Abstract

We are now living in an age of fully competitive and changing globalization. During this change process, it is essential to deeply acknowledge the nature and effects of this process to help us minimizing risks. Meanwhile, it is important to develop a sustainable economy and to absorb the quintessence of human culture, and at the same time, to prevent the risks of social ethic deterioration. In such context, education of ethics and values for students has become more and more exigent and should focus on practical contents.

1. Introduction

We are living in a world of fully competitive and dynamic globalization. This globalization process strongly increases interaction and interdependence between all countries in different fields of social life, foremost and mainly in the field of economics, and afterwards in other fields of politics, culture, and education etc., creating changes and common relationships all around the globe. It has become an objective trend, affecting all aspects of human life, and at the same time, containing multiple conflicts, which include both positive and negative sides as well as both co-operation and competition. Under an economic angle, globalization is mostly used to indicate commercial effects in general and liberalization of trade or “free trade” in particular. Under this same angle, it is only seen that capital flow on a global scale has drawn flows of trade, technique, technology, information, and culture.

However, there are potential challenges, which can even become risks, in this fully competitive and dynamic globalization process, especially for developing countries because these countries are dominated and “directed” by developed capitalist countries and inter-country capitalist economic corporations. According to Suzanne Berger in Globalization and Politics, marketing activities and American culture export weakened national values and traditions ¹. Nguyen Van Huyen also realized that globalization could wrongfully change many values from our way of life that followed noble and fine humanistic ideal cultivated by our ancestors after thousands of years, and therefore deteriorated social values ². With the same point of view, Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen, in her article “Globalization and the risk of ethic and lifestyle deterioration to Vietnamese people at present”, warned about the risks of globalization to ethical lifestyle of Vietnamese people ³.

In Vietnam, there has been a lot of research about globalization in general, but there has not been a lot of systematic research about the impact of globalization on ethic education for students in particular. There are several typical works including: Pham Van Duc (2006), Globalization and its impact on Vietnam ⁴; Le Ngoc Tra (2009), Some issues of Vietnam education in globalization context ⁷; Tran Le Bao (2010), Dialogue between cultures in the trend of globalization ⁸; Phan Thanh Long (2015), Multi-cultural education in the context of integration and globalization ⁹…

During this fully dynamic process, it is essential and has important meaning to do research about opportunities and risks in general and in regards to ethic education for students in particular. Students represent a special social class with certain culture levels. They are sensitive and active in acquiring new knowledge and affirming new values, but their development is not complete. There are limitations of their young age, and they can be easily affected by negative aspects of globalization, causing ethical and lifestyle deterioration. Therefore, on the basis of analyzing some impacts of globalization on Vietnamese social ethics in general, this article proposes some ethic education contents for students at present.

2. Content

Globalization brings variety and helps us to understand better about the world and about values that were created in the past and are being created at present by human. The explosion of information resources, tourism development, and easier approach to global educational and cultural services will take part in overcoming historic limitations of Vietnam, a country from an agricultural origin. Traditional values will be re-examined during selective inheritance, while things that became outdated will be filtered out and replaced by acquiring and developing progressive values. As globalization is more and more robust, this process will be more and more motivated. The young generation, especially students, is the subject that can most quickly acquire values and generate creations and changes.

Globalization creates opportunities for approaching new values, while individual role will be specially focused on and relatively enhanced. Globalization will bring Vietnam human resources, especially the young generation, many job opportunities with high salary within the country as well as in foreign countries, depending on each individual’s capability. Through participating in international labor market, global communication standards will be acquired, helping us to reduce the gap between national and international characteristics. Culture, art, and entertainment activities acquired from outside the country will contribute to make our culture in general and spiritual life in particular becoming more diversified and enriched. It will be possible for the young generation in general and students in particular to live in an exciting cultural environment that is highly intellectual and aesthetic and brought forward by modern technologies. This is a good condition for optimal development of cognition, evaluation, consciousness, and emotion of human based on modern society criteria, providing opportunity for Vietnamese people to develop their spirit and physique, intelligence and emotion.

For a country originally carried many agricultural culture imprints like Vietnam, the way of life and work with small farmers’ style will be reformed and gradually replaced by industrial way of life and international lifestyle atmosphere. People will be drawn into the life rhythm of market economy, knowledge economy, and science and technology. Young generation, especially students, will likely be drawn into continuously increasing speed of knowledge. Modern industrial style of labor and work will generate significant changes in lifestyle of Vietnamese, where there will be no space for procrastination and dependency but instead it is required to be self-motivated, sensitive, and to seize opportunities.

