Literature and Soul Engineering

I was born and brought up in a beautiful village surrounded by bamboo ranges, paddy fields, lakes, rivers and mountains in the outskirt of Hanoi. My childhood was filled with poems, fairy tales and afternoons flying kites with friends in the meadows. Nature or motherland became part of my life, and I tend to love it more through every page of school text books. My teacher was a slim woman with a very sweet voice. My heart was shaken every time she read a poem to my class. I can feel and learn from the poems she read that a woman bailing out water in the paddy field in a night of full moon is actually playing with the moonlight, that father’s love is bigger than mountains and mother’s care is as gentle as water running in the streams, and that in life we need to have a heart gone with the wind.

My classmates and I developed our knowledge of the world and values primarily from dialogues of relationships through language lessons in class, extra-curriculum activities at school, and childhood games in the meadow. We became close friends and have been traveling on the same journey of life with all the values we own and share together. Every time there is a gathering among us, dozens of stories of our childhood time are retold, and we never forget to mention our teacher and her beautiful poems. We appreciate and cherish all the values such as love, care and forgiveness that we developed since a child. We feel a pain deeply inside to share the same observation that our children today seem to be shallow in love for nature, people, relationships, family, and motherland. They are more attracted to material life and less passionate about relationships. They are more addicted to technological products and less engaged in reading. They are losing deep understanding and affection for the world created by the language of literature.

This is, from my point of view, partially because of the changes in school curriculum today. To meet the demand of an ever-changing and competitive global economy, schools keep changing curricula to prepare students for a bright future of career and for the strength of a nation. Curricula become work-oriented and nation-oriented, which means they are committed to preparing students for occupational knowledge and skills and for a strong national economy. Individuals’ personal development seems to be neglected. Less curriculum content and approach are dedicated to engineering the souls. Values are taught, not constructed. Students being able to think right and doing the right things as named in curriculum is the aim of moral education. The true motive for students to do the right things and their feeling following this is never a school curriculum’s concern.

The implication is that change is not always positive. No matter how much change is needed for the sake of a nation, the school of old days and the school today should always be the second home to our children where children are given opportunities to construct their values, discover their feelings, and attain their happiness.

I was trained to be a language teacher and have been working as a language teacher for 13 years in Vietnam and Singapore. To me, language is not just what I teach, but more importantly how I am going to teach. Teaching, from my point of view, is touching students’ heart, mind and soul partially by the language. Accordingly, my 13-year-experience as a teacher of English and Vietnamese languages has been dedicated to creating considerable changes in my students in term of knowledge extension, knowledge application, behavior, and soul enrichment. Considerable positive feedbacks from students on the quality of course materials, teaching approach, and teacher’s passion have driven me to answering this question – How important is the language in creating these changes? And how important is literature as artistic language in shaping one’s concepts of life and happiness?