What place for creativity and human values?

(Baonghean) - Every society has its own values ​​and standards to measure individuals in the community. In the old feudal society, Confucianism and the Sages' teachings were especially respected, along with a system of moral principles such as the king-subject relationship, the teacher-student relationship, the husband-wife relationship, the father-son relationship, and the education system was established to train people towards the ideals, models, and needs of society. This principle still holds true today. However, the expansion and monopoly of material values ​​in modern thought raises a big question about today's education system. Are we gradually replacing a comprehensive education with a stereotyped educational chain that focuses on economic benefits, disregarding creativity and human values?

The most obvious manifestation of the distorted education system is the distinction between major and minor subjects. Obviously, major subjects here are natural sciences such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, social sciences such as literature, history, geography are considered less important, and physical education, music, and art are classified as "minor subjects". Why is there such a distinction? Most students, parents, and teachers believe (and they are completely right) that studying natural sciences well is the surest guarantee for success in society. This has invisibly created an easy path that everyone wants to take: many young people who love and have a tendency to develop artistic talents, end up choosing the safe solution of "popular" subjects and careers, instead of daring to live true to their passion. After all, we cannot entirely blame them for their passivity and weakness, because if society gave social sciences and arts an equal place with natural sciences, we would be free to do what corresponds to our abilities and interests without being influenced by the weight of social prejudice and the worries about food, clothing, rice, and money.

Describing people trained by today's education, we can imagine a person with a very big head, but very small limbs, mouth and heart. The head is big because it is full of formulas, definitions, because it is only used to calculating, thinking about gains and losses, advantages and disadvantages. The limbs are small, the mouth is small because of great inertia, not willing to think innovatively, not daring to do, not daring to speak because of fear of making mistakes, fear of being different from everyone, fear of everything related to creativity and innovation. But nothing is more dangerous than a small heart, small because the rigid education system has cut off the part reserved for emotions and human values.

We strongly condemn and criticize Chinese goods. Why is that? Isn't it because the mass production method does not pay attention to the quality and longevity of the product as well as the long-term impact on the health of consumers, because Chinese products only meet a small need of aesthetics and low price? Similarly, when we train our children with an unbalanced education system and program, focusing on what is temporarily considered necessary and sufficient to bring economic benefits to society, are we training a generation that is not capable of mastering the future but a labor force serving short-term economic purposes, pre-programmed machines, no better than a Chinese product? This development path is not only uneconomic in the long term, but also unscientific for intellectual development and inhumane for the desire to live truly, to live up to each person's ability. Looking at the picture of society today and tomorrow, it is worrying that we are all the same, developing in a distorted and one-sided way. Once diversity and difference are eliminated, society will not be able to progress, people will gradually lose their "human" side and become machines, tools to serve money.

It is ridiculous that our education system follows the above path to develop the economy, while in some developed countries such as France, the US or Japan, social sciences and arts are highly valued without affecting their economic development. We often have prejudices against Western consumer society, but in fact, we know that they highly value human values ​​and freedom to develop themselves. They are the pioneers in training social sciences and arts, as well as the rate of students studying social sciences abroad is very high (accounting for 54% in the most prestigious universities in Belgium, 38% in Japan). These numbers, compared with the poor rate of social science students in Vietnam (4.43%), are they worth our consideration?!

After ten or twenty years, when the needs of society change, how will the people trained by today's education system be? Spending money and time to retrain human resources will be a costly and effective solution, but it is not certain that it will be high. In the end, the benefits are not much, but the consequences are countless. The biggest danger is coming very close before our eyes: the lack of social knowledge leads to an indifferent lifestyle, moral degradation and the decline of humanistic values, traditions and national pride in the concept of today's young generation. The alarm bell has already sounded, who knows when we will wake up?

Hai Trieu (Mail from Paris)