The spoiled fruit of a poignant day!

- Jesus! You hit that helicopter with the car!

- Yeah! I was running out of bullets!

Die Hard 4*

22 August 2008 – 19:35 / Home

Just came home! A bit disappointed with my day. We had three power cuts in the office. I could not finish my work due to the problem with electricity. But the real disappointment came during my class in the afternoon. As it happens sometimes, I would like to talk with students about the things which are not directly related with the course, but somehow related with life experiences or some pure ideas which can fit to the students’ lives, can help them to think clearly. I wrote a sentence from Kant (If you have the opportunity to do a favour, it becomes your duty.) and tried to explain it to them. But suddenly the noise started to emerge from the class. I first thought they don’t know Kant so I tried to tell them more about this great enlightenment philosopher/thinker. But it was not that they don’t know him. They don’t want to know him, they don’t want to know anyone who is not funny or cool. What is cool? The conversation I wrote at the top of this page is cool! Silly, meaningless, out of mind but still cool! Kant is not cool because he was ugly, short… He was not cool because he spent all his life working, reading and writing… He was not cool because he was not able to hit helicopters by his car just because he was running out of bullet. But the truth is those who changed the world are the ones who work very hard and believe that their hard work means something for the humanity. The cool/hot celebrities became oblivious once they became old or once they are out of shape. But ideas survives centuries, milleniums…

Maybe I was wrong at the beginning by mentioning Kant’s name in the class. These students are studying business. What they need to know is how to make money in the easiest way. Ethics, philosophy, sociology, politics, world history! Don’t they keep asking all the time “Why we learn Statistics?”. I would like to say them “You learn it because it is a piece of knowledge”. They think knowledge is a secondary issue! First they have to know how to make money, how to organize people, how to manage people and make them work. But ethics is an issue for all human beings because we are all facing the dilemmas of good and evil in our daily lives. Kant did not write his books for a bunch of academician, he wrote them for the people so that people can use their own brains to make decisions, to have ideas either for him or against him. He was one of the enlightenment philosophers who opened people’s eyes to let them see how they can be powerful only when they use their own minds.

I read Kant at university years. I read him although I was studying Mathematics. Except for a few pages in Prolegomena to Metaphysics, he rarely mentions Mathematics in his books. But when I mention his name or reading his books in my class, students stared at my face as if I was talking about someone extra-terrestrial. What is wrong with a man who dedicated his life to knowledge, to thinking and creating new ideas. Just because we are a bunch of lazy people, this does not justify us to laugh at those who devote their life to the great pool of knowledge.

But then I was talking about the books. How sad, how discouraging, how heart-breaking to see young minds not caring anything but only the colorful filth of bubbled popular culture! They don’t read and the worse is they don’t know why they should read! “Books” I might say, “Harry Potter” they answer! It is the only book they know. I actually doubt that they read Harry Potter. Maybe a few of them, but I believe most of them have seen the movie only. A children story is the only book they know. I wrote a few names whose books can be found in Vietnamese bookstores: Turgeniev, Tolstoy, Naipaul, Marquez, Murakami, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau and some more fiction writers. I wished they knew these writers, read some of them, learnt something about human nature, the pain some of our brothers and sisters are facing, the happiness which illuminates the earth, the coolness of the river which makes the life possible… Is it possible to respect others without understanding their stories? That is where the problem comes from. Young generation grows without caring anything except for themselves. Nothing interests them more than having fun, having laughters. The cinemas in Vietnam are a good representative of this. Not a single good movie they show in theatres. All the same, Holywood’s cyclic action movies or comedies… No drama, no art, no thoughts! Superfical, spoiled, not even deep enough to tell a story from beginning to end with its possible effects on human psyche.

When I was at university, I was reading a lot. I am still considering myself a good reader, still finishing at least a book every week. Maybe because I wanted to learn more about the world, about myself and nature, about life, because I believed the only purpose in this life is to look for a purpose in this life. I did not hope to find it but I knew if I stop reading and thinking, I will lose the whole point. Then what I am living for, if not for thinking and creating new things. I was worshipping knowledge, books, great minds and great works.

The ages of 18-22 are the best times for reading, the best times to develop the minds and have a world view. Unfortunately, knowledge has been commodified in modern times and as many commercial schools do, knowledge became a tool for consumption, not for production. Therefore universities are not producing knowledge but just consuming it, using it and even most of the times abusing it.

I don’t know why I wrote this. It just came out like vomitting after having a bad stomach. But this is how I felt today in the class. They were laughing at books, at reading, at thinking and I was feeling an arrow digging towards my heart, pinching my flesh and making me sick… The pitiful situation before my eyes was one of the worst in my 9 years of teaching career. Maybe I should never talk about the books in the class again, maybe I should just shut up, teach what the textbooks say and leave the class without thinking what they really think, learn… But this is against my philosophy of teaching. I have to tell them the things I know as good and respectful. I have to tell them the evil. I have to tell them that knowledge always pays back even though it is not the puspose of getting it. We know because knowing is pleasure itself. We learn new things because learning is fun. And the more we learn about the world, the more we respect others, the more we realize that there are many problems in this world waiting for attention, waiting for smart people to bring solutions. This in fact cannot be resolved by hitting helicopters by cars… This can be done by thinking, reading, writing, creating, manipulating, protesting, organizing, working hard, trying hard, pushing the limits and considering others’ problems as if they are our own…

* I have just seen the 15-seconds-long thriller on TV.