Traditional communication style of Vietnamese will be quickly transformed according to the direction of internalization. In globalization, communication is not only limited to human behavior, but also related to all popular activity fields of people. Communication accomodates needs of economy, politic, society, and culture, and especially accomodates emotion relationships, wills, understanding, and mutual support for improvement. The concept “The world is flat” of globalization will step by step broaden Vietnamese’s point of view about communication. Scientific, technical, and technology means will enhance globalization and become effective means of exchanging and assimilating values between people to people in an open global environment.

Globalization brings Western way of life to our country, and can unnoticeably motivate practical way of life, with appreciation of purely material and economic values. It is harming the social ethics when people run after practical and egoistic way of life. In many cases, it was because of money that family values and relationships between teachers and students, between congrats and colleagues, are trampled on. Practical and egoistic way of life is leading to emotionless and careless altitude for surrounding people, weakening connections between individuals and the community.

In a society like Vietnam where the economy is still poor, consumptive way of life will easily lead to misconceptions in evaluating human values. “Foreign preference” way of life will become way of thinking and way of life for some parts of the society, and this will lead to the phenomenon of running after material accommodations in various ways, including unhealthy and illegal ways. This is one of the causes that resulted in social evils including: drugs, prostitution, and debauchery etc. Unhealthy lifestyle will easily lead to the thought of disregarding fine habits and customs, even despising human dignity, and considering that everything can be come goods. This effect will lead to distortion and destruction of ethical standards, social aesthetics, good traditional spiritual states of our nation, and especially life ideal of each individual.

“Pollution” of cultural environment caused by the Internet has become more and more alarming. The phenomenon of addicting to online game and the Internet and living in a virtual world instead of the real world etc. led to conducts that disregarded ethical standards and legal laws to satisfy “self-ego”. We cannot deny the significant benefits that a global network has been bringing in the past, the present, and the future. However, it is impossible for us not to realize that the Internet is also the shortest and quickest path to take part in making ethics and way of life become unordered and deteriorated. Meanwhile, the government’s management in this area still remains week and inappropriate. A lot of movies, news, and printed materials, which are violent and inappropriate with our national culture and even contradictory to national benefits, penetrated from the internet.

In the East, from a very early time, Kong Qiu (551-479 BC) specially valued ethic education. Despite of his great ambition for politics, his path was towards ethic education, with high evaluation of humaneness, righteousness, loyalty, and filial piety (rule of virtue). After eliminating limitations, “self-cultivation” was the ideology throughout his education philosophy.

In the West, philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC) believed that ethics and knowledge defined each other, which meant that one’s ethics were due to his knowledge and that human became ethical after having knowledge.

Aristotle (384 -322 BC) believed that the God did not enforce to have completely ethical citizens, but it was the discovery of needs on earth that created a complete human in ethical relationships.

Petxtalodi (1746 - 1827), one of the representative educators of XIX century, highly evaluated the role of ethic education. He believed that the central role of education was ethic education for children, with the love for human as the most general basis. This love originated from the family, firstly with love for parents and siblings first, and secondly, for friends and everyone in the society.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), the founder of scientific socialism, believed that: comprehensively developed human was the goal of the socialism education. A comprehensively developed human was a human who fully developed and optimized his/her potential in all areas of ethics, intellectual, physical, emotion, perception, efficiency, and aesthetics, with the capability to experience all surrounding nature and social phenomenon

Inheriting traditions from our ancestors, our Socialist Party, with President Ho Chi Minh as the leader, always pays attention to ethic education for the youth because, as the President often said, “The youth is the future owner of our nation. In fact, it largely depends upon the youth that our nation can be prosperous or poor, weak or strong”, while students account for a very large percentage.

Entering into an innovative era, our Communist Party continues to affirm the role and importance of education and training. Meanwhile, the Party specially values cultivation of ethics and development of personality for pupils and students, guiding them to associate their self-development and career development with the future of our community and nation, and cultivating them with competencies, qualities, and way of life of modern Vietnamese young generation.

As it is understood, ethic education is the process that an education subject impacts an education object with purpose, system, and plan, in order to assist the education object to build consciousness, emotion, belief, ethical habits and conducts that are appropriate with social requirements.

Ethic education not only enhances ethical perception level, but also preserves ethical values and standards established from past generations. It also takes part in creating new ethical values and building new ethical viewpoints and qualities, as well as active cognition for each education object. Concurrently, ethic education also actively contributes to overcoming obsolete ethical viewpoints, deviation of personal values from standards, fighting against un-ethical phenomenon that is poisoning the social environment, and establishing protection mechanisms against devaluation of ethical and cultural values in each individual’s personality.

