Vietnam’s learning tradition gets Canadian reboot

Speaking to Vietnam News Agency reporters in Canada around the 950th anniversary of Quoc Tu Giam, Trang shared that the tradition is alive in Toronto’s Vietnamese families, adapted to a new country. Parents speak Vietnamese at home, tell homeland history, and use community groups to add language and culture space for kids.

Her maternal family has imperial-exam laureates named on the temple’s stelae. Every return visit is a family check-in and a reminder of the duty to keep the learning tradition going.

Later, offering Vietnamese language expertise to Educap’s culture and language courses for foreigners, she went back to the temple in a new role as a guide for foreigners on Vietnam’s educational history.

That shaped her Canadian community-education playbook: bringing homeland stories close to learners through family memory and daily practice.

She runs the same play at home. Her son Nguyen The Bao is fluent in English but uses Vietnamese at home and likes Vietnamese history. For Trang, good integration in Canada and a retained mother tongue and homeland attachment show that family values can travel with integration.

CVCEC built a free online platform, “Truong Tieng Viet Cua Em” (My Vietnamese School), with 70 lessons tied to the Ministry of Education and Training curricula. It is digitising more materials to widen teaching content.

The council is also building culture lessons on Vietnamese landmarks, with the Temple of Literature as a core module. Kids will hear stories about teacher Chu Van An, and practice greetings, gratitude to teachers and respect for elders.

This approach aims to help children understand and appreciate the Vietnamese tradition of respecting teachers and valuing education through real-life situations. For kids raised abroad, a relic site thousands of kilometres away becomes real through a teacher greeting or a grandparent conversation.

Another track is getting kids to find studious role models inside their own families. Grandparents’ and parents’ stories of overcoming hardship turn the tradition into something relatives lived, giving kids a reason to continue it themselves.

For youth, CVCEC runs the Viet Youth Readiness Hub (VYRH), mixing cultural preservation with volunteering and community engagement.

Trang said young people can now pitch the Van Mieu - Quoc Tu Giam story in English to international friends, presenting Vietnam’s education-first tradition in their own generation’s language and experience. For her, education is the durable Vietnam-Canada bridge as it helps the youth keep their roots while pushing Vietnamese cultural values closer to global audiences.

Temple of Literature – Quoc Tu Giam: 950 years of Vietnam’s tradition of learning

Nearly 1,000 years after its establishment, the Temple of Literature - Quoc Tu Giam remains a prominent symbol of Vietnam’s respect for knowledge, talent and the tradition of learning, according to French historian Philippe Le Failler of the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO).