into a billboard for alien
12:54cultural invasion. He praises a specific school in GoVap that fought back by printing custom covers
13:00featuring the school's own history and the faces of their top. Students, why does this matter?
13:07Because it shows that the battle for the minds of the youth isn't just happening in the lesson plans,
13:12it's happening on the margins, on the covers of the books, in the physical artifacts of their daily lives.
13:20Now, as we move deeper into the author's reflections,
13:24we hit a fascinating and highly controversial defense of something modern education loves to hate,
13:29wrote Learning. We live in an era where we are told that memorization is dead, that kids shouldn't be
13:36parrots, that everything can be googled. But Nguyen Kwa Dang vehemently pushes back.
13:42He argues that memory is the fundamental bedrock of intelligence.
13:47He reminisces about his own generation, people now in their sixties, who can still flawlessly
13:52recite beautiful, complex prose from half a century ago. Like the classic text,
13:59Trois-de-hoc, I go to school. He contrasts this deep, internalized knowledge with modern students who
14:06don't actually study lessons, they just view them on screens. They outsource their memory to computers
14:13and calculators. The author acknowledges that mindless parrot learning is bad. But he insists
14:20that without the basic elements of knowledge physically stored in the brain, intelligence
14:25has no raw material to work with. You cannot synthesize, you cannot create, if your mental
14:31cupboard is bare. This belief in a strong foundation ties directly into the duty of precision.
14:37A teacher must be relentless in correcting foundational errors. The author tells an incredibly moving
14:44story from a school for the disabled. A teacher is working with a deaf student who has just recently
14:50regained a tiny fraction of hearing. The student is trying to say the word, L-Y, meaning glass,
14:57but keeps saying. New York. It would be so easy for the teacher to just say. Close enough. The kid
15:05is
15:05deaf, give him a break. But she doesn't. She works tirelessly, forcing the student to literally bend
15:12a stiff, untrained tongue over and over again until the pronunciation is perfect. The author juxtaposes
15:19this heroic, grueling dedication to precision with modern public figures and highly paid broadcasters
15:26who carelessly mix up their, L, S, and N, S on national. Television. It's a biting critique of a society
15:34that accepts mediocrity at the top, while the true, grueling work of perfection is happening in a quiet
15:41classroom for the disabled. But how does a teacher enforce this precision, this discipline, without
15:47becoming a tyrant? This is the eternal tightrope of pedagogy versus what the author calls, police tactics.
15:56A teacher is a judge, yes, but they must be a judge tempered by grace. The author gives us two
16:02gripping examples of investigations in the classroom. In the first, a watch goes missing.
16:07The teacher decides to use a psychological trick, the classic, magic straw method. He gives everyone
16:15a straw, telling them the thief's straw will magically lengthen. The guilty student, terrified,
16:21bites off a piece of his straw to hide it, thereby revealing himself. It's a clever trick, and it
16:28catches the thief. But the author steps back and asks, is this right? Does using fear and deception,
16:35this, about song, style of detective work, violate the core principles of pedagogy?
16:41This is contrasted with a second, darker story where a teacher choruses a student into confessing
16:47to a theft by threatening to call the police. The terrified student confesses, but later retracts
16:53it, causing a massive legal scandal and a lawsuit against the teacher. The author argues that treating
16:59students like criminal suspects destroys their souls. He invokes Victor Hugo's masterpiece,
17:06Les Miserables, specifically the moment when Bishop Muriel catches Jean Valjean stealing his silver.
17:12Instead of calling the police, the bishop gifts him the silver, buying his soul for God.
17:18The author argues that this kind of profound, pedagogical gesture, an act of radical,
17:25unmerited grace, is infinitely more effective at reforming a human character than coercion and
17:30threats. This idea that a teacher's character is the ultimate teaching tool is explored in the
17:36concept of the teacher as a moral mirror. Students don't just react to the rules,
17:41they react to the human enforcing them. If the teacher lacks culture, the bond dissolves into
17:47violence. Take the story of the school gate conflict. A young girl is actually put on trial
17:53for throwing a stone and hitting a teacher. It sounds like an open-and-shut case of a delinquent
17:59student. But when you look at the context, the truth is far more damning. The teacher had locked the
18:06school gate, physically blocking the girl from entering her own home nearby. When the girl pleaded,
18:12the teacher insulted her family. The girl, humiliated and trapped, through the stone.
18:18The author concludes that if the teacher had simply acted like a decent human being,
18:23like a teacher, in the truest sense of the word, the crime would
18:27never have occurred. The teacher created the delinquent.
18:31Conversely, look at the story of the traffic guard. A young student, volunteering as a traffic
18:37guard, stops a man for a driving violation. As he approaches, he realizes the man is his
18:44own teacher. The student respectfully says,
18:47Hello teacher.
18:49The teacher, overwhelmed by the shame of being caught breaking the law by his own student,
18:54retreats immediately. The title, teacher, carries a heavy moral weight.
19:00You don't just get to wear it in the classroom. You have to earn it in public, in private,
19:05at all times. You are the mirror in which the student sees society. Now, does this mean teachers
19:12must be perfect, infallible beings? Not at all. The author is deeply pragmatic, and he admits that
19:19sometimes, the classroom requires what we might call, white lies. He tells a hilarious and stressful
19:26story about a trainee teacher who is being evaluated by a strict inspector.
19:31The teacher is supposed to be showing the students a fly's leg under a microscope.