* Ethic education must be oriented to tradition and modern values

Knowledge society and economy set higher and newer requirements for cultivating humane ethics. In knowledge economy, it is the most focused and valued activity to generate knowledge and utilize knowledge to create values. The human society’s production force gradually depends mainly on human intellectual capacity. On the other hand, the information revolution also takes part in changing human’s mind to keep up with the new era. While information technology penetrates into economic fields to create advanced technologies for these fields, it also supports and motivates the process of thinking innovation, and change of viewpoints and ways of approach. It requires human to innovate ways of thinking, doing, adapting, and taking ownership of self-development as well as society development. This, on one hand, continues to free human of labor, and requires connection, collaboration, improvisation, creation, and exchange with international environment to reach a new level of density and intensity. On the other hand, it also brings new requirements for human in the areas of ethical values, emotion, good wills, responsibility, and voluntary self-consciousness.

However, knowledge economy can easily lead people to blindly pursue rational means, forgetting its purpose. In current education for example, despite of abundant education contents, it seems that the goals of human education and ethical personality education have not been reached with expected results. During the process of assimilating with Western culture, a part of young people has limited knowledge about traditional culture. They mostly run after fame and money, and rarely care about spiritual elements and values, which make them gradually, lose empathy, compassion, and shame. Nowadays, there are more and more students who are not obedient to rules, who are indulgent, rebellious, careless in their studies, and even violate the laws. On the other hand, because of the society’s spontaneous tendency to extremely value individual rights and freedom, students think that they have freedom right, and no one can criticize or administer them. This extreme freedom results in deteriorating signs of ethical standards in social relationships between students and teacher, parents and children etc., where students lack respect for teachers, and children are unfilially and disrespectful to their parents and grandparents. The schools sometimes only administer areas related to knowledge and skills, with little attention on training people in disciplines and dignity. The risks that a part of the youth and students, at present, mistake values and disregard rules and standards have become a painful problem for parents, educators, and education administrators.

In this context, knowledge society and knowledge economy really need humane spirits and value ideal. Despite lack of democratic and scientific factors in traditional ideology in relative comparison with modernization, it will be one-sided if only democracy and science are used to judge national culture resources. In theory about tradition, there is something about value and orientation related to ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy. In additionally, there are notions about human’s self-development, human using rationality to face failures, appreciating the meaning of happiness and success, as well as cultivating personality, spiritual values, and appreciating life. We can develop Vietnamese people in cultural capability, personal experience with others, as well as the ability to scope with adversity, and make people gain thorough view of humane and spiritual values and personality cultivation. These are not only contradicting to democracy and science, but also are supporting development of democracy and science. These are very suitable with developing new and modern Vietnamese people who still carry in-depth traditional culture, which Japanese, Korean, and Singaporean have been very successful at. In Singapore, since the eightieth years of XX centuries, it started with the trend of coming back to Confucianism ethical tradition and content modification of Confucianism ethic values (such as Loyalty, Filial piety, Manners, and Righteousness etc.) to become the nucleus content in ethic education at schools. The Singapore government called it “Confucianism customization of Singapore” [ ¹⁰; 103]. It is additionally said here, that President Ho Chi Minh was also very focused on innovating substances of Confucianism ethic values for ethic education. His education about Loyalty, Filial Piety, Diligence, Frugality, Modesty, and Honesty etc. more or less originated from Confucianism.

* Ethic education targeting global citizen values

In a globalization economy, it is impossible for non-existence of national culture and inheritance and creation of national culture that create new achievements for the nation and human. In the globalization context, it is important to promote traditional culture in contribution to intergration development. Firstly, negative effects of remaining Confucianism cultural tradition must be overcome and eliminated. If we cannot participate with a new and modern posture in the globalization process, it will create a bad image of ourselves, having conducts inappropriate with general international rules and standards, and missing appropriate appearance of Vietnamese people during the process of building a modern society. Feudal patriarchal habits, social class opinion, dependent habit, servant habit, disrespectful habit for laws, conservative mentality, and lack of independence etc. are hindering development and are toxins on the body of modern Vietnamese citizens. It is needed to rely on establishment and development of new standards and education from schools and the whole society to eliminate these negative aspects (globalization will also be helpful to eliminate these negative aspects). These must be gradually overcome in economic, politic, and cultural fields.

