From morning coffees…
It was a morning coffee meeting for an intimate conversation and a joint “Mastermind” session to help guide a business project just getting started. I met someone with many years of experience working for foreign organizations and professional working skills. His social business project already had an established client base of more than 50 domestic and international businesses and organizations. Yet in sentence 1, sentence 2, sentence 3… he remained… very consistent in calling me “teacher.” That surprised me.
His project concerns education. Through my own reflections, I have found that Education has 1 tremendous power: changing society.
Do all these losses, “sick” values, and social stagnation have education as their “root cause”? We often say this society can only change when the aging, outdated generation currently running the country “passes on,” and that our only hope is the young. The statement sounds like a joke yet is true, amusing yet leaving a sad smile…
If education can change a person, when is the best time for that person to change?
Here is 1 secret of change: every living creature on this earth has 1 ideal time to change, when change happens very naturally and does not “take so much effort” as intervention at other stages. It is easier to teach a newly born cat, during its first few months, to use a litter box in the “designated area.” Two people in love find it easiest to change for each other during the first 18 months. Later, change becomes increasingly sluggish and slow, until, when they can no longer change, many couples sigh as they say, “Well, that's love and marriage; you have to learn to accept it.”
How can this be applied to 2 sectors with considerable ‘inertia’ in society today: transportation and healthcare?
Take Vietnam's traffic: “Final Destination”-style deaths still occur on the roads daily. The death rate is so alarmingly high that we hesitate to… go out. Most accidents stem from people's awareness of and compliance with traffic laws.
In Vietnam, people only learn traffic laws at age 18 when taking their driving test. Even setting aside dishonest teaching that gives students “tricks” for passing multiple-choice tests rather than caring whether they understand the essence of each traffic situation, learning the laws only at this point is probably rather late. For the preceding 18 years, that young person has lived with and experienced how others, even their parents, behave on the roads. It has become a “pattern” in the brain, like a sheet of paper covered in writing: erasing and rewriting it is difficult, and erasing too hard may tear the whole sheet!
In Japan, meanwhile, children are taught traffic laws from kindergarten. Or even earlier: in 1 book called “Kindergarten Is Too Late,” the Japanese author says systematic child education needs to begin during the first 3 years of life. A blank page is still easy to write on, especially when what is “written” consists of good habits, good for that person and for society!
After years in community healthcare, I know Vietnam has high disease rates, with some conditions much more prevalent than worldwide, such as stomach cancer, blood pressure problems and “diabetes”—both literally and figuratively… Many arise from our Lifestyle: how we live now determines our health in 5, 10 or 20 years. In other words, we bring our illnesses upon ourselves.
Food all around us seems harmful, yet we do not know how to be smart consumers and protect ourselves (of course, at 1 most reasonable cost). Vietnamese people still think in terms of “eating to feel full” rather than “eating for adequate nutrition.” Lifestyle comes from eating and drinking (nutrition), exercise, habits, the surrounding environment, and professional activities… We are completely ignorant of these things. So while criticizing doctors and nurses for lacking medical ethics, we also forget that we do not know how to prevent illness ourselves, leading us to cause our own illnesses, leading to too much illness, leading to many sick people, leading to overcrowded hospitals, leading to cramped hospital environments and healthcare staff unable to serve everyone, leading to us needing them more than they need us, leading to dreadful service attitudes in healthcare and other abuses such as cash-filled envelopes, leading to many systemic failures from top to bottom, leading us to lose trust in Vietnamese healthcare, leading to billions of USD “flowing” from Vietnam to countries such as Singapore every year for overseas medical care… And leading to a “billion” other things.
“I” am often the cause of the problem, yet rarely think that “I” am also 1 part of its cause, instead placing the cause somewhere outside “me.”
Vietnamese healthcare would surely improve if everyone were educated and educated themselves early about the mindset, knowledge, and skills of Preventing Illness Themselves, and were given the tools to do so. Only then could we address the ‘root of the problem.’ Vietnam remains very weak and lacking in preventive healthcare. We have only managed prevention of infectious diseases, such as dengue fever. For conditions with very costly treatment—cancer, blood pressure disorders, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses—there remains an enormous market gap for Start-ups.
And healthcare certainly needs to develop alongside education. No matter how skilled doctors are, if people are not educated about preventing illness themselves, no number of hospitals will be enough.
You see, education permeates every aspect of life. That is why I always admire and enthusiastically support people sincerely contributing to this profession (provided their methods are correct), as well as education startups. I really like that student’s project, because if education has such power, it should reach young people as early as possible. Of course, learning should happen as naturally as possible, without “straining,” racing to meet targets, or sending children to study ahead so they can “excel” or avoid falling behind their classmates (an unfounded obsession of parents). Bring Life Values and Life Skills to children earlier, so they learn to dream earlier, respect differences earlier, work in teams earlier, take responsibility earlier, and make decisions for their lives earlier… “Write, draw, and color” those right, good, beneficial habits onto a sheet of paper while it is still blank, and society will gain greater benefits and eliminate far more Waste!
And we have the right to hope for a future being created at this very moment. There are three ways to create a beautiful future world: first, do it directly; second, develop people capable of doing it; third, do both. I hope that, with the seeds being sown now, when we look back 10 years from now, we too will feel proud to have done a little that was meaningful. We have the right to hope, and we should focus more on education, including self-education.
Because wanting to Change society without Transforming people is like trying to retrieve the moon from the bottom of a well.
TMT
Tạ Minh Tuấn – TMT – is a successful entrepreneur pioneering several startup fields in Vietnam, 1 of Vietnam's 30 most outstandingly successful and influential people in the prestigious “30 Under 30″ ranking by Forbes, the world's leading business magazine, and the founder of YUP! Start-Up Education & Incubation Centrer (www.yup.edu.vn).