19:36But the equipment is terrible, the lighting is bad, and he just cannot get the fly's leg into focus.
19:43The silence in the room is deafening. The inspector is glaring.
19:48Desperate to save the lesson, the teacher looks at a student peering into the blurry lens and asks,
19:53Do you see the black, prickly hair? The student, perhaps sensing the absolute terror radiating from
20:00the teacher, nods and agrees. Yes, it's a lie. It's performative teaching. But the author presents
20:07it with a wink, acknowledging it as a necessary survival tactic and the impossibly high pressure.
20:13Artificial environment of pedagogical inspections. It's a moment of unspoken solidarity between student
20:20and teacher against the bureaucratic machine. But while performative teaching might save a lesson,
20:27performative living will ruin a life. The author makes a profound argument for substance over
20:32appearance in a story about two teachers, Lam and Ben. Both are looking for husbands. Ben,
20:39who is obsessed with appearances, rejects a brilliant engineer because she finds him sloppy and brusque.
20:46He doesn't have the smooth manner she desires. Lam, however, looks deeper.
20:52She marries the engineer because she saw his quiet, relentless dedication while he was studying at
20:58the library. Fast forward a few years, Lam is deeply happy, building a solid life with a man of
21:05substance. And Ben? Ben married a man who was incredibly polished, perfectly well-spoken,
21:12and infinitely gallant. He also turned out to be a total fraud with a fake degree and multiple
21:18secret wives. It's a devastating critique of a society that increasingly values the shiny veneer
21:25over the solid core. True intellectualism, true character, is found in diligence, not in superficial
21:32gallantry. And this superficiality is exactly what the modern, market culture, is injecting into the
21:39minds of the youth. The author is merciless in his critique of how the media and the relentless
21:44drive for profit are eroding the purity of education. He points out absurd media errors.
21:51Like a newspaper that prints a completely nonsensical math equation, calculating that 8 meters times 20
21:57meters equals 26 trees. A student reads this and uses it to mock his own grandfather's meticulous
22:04corrections. When the media normalizes stupidity, the teacher's job becomes infinitely harder.
22:11He talks about market literature, where a student comes to class asking about some trashy,
22:18sensationalist celebrity gossip snippet they read. The teacher has to brutally dismiss it,
22:24telling the student that in a real academic setting, that garbage would earn a zero.
22:29But the most heartbreaking critique of this market-driven era is the epidemic of extra
22:34classes. He shares the lament of a grandfather who says that summer vacation, what used to be the
22:40spring and summer, a time for play for rest, for childhood, has just become summer and summer.
22:49Children are trapped in sweltering classrooms year-round, shuttled from tutor to tutor,
22:53just to keep up in a hyper-competitive, commodified educational rat race. We are stealing their
23:01childhoods to pad their resumes. Yet, even in this cynical modern age, the sentimentality of you
23:08survives, even if it is sometimes a bit performative itself. The author gives us a funny look at the
23:14lube, the traditional student scrapbook culture. He describes a teenage girl sobbing over the
23:21tear-stained pages of a farewell note from a friend. It's incredibly dramatic. But then,
23:27her cynical brother walks by and demonstrates how those, tears, were likely made. By flicking
23:34water off a toothbrush onto the page to fake the emotional stains. It's a cynical joke, but it's
23:40also a perfect metaphor for youth itself, a chaotic mixture of deep, genuine, overwhelming emotion
23:47and highly choreographed, performative drama. Finally, the author grounds all of these observations
23:54in his own painful history, proving that he isn't just an armchair philosopher. He has bled for his
24:01profession. He takes us back to 1966, to a massive scandal surrounding the adult education movement.
24:09At the time, local districts were boasting about their incredible, miraculous achievements in educating
24:15the adult peasantry. But it was a lie. The numbers were cooked. The author, acting as a teacher-poet,
24:23wrote a poem exposing the truth and published it in a newspaper called The People's Teacher.
24:28He called out the fake achievements. And what happened? Was he celebrated as a whistleblower?
24:35No. He was persecuted. He faced severe personal and professional retaliation for daring to speak the
24:42truth. This story anchors the entire book. It reminds us that fighting for the integrity of
24:48education, fighting for truth in a system that often prefers comfortable lies carries a heavy
24:55real-world toll. So, what are we left with? When we step back and look at the vast tapestry when
25:02Kwa Dang has woven in these pages, we see a bidirectional gaze. He looks back to the resistance
25:08era to find lost values of discipline, patriotism, and respect. But he doesn't stay stuck in the past.
25:16He turns that gaze fiercely on the present, critiquing the lazy teachers, the mischievous
25:21students, the overbearing administrators. And the corrosive market economy. Education,
25:29he argues, is the most delicate, dangerous, and beautiful career on earth. It is the business
25:35of growing humans. And it requires a terrifying amount of self-correction, humility, and responsibility.
25:43Every mistake, every tear, every hole in a shirt, every mispronounced word, every moment of grace,
25:50these are the raw materials of our history. And if we are brave enough to ask the right questions,
25:56if we are willing to look our failures in the eye, we can take those thorny, painful memories.
26:02And we can pin them like flowers onto the past. We can make the past live again,
26:07so that the future might bloom. Think about your own teachers today. Think about the habits you
26:13absorbed, the grace you were shown, or the cruelty you endured. It's all still there, living inside you.
26:20It's time we started asking questions about it. Thanks for listening, everyone. Take care of yourselves,
26:28and never stop learning.
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