It is necessary that the education content for our citizens and young generation, for them to experience themselves during work and daily life, is considered to include cultural quintessences from Vietnam Confucianism, with deeply humane spirit, personality development, progressive spirit, strong responsibility, consistency, continuous improvement, patriotism and love for people (people as the foundation), respect for the elder and yield to the younger, altruistic and gracious spirit in behavior, righteousness and generosity, emphasis on harmony with others and ethic self-cultivation, establishment of dignity and appropriate conducts, and unification between thought and action etc. In order to enhance promotion of traditional values, it is necessary to assimilate and introduce advantages of our cultural tradition during the globalization process to allow the world to understand and empathize with our culture. We do not only assimilate our culture but also transfer our culture. Our self-confidence will be generated when our national distinctive cultural tradition is developed and widely introduced around the world. The current problem is how to make traditional quintessence become knowledge and intellectual resources that penetrate into education, help young people to have broad understanding about national culture content, and motivate them to turn themselves into culture messengers who are confident with conversation and exchange with Western cultures, in assimilation with Vietnamese traditional culture.

During the process of education innovation, we must correct previous mistakes from our cultural tradition. We should criticize things that have not been thoroughly criticized and inherit and develop things that have not been inherited and developed. And in turn, we must improve the weakness of historical awareness among young generations, especially when there are some groups of students who have a superficial understanding about the nation’s history. There are many reasons for this, including some from education and teaching the history subject. Some people, including students, are not interested in studying, exploring or researching the nation’s history. For them, so many great historical events are far away and therefore, they have no meaning for them at all. This results in the fact that a part of us do not respect great heroes of the nation as well as famous thinkers, culturists and educators in our own history. Looking to the United States, we see that they always treasure their history of over 300 years. The United States has used a variety of ways and means to educate young people to have good understanding about their short history. We need to act drastically as they do. We should comprehensively change the objective, the content, the method, the form of history teaching, of which, besides educating values of the times, values of the world, it is also important to improve the history education with the values and pride of our own nation.

Firstly, it is education of patriotism and national conciousness. Education of patriotism and national conciousness is a factor for evaluation of ethical value scale of Vietnamese. Patriotism education helps students to develop the right perception, and therefore results in future practical actions, and helps them to have the right direction for their future works. During the war, we sacrified a lot, including both human and material resources, but during peaceful country development, we let our guard down and became neglectful and unvigilant, especially when hostile forces continously kept opposing the government with a lot of sophisticated maneuvers.

Patriotism education must go along with education of tradition and national cultural characteristics, teaching students appropriate ways of behavior when confronting issues from the society and current situation, and helping them to develop the ability to self-control their own actions and to fight against deviated expression in thinking. Globalization, together with the current open market and changes in international life, are significantly affecting all aspects of domestic life. On one hand, this effect is making each person become more pro-active, sensitive, and more quickly adaptive to complicated fluctuations of modern society. On the other hand, it also significantly affects emotions and national consciousness for a part of students. Any change, even big or small, in the daily political-economic life, will quickly and significantly affect the student class. Therefore, with the sensitivity of students, if they are not properly oriented, they can be easily provoked and manipulated, causing spontaneous actions that can result in unpredictable consequences.

Education of patriotism and national pride spirit also inspires students to build more trust in the leadership of our Communist Party and management of our Government during current innovation of our country. It also help students to have more faith and motivation to do their best in studying and self-training to better serve our country and people in the future.

Education of filial piety for parents. Filial piety for parents is an expression of respect, love, and willingness to provide for parents. With their responsibility and duty, children must appreciate their parent’s giving birth and nurturing them. This is the most basic ethical qualify of being a child and being a human.

From the past to present, Vietnamese tradition has always valued “filial piety”. In combination with influence of Confucianism from the old times, Vietnamese has considered “filial piety” as the basic of human ethics. All human virtues originate from cultivation and behavior within the family. Therefore, filial piety must start from respect for family members, including grandparents and parents, and afterwards continue with good behavior to surrounding people. For any human life, it all starts with the relationship between family members, firstly with parents. If one person is not aware of filial piety for his parents, how he can effectively deal with relationships with siblings, friends, teachers, colleagues, teams, community, and his nation.

In order to well conducting “filial piety”, it is mandatory to carry out “respect”. Zeng Zi used to say that: There are three levels of filial piety. The best is to gain respect for one’s parents, the second is to not tarnish the parents’ names, and the lowest level is merely providing for them (The Book of Rites). In the old times, “filial piety” was emphasized, firstly with respect to parents. Naturally, the condition of providing for parents depended on economic conditions, whether rich or poor. However, the most important factor was the child’s thought and his respectful and loving feelings for parents. It was not enough to only “provide for” parents. It was also said in the “Book of Rites” that if a child with filial piety had deep feelings, he would have harmony, harmony would certainly bring joy, and joy would certainly bring empathy. An important aspect of filial piety was emphasis that filial piety must come from the love for parents deep inside the child’s heart and mind.

In current Vietnamese society context, we can see that the deep humane meaning praised by traditional filial piety ideology still keeps its positive value and reason, worthy for us to inherit and add new meanings for it to become a necessary ethical quality for Vietnamese young generation to cultivate and follow.

Since our country foundation, we have inherited and further developed the traditional virtue “filial piety to parents”. In “Marriage and family laws”, it is mentioned that children have the responsibility to provide for parents. Public social welfare also built and developed behavior standards such as prioritizing and respecting elders, and creating healthy and good social ethic environment.

Filial piety for parents is the most basic ethical qulity of being a human. It is very difficult to imagine that a person, who is not aware of filiat piety for parents, can become a person who loves his country and people. However, there were some phenomenon where a part of young people, after graduating and being sucessfully in their career, forgot their parents’ nurture and education, and despised their parents’ countryside laborious origin and low cultural level. There were even some unfilial and conscienceless children, who deceived their parents of all money, houses, and lands, and then turned around and took their parents to nursing institutes, or even got rid of parents to the road. Those situations raised an issue, that schools, from secondary to universities, must value education of filial piety for parents. In general, although young people might not have the capability to provide for their parents yet, they need to build a life outlook of love and filial piety for parents. They actions must show care, attention, respect, and love for parents.

Diligence, love of working, and frugality are important personalities essential for each person. Diligence is the effort of laboring or working, without refusing the work despite of hardship, and effort of creating properties. Frugality is being aware of appreciation for labor results. Contradictory to diligence and frugality is laziness and lavishness.

Diligence and frugality were concluded by our ancestors from their long practical life, and became part of typical and basic traditions of Vietnam nation. In our treasure of folk songs and proverbs, there are many conclusions about diligence such as “No pain, no gain” or “The society prefers properties and works/No one prefers non-working people”. If in the community, there were lazy people, ancient people would criticize to awake them: “Women who do not know how to raise pigs are lazy women/Men who do not know how to tie bamboo strings are spoilt men”. Talking about frugality, our ancestors concluded as follows: “When harvest is good, do not abandon corn and potatoes/When harvest is bad, what to have for eating?” In daily life, they never “lived from day to day” or “lived beyond one’s means” and always remembered to be careful, “cut your coat according to your cloth”, “Accumulate crops in case of being hungry, accumulate clothes in case of being cold”. Parsimony does not mean stinginess, but rather, means spending enough to last a long time, “a penny saved is a penny gained”. It can be affirmed that at any period of time, from regular shabby people to people who are wealthy, high-ranking, and well-dressed etc., no one disagrees that frugality is a virtue, one of deciding factor to secure family economy, and an effective mean to manage the country.

Looking back at our national history for thousands of years, it has been considered a popular rule that “It is good for the country to be frugal, it is destructive for the country to be lavish”.

It can be said that frugality is a popular method that is essential for the existance and development of each individual, family, community, nation and country. It is because of diligent labor and production that each individual, family, or country can have products and properties to spend in life. Concurrently, if diligent labor and hardworking is not associated with limiting expenses and saving, it will certainly be insufficient despite of making a lot of properties. Each family, on one hand, must work hard and make properties, and on the other hand, must save and appreciate properties created from working and must know to “Accumulate crops in case of being hungry, accumulate clothes in case of being cold”. This way, it will keep the family to live on a plan and make the family become affluent and comfortable. The country can only become strong and prosperous if each citizen can become affluent and wealthy.

During our national revolution struggle led by the Communnist Party, this tradition was further developed and became one of the content of President Ho Chi Minh’s thoughts. He considered diligence and frugality as the basic ethical rule that each person, especial government’s worker, must thoroughly understand and continuously cultivate and practice.

There are a lot of significant changes in the social situation that the youth and students are now living in. They are the main force that will become the country’s owner in the future, and they must inherit and develop the traditions of diligence, frugality, and cultivate these traditions to become their own ethical foundation quality. However, it is currently a phenomenon that the young generation is running after a consumptive and luxury way of life at too early age. This phenomenon can easily result in unexpected consequences. Laziness and lavishness, and rioting without working, are the main causes of all crimes and social evils. In the old days, the causes of becoming ruined were generalized as “laziness, coveting, seizing, greediness, and corruption”. A lot of facts proved the foundation of this generalization. The young generation nowadays is the basic pillar of our country in the XXI century. Starting right now, and starting right from the school, they need to be strictly educated to prevent, from the beginning, bad habits that can easily corrupt people, to build perception about the glory of labor and frugal way of life, to condemn laziness and lavishness, to participate voluntarily in public labor inside and outside of school, and to actively help with chores in the family. In their personal life, they should not boast, wish for vanity, compare with others, and be envious of others. They also should not require their parents of things that are beyond the family’s economic condition. They should practice saving of resources from the family, schools, and society, loving and protecting public properties, and striving against conducts of wasteful ostentatious consumption and public property destruction. They need to cultivate good thinking and habits, fine qualities, diligence, frugality, and strong will to overcome difficulties.

