The rivalry of the French and American educational missions during the Vietnam War

From 1955 to 1975, the French and the Americans were both active in the educational field in South Vietnam, but their objectives were different. The French were concerned with preserving their influence with the Vietnamese elites and relied on the Mission Culturelle – the heir of the colonial Direction of Education – and its prestigious high schools. The Americans wanted to improve the level of education of the population and strived to reform the Vietnamese administration in order to make South Vietnam a nation strong enough to bar the advance of communism. The main operator was USAID, which coordinated and funded the activities of expert teams, and particularly of academic missions. The French deeply resented the American intrusion into what they believed to be their historical area of cultural influence, and they perceived the United States as aggressive towards them. The Americans did not oppose the French cultural presence but they did try to eliminate those parts of the French legacy – particularly the teaching methods and the administrative structures – that they considered to be obsolete and an obstacle to their reforms. The battle between those two cultural traditions was waged by their Vietnamese supporters, with long-time Francophiles on one side and US-trained educators and administrators on the other. However, this competition was partly artificial, as the French and Americans actually needed each other. Their educational missions also had to deal with the circumstances of the war in Vietnam. In the early 1970s, the French resigned themselves to the dismantling of their educational network while American reform met with substantial resistance in South Vietnamese society, which resented the Americanisation of an educational system that mixed the Confucian and the French academic traditions, as symbolised by the enduring popularity of the Baccalaureate examination that still exists today in Vietnam.