years.
Champa had always been a rich agricultural region, its bountiful crops a challenge to less fertile northern countries. Both Annam and Tonkin, usually with assistance from China, had attempted to dominate Champa. The Vietnam War was simply another move in the same continuing effort.
A very good book on the history of the area is D. G. E. Hall's A History of South-east Asia, although there are a number of other good ones.
Acquiring an education has many aspects, of which school is only one, and the present approach is, I believe, the wrong one.
Without claiming to have all the answers, I can only express my feeling that our methods of instruction do much to hamper a child in learning. Our approach is pedestrian. We teach a child to creep when he should be running; education becomes a task rather than excitement. Yet each of us can remember one or two teachers who made learning an adventure, which it surely is.
Personally, I believe children should be taught to see, to observe, and to subject what they have seen to analysis, and this in the earliest grades. Very young children will often learn a difficult subject easily unless someone tells them it is "hard." To me it also seems obvious that a child should be taught some methods of reasoning, methods of scientific investigation.
Children have an innate feeling for logic and, given the opportunity, would learn quickly.
Such instruction would be unthinkable in any country not a democracy, and if carried out in a democracy it might clear the air of a lot of loose thinking, loose public speaking, and the kind of questionable statements that fill the air during political and other campaigns. The first generation of parents who had such children would have a difficult time but would find their own thinking undergoing drastic change.
We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different. Many of the political ideas that have disturbed the world in the past fifty years could not exist in such an atmosphere.
Often I am asked if I would recommend my way of learning to others. I certainly would not. A young man once asked me that question and I told him that the first time he read fifty nonfiction books for fun, in one year, he could think about it. Most students require the disciplined atmosphere