In current age, the spirit of “be deferential to teacher and respected for morals” also needs to be enhanced. It is not only a development’s need but also an expression of civilization and social advance. Pupils and students must voluntarily practice the spirit of respecting teachers and morals. They need to build the perception of respect for teachers and morals, and understand that “to be deferential to teachers and respected for morals is to make the country become prosperous”. It is meant that they must follow teachers’ lessons, study hard, and repay the teachers by their study results and good work achievements.

Unification and loving mutual support is a good tradition of our nation, “Brothers are like limbs/They should support each other whenever in difficulties”, “The leaves cover the torn leaves”, “Red silk covers the mirror, People in the same country should love and support each other” etc. During this age of innovation, industrialization, and country modernization, especially during the process of market economic development following the direction of socialist society, competition awareness and actions formed a new ethic quality. However, competition must base on ethic rules, meaning fair, open, straightforward, and appropriate competition, with opposition to illegitimate and unhealthy competition. Competition, unification, and loving mutual support can co-exist. Relationship between people with unification and loving mutual support cannot be damaged because of competition. Likewise, competition cannot be diminished because of unification and loving mutual support.

The young generation nowadays needs to possess the ethic quality of unification and loving mutual support, meaning that they need to practice caring for and unifying with others and they can not care only for themselves without feeling for surrounding people. They also should have empathy with others and provide support to others. For people with difficulties in daily life and in study, especially disabled people, they should be willing to help, respect, and have trust in those, without discrimination and ridicule. They should know “to find simillarities and respect each other’s differences”, and should be humble and tolerant. They also must value unification without ganging up and causing separation; be patient, fair, straight forward, reasonable, and legitimate in competition; collaborate and oppose illegitimate competition, unify the majority, and bravely carry out self-criticism.

Fairly speaking, the culture tradition of our nation has gone through various interactions with the Western culture for more than one century, especially through challenges in integration and globalizataion, innovation and openning doors during the past 30 years. It is necessary that we do not lose or languish our own values while acquiring good values from other nations, that we dare to look right into advantages and limitations of our cultural tradition to overcome these limitations, and that, during the country modernization process, we do not overlook building new modern people who still keep traditions. That way, our culture tradition will certainly have place to develop its positive values.

Education of diligent will in learning. Through close connection between “building will” and “diligence in learning”, the dialectic relationship between direction and ethic of knowledge accumulation to become talented can be defined. One can only have the determination to study hard and diligently if he can establish consistent sense of purpose. Likewise, one can only carry out his consistent sense of purpose with diligent study and patience.

For education of diligent will in learning, firstly it is education of serious and careful learning spirit, building and promoting the culture of reading and endless learning spirit. Secondly, it is education of will to overcome difficulties and hardship, and diligent effort and consistent learning and training to become talented. Thirdly, it is education of will for self-development and career development, firstly to take care of oneself and then to requite favor from parents and teachers, and to contribute to the community, society and country.

Learning is the basic path to gain knowledge and is also an important requirement to educate human to become mature and helpful. Pupils and students nowadays should inherit and develop the learning tradition of our nation that has been passed on through thousands of years. It is during learning and training that human can discover and cultivate his own capability, nurture dreams and ambitions, and establish wills to make dreams and ambitions come true. In order to do this, during the learning process, one needs to find a scientific learning method, making study become joy and passion. It is necessary to know how to manage time efficiently to enhance learning efficiency. In addition, knowledge must be associated with practice, study goes as a pair with practice, and study does not only limit to books but also include learning from practicality of actual life. We study to know, study to do, study to live together, and study to affirm ourselves.

Education of modesty and politeness. Human’s words, actions, and behaviors should be appropriate with certain manner norms, gentle, friendly, polite, and modest. It is the cultivation of culture and ethic quality needed for pupils and students nowadays.

Modesty is an important virtue of each person. It is the opposite of arrogance, self-centeredness, and egotism. Modest people can treat others fairly, closely, and they are also aware of themselves and others. The importance of modesty is to find out weaknesses of us and strengths of others, and to take advantage of our strengths to make up for our weaknesses. Politeness refers to humble and respectful words and gestures. It is contradictory with rudeness and unruliness. It also consists of friendship and friendly altitude between people to people, courteous words and gestures, and gentle, cheerful, and polite facial expression. The main point of politeness is respect for others. In order to possess these qualities, it is necessary for people to practice in their childhood to establish habits, just like conditional reactions. When becoming a habit, respect will be naturally shown as if it comes from the heart, and will be sincere without any reluctant.

