Vietnamese Education Under Colonial Rule: The Red Myth and the Black Myth (Giáo dục Việt Nam dưới thời thuộc địa: Huyền thoại đỏ và huyền thoại đen) by Dr. Nguyễn Thụy Phương is an important scholarly study on the history of education in Vietnam under French colonial rule, while also serving as an attempt to dismantle long-standing assumptions surrounding the legacy of colonial education. Published in 2020 by Nhà xuất bản Hà Nội in collaboration with Omega Plus Books, the book challenges polarized interpretations of French colonial education in Vietnam, whether viewed as a “civilizing mission” bestowed by colonialism or as a purely oppressive instrument of domination. Instead, the author argues that both perspectives have themselves become mythologized. In this sense, the notions of the “red myth” and the “black myth” are not merely rhetorical devices, but methodological statements at the heart of the book.

Here, the “red myth” refers to the highly critical anti-colonial interpretation that saw the colonial education system solely as a tool of imperial control. In contrast, the “black myth” refers to the nostalgic idealization of French education as a wholly superior and modernizing force, often associated with romanticized memories of the era of Western-style learning. Nguyễn Thụy Phương argues that both approaches oversimplify a far more complex historical reality.

One of the book’s defining strengths lies in the fact that it does not approach colonial education merely as an administrative policy, but as a site of encounter between colonial power, Confucian traditions, aspirations toward modernization, and Vietnamese strategies of adaptation. This perspective allows the study to move beyond simplistic debates over whether colonial education was “good” or “bad,” instead presenting it as a layered and internally contradictory historical phenomenon.

The historical context established by the book is especially significant. Before the French introduced modern schools, Vietnam already possessed a long-standing Confucian examination system rooted in scholarly traditions. By the late nineteenth century, however, this educational model was increasingly unable to respond to global transformations in military power, economics, and knowledge systems. When the French established schools in Indochina, they were not building education upon an empty landscape, but within a society already deeply shaped by a strong culture of learning and scholarly advancement. This existing educational ethos became one of the foundations that enabled the colonial school system to function in Vietnam.

Nguyễn Thụy Phương demonstrates that colonial education in Indochina was, in fact, among the most systematically organized educational systems within the French colonial empire. Yet its goals were inherently contradictory. On one hand, the colonial administration needed to train clerks, civil servants, and technical personnel to sustain the machinery of governance. On the other hand, it feared that expanding education too broadly would produce a class of educated Vietnamese intellectuals capable of political resistance. As a result, the system simultaneously created opportunities while deliberately limiting social mobility for colonized subjects.

The book places particular emphasis on the emergence of the Western-educated Vietnamese intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. Educated within the French colonial framework, these intellectuals later became major forces behind social reform, modernization movements, journalism, modern literature, and eventually nationalist struggles. This reveals one of the central paradoxes of colonial history: the very educational system established to support colonial rule also helped produce the subjects who would later challenge it.

Another important contribution of the study is its extensive use of French-language archival materials and historical documents to reconstruct the concrete realities of colonial education, from curricula and teacher training policies to Franco-Vietnamese schools, examinations, and strategies of educational stratification. Rather than remaining at the level of ideological judgment, the book closely examines the practical structures and mechanisms through which the educational system operates.

Nguyễn Thụy Phương also argues that the influence of colonial education did not end in 1945. Many institutional structures, administrative models, concepts of certification, educational hierarchies, and even broader ideas about academic achievement as a pathway to social advancement continued long after the colonial regime itself disappeared. This makes the legacy of French colonial education in Vietnam not only a historical issue, but one deeply connected to the present.

From an academic perspective, the book is especially notable for its postcolonial approach, which seeks to move beyond simplistic binaries between “colonizer” and “anti-colonial resistance.” Rather than asking whether colonial education was beneficial or harmful, the author asks more difficult and productive questions: how exactly did the system function, what kinds of social transformations did it produce, and why has collective memory about it become divided into such sharply opposing narratives?

Ultimately, Vietnamese Education Under Colonial Rule: The Red Myth and the Black Myth is not simply a book about the history of education. It is also a study of historical memory, modernization, the politics of knowledge, and the ways Vietnamese society entered modernity through a system that was at once coercive and transformative. For this reason, the book holds particular value for readers interested in modern Vietnamese history, postcolonial studies, intellectual history, and the formation of modern Vietnamese society.