Evil

I still remember that in the mid-2000s, a provincial leader made a statement that caused a stir in the press: "If we maintain a team of weak and poorly educated teachers for too long, it can be considered a crime against the young generation." At that time, social networks had not yet exploded, and the information infrastructure was sparse in density and slow in speed, not as sensitive and fast as it is now, so the "performance space" of opposing opinions was mainly through newspapers, but it still attracted hundreds of thousands of readers for quite a long time. The concepts of education, official knowledge, and people's knowledge were dissected, but the word "evil" in the word "crime" was haphazardly pulled apart to "assign responsibility" and even criticize mercilessly. Therefore, the "revolution in teacher quality" did not seem as crisp as the initial offensive atmosphere.

Perception is a process, I think if the statement that was considered bold at that time was made at this time, it would have been received by public opinion with a much less confrontational attitude. Teachers are also human beings, teaching is also a profession. To work in a profession, one must learn the profession, practice the profession, and to make a living from it, one must be good at it. However, unlike the rest, the teaching profession carries a special social responsibility. “If the engineer is happy to see the bridge he has just built, the farmer smiles at the rice field he has just planted, then the teacher is happy to see the students growing up and maturing” (Golobolin). Thinking back to the famous saying, we see that they are a little similar but also a little different: the mistakes of engineers can damage bridges, the mistakes of farmers can cause rice fields to fail… But the mistakes of teachers certainly cause the loss of opportunities for an entire generation.

Using the word “crime” for “maintaining a team of weak and poor teachers” is harsh or not, but if we did not use that word, that viewpoint, that determined attitude, there would not have been a story for us to remember that incident with such regretful feelings as today. Nearly 15 years have passed, most of the girls and boys who were students of that “team of weak and poor teachers” back then must have grown up now. The “10+1” level teachers who were worried back then must have also completed their mission of sowing knowledge and returning to enjoy the countryside with simple retirement books. So has the “evil” from those who hold the chalk been completely liberated? It is heartbreaking to say, not yet! The incident of hundreds of university students preparing to “return home” after cheating on their grades has once again sounded the alarm. Education is still full of difficult problems. Perhaps the existence of a team of weak and poor teachers is not a crime, but if there is a group of teachers who are degenerate and corrupt, it is certainly not a… good crime. Education deserves to be promoted, but morality cannot be treated unfairly. The decline of education is as worrying as the decline of morality is terrifying. Imagine that, if there was a device to warn of the level of morality like a forest fire, would that chart often display the red color of “extremely dangerous level”? Hopefully not, but I fear that there is! Morality, we really need an alarm to limit incidents, at least limit the terrifying incidents! The most horrifying example is probably Principal Sam Duc Xuong a few years ago. He had long, continuous relationships with many “underage lovers” who were not his children’s age but his grandchildren’s age. Not only outsiders but also students became sex slaves. He also brokered prostitution, and not only brokered prostitution, he also brokered prostitution of minors! Not only did he take his students to motels to satisfy his animalistic desires, this teacher also did it right in his office. His cruelty, when disguised under the guise of a pedagogical model, was limitless. Yet the "teacher" demanded to... take off his pants in court to prove his innocence. Of course, in the end, the "teacher" had to tearfully admit his guilt. The 10-year sentence for a perverted, depraved cultist was still not as heavy as the stain that Xuong had smeared on the teacher's image. Another shocking incident, on December 15, 2018, the investigation agency - Thanh Son District Police issued a Decision to prosecute the accused and an order to temporarily detainDinh Bang My- Principal of Thanh Son Secondary School for Ethnic Minorities Boarding for the crimemolested dozens of male studentsThe irony is that not long before, Dinh Bang My was a speaker at a presentation on preventing child sexual abuse. Speechless.

The length of an article cannot list all the thousands of cases related to ethics that seem to appear more and more frequently, the severity is more and more terrible, and the violations are more and more blatantly challenging, so public opinion is also more and more indignant. Rinsing the mouth with soap, wiping chairs with the tongue, kneeling in the village - sticking the butt up in the air... The most bizarre punishments that we have heard somewhere in the Middle Ages are now being skillfully applied by many "mothers of children at school" under the poetic green leaves. There were times when the case of dipping children's heads in a bucket of water had not yet been resolved, but the case of forcing students to drink water to wash the blackboard was on the floor. The case of a teacher in Quang Binh directing a student to reach the "target" of 231 slaps, but the handprints were not gone, then the teacher in Hanoi continued to slap "additionally" 50 slaps. In just the past month alone, a series of scandals related to teachers' ethical behavior have appeared. A homeroom teacher of a specialized school texted a 10th grade female student to flirt; a primary school teacher groped a group of students... then a female teacher took a male student under 16 years old to a motel to "ask to rent a room". While all three incidents were still being mixed together and not yet resolved, people discovered that hundreds of preschool students in Bac Ninh were infected with tapeworms because of eating dirty meat. People put tapeworm-infected meat in preschool students' meals, not once but many times, not accidentally but intentionally, not heartlessly but inhumanely. The students' families discovered it, reminded them but they still stubbornly refused, they blatantly violated right under the slogan "All for dear students". The image of pork pieces crawling with tapeworms is haunting and makes you shudder. How cruel. When asked, the principal answered bluntly, "I have resigned, I will not answer anyone anymore". Oh my, a few days before that, "she" and her colleagues were still leading the children to sing the song“Standing by the river, looking at the stork/ With long strides, the stork goes groping/ Grabs something to eat in a hurry/ Drinks water, then green fruit/ Eats greedily, so when I go home at night/ My stomach aches and I groan for 3 days and nights/ Hey hey... that stork is really despicable”.A stork that eats unripe fruit and gets a stomachache is "really deplorable", so what is the point of a teacher who closes her eyes and lets pork infected with tapeworms be smuggled into her own immature students, shocking the whole society?

Evil, perhaps we can completely use this word without fear of being accused of… evil speech. If the case of colluding to smuggle dirty meat into schools is not a nightmare but a terrifying act of one side being a devil and the other side being a villain, then those who create evil karma will pay the price. I am afraid that if this worm is expelled with a drastic disciplinary decision, another worm will quietly sneak in. If there is no moral revolution, if we continue to arrange each other according to the model of “Evil begets evil”, then those worms in the name of education will transform into other types of worms. Maybe even become good worms!