In some other meaning, modesty is the basis of politeness. Politeness is the outside expression of modesty and humility. These are closely related. The basis of our general ideology originates from respest for others, and accurate awareness and evaluation of ourselves.

Modesty and politeness are essential conditions to maintain friendship and harmony in relationship between people to people in life. It is also possible to say that modesty and politeness must become distintive criteria of spiritual face and cultural quality of each individual, as well as of the whole society.

Students today are actually the knowledgeable class tomorrow, who receive new education foundation, and who are highly expected of modesty and politeness. Between people, there must be fair relationship and friendly mutual living. In public places, students must have standard manners that are gentle, civilized, and polite. To others and during happenings, they must be pro-active, enthusiastic, and decent. To foreigners, they must have polite manners, without lowering or elevating themselves, and at the same time, expressing hospitality and national culture spirit.

Self-discipline is being strict to one’s self in applying ethical standards and certain behavior norms to keep own behaviors and habits from deviation from standards. Tolerance to others indicates open and generous heart without prejudice, and friendly and unified altitude when treating others. Self-discipline is the basis of tolerance to others. Tolerance to others is also an extension to self-discipline. Tolerance to others does not mean inconsistency to rules, or abandonment of our own standpoint to yield to other mistakes for achieving harmony. It means protecting mutual and whole interests and maintaining friendliness, sympathy, politeness, and humility between individuals.

Being disciplinary with self and tolerating to other are fine qualities of strong-willed scholars and sages in our national history. Kong Qiu also used to say, “If one’s self is righteous, people will follow even without being ordered; if one’s self is unrighteous, people will not follow even when being ordered” ¹¹; 257. He also emphasized “if someone is wise, everyone wants to be as wise, if someone is unwise, we must examine ourselves if we are as unwise” [ ¹¹; 142]. All of these are concise presentation of self-discipline.

In practical life, it is common to see conflicts between people. It also incurs that people misunderstand or envy others. Therefore, self-discipline and tolerance to others are clearly very important. People normally say “everything is prosperous when people are in harmony”. If everybody can “criticize him/herself instead of blaming others, and tolerate others before forgiving him/herself”, then separation can be replaced by unification. Self-discipline and tolerance to others can optimize our personality, enhance our ethical qualities, make us feel comfortable and easy, and promote our successful and prosperous career.

In order for today students, in reality or life in general, to train and cultivate self-discipline and tolerance to others, they need to focus on the following aspects:

We must know how to examine ourselves. “Daily, I examine myself three times”. We must know how to evaluate our words and behaviors, know our shortcomings and limitations, and find out the causes and methods for overcoming these. We need to build an ideology of confraternity, comply with the rule of treating people with “benevolence and righteousness, modesty and harmony”, think under the position of others, and should not be deceitful, suspicious, hateful, and prejudiced. We should actively do good things and help others, be full of love and sincere, and strictly examine ourselves and find out the objective cause (know our own faults before blaming other for theirs) whenever having conflict and disagreement with others. We should not “force others to do things that we do not want to do”, open our heart, and should not be scared or become hateful whenever being envied and aspersed but instead, be tolerant and conciliatory. We must be greathearted and unified and work together with people with disagreement, following the philosophy of “finding similarities and respecting differences”.

Honesty and trustworthiness means that our words and actions must go along with our thinking without disguise and deception, and we must value credibility in our doing. Honesty and trustworthiness are closely related. Honesty is the basic ideology of keeping credibility. Keeping trust is the outside expression of honesty. We can only gain trust when we are honest in our heart, true to others, and sincere in our works.

In the old days, our nation enhanced trustworthiness as a fine quality of humanism. Kong Qiu also said “if a person is not trustworthy, it is unsure of what he can do” ¹¹; 120. Our society also valued trust and self-development. Zeng Zi, a student of Kong Qiu, used to say that “Daily, I examine myself in three areas: Have I done my best in when doing things for others? Have I been trustworthy in my dealings with my friends? Have I applied the lessons that I have been taught in practice?” ¹¹; 103. Fine qualities emphasized by Confucianism from Kong Qiu’s age included the followings: “Word must be trusted, action must gain result. Speech must be thought about and considered, action must be decisive”.

Our ancesters’ proverb also said that the most intelligent person was the honest one. It was because only honest people could overcome tests of truth and history. Famous sayings passed on from the ancient times tell us that being sincere and trustworthy are the most basic and minimal qualities of being human.

Today students really need to firmly build their perception of sincereness and righteousness, and whole-heartedly seek the truth that “word must be trustworthy, if it is not trustworthy, it can not be fulfilled”. They need to volunteerily prevent effect of wrong thinking such as “Honest people are disadvantageous, accomplishment can not be achieved without telling lies”. They also need to voluntarily cultivate the best habits and behaviors, with actions accordant to words, with strict self-demand, sincere heart, forthrightness, not covering mistakes, and courageous admission and serious correction of mistakes. These habits and behaviors also include being upright, not imitating others or saying things untrue to the heart or crouching before others, and the spirit of “words bind men”. In relationships with others, they need to have trust and be trustworthy, value time as gold, and behave according to the spirit of “words are as worthy as gold”. They should be on time and keep appointments. When being invited or having appointment, they should not be late for meetings, works, and other activities.

Courage and dedication mean to continuously strive for some ideal, career, truth, or cause, without fear and regardless of any price, and to dedicate everything, even one’s own life.

The spirit for courageous dedication has always existed since the old days. However, in each different historic period and social condition, the cause, purpose, and subjective effect generated from people’s dedicated spirit were quite different.

There were a lot of examples that disregarded their life and safety to dedicate all of their force and intelligence and even their life, and expressed noble ethical feeling for communism. It is necessary that this spirit of courage and dedication will become important spiritual strength in our career of building the country in a new period of revolution. It is also essential that this spirit will become popular among the society, especially for the young generation.

The spirit of courage and dedication is not only needed in wars and in building our country, but also necessary in study and scientific research. Students can learn not only from historic examples of dedication and sacrifice, but also from people from current time and the same generation. They need to voluntarily correct deviation in their thoughts that is inappropriate in reality and contradictory to people’s benefits and wishes, and to build noble ideal that is worth striving for and serving. They should dare to follow, to be consistent with, and to carry out their ideal, without considering personal gain or loss, and without stepping back from difficulties and challenges. They also should dare to fight against and criticize negative phenomenon, actively do good things, empathise with and support for surrounding people, for the sake of the community and social development.

Fairness and impartiality is the ethic quality of fair and appropriate conduct, because upright people will not be partial or self-interested.

The meaning of fairness is to act with sense of justice, truthfully, straightforwardly, righteously, impartially, and without bias or self-interest. We should not do bad things because of self-interest or rely on power to gain self-interest. Fairness and impartiality are contradictory with bias and self-interest that cause elimination of subjectivity. In regards to relationship between right and duty, responsibility and benefit, it is possible that people can be biased and even deceitfully uses public interest to cover self-interest, damage public interest to gain self-interest, and use power to gain self-interest.

In today’s process of building the country under socialism, especially during the process of market economy development, due to impacts from negative side effects of the market economy, it is certain that some negative and unhealthy thoughts arise in our society including the followings: living day to day, valuing benefits and disregarding righteousness, forgetting righteousness when seeing benefits, and even tendency to worship money, epicureanism, individualism etc. In this situation, it must be valued and prioritized to educate government workers as well as the young generation, future of our nation, of fine qualities such as uprightness, fairness, impartiality, disregarding self-interest for public interest, and prioritizing public interest before self-interest etc.

According to education guidance set forth by our Communist Party and Government, the young generation, who will inherit our career of building and owning the country in the future, must be cultivated to have ideal, ethics, culture, and discipline. One part of this generation will become managers and leaders in different levels of our Communist Party and Government. They not only fully need the above ethic qualities, but also must achieve the highest levels of relevant standards. Only upon achieving these, that they can properly perceive and appropriately deal with relationship from individual to groups, society, and nation; respect, love, and care for the people; and build their perception to serve the people; when confronting an issue, they can separate between public interest and self-interest. In daily life, they can voluntarily cultivate the qualities of fairness, impartiality, and being ethical. They should become people who are upright, decent, impartial, not self-interested, and against doing bad things for self-interest, or who take advantage of their power to gain self-interest.

3. Conclusion

Human has undergone almost two centuries of the third Millennium with many significant changes, while globalization has been one of many processes that directly or indirectly caused these changes. This is a two-sided process which not only creates opportunity but also bring challenges and risks for nations, especially for a developing country like Vietnam. Obviously, it is impossible for Vietnam to exclude itself from this process. However, in-depth perception about nature and effects of globalization will help us to minimize risks, especially risk from negative impacts that we do not expect. Therefore, it is important to appropriately resolve the relationship between subjective certainty of globalization and our objective impacts through our proper viewpoint, path, and management.

Human is always the deciding factor in success or failure of any strategy and policy. Therefore, there must be an education strategy for human that is scientific, reasonable, and impartial. Meanwhile, ethic education must be properly focused on, in order to successfully educate and train people to have dignity, consistent patriotism, and will to make our country become stronger and appropriate value perception. It is the key to ensure success of Vietnam’s integration to the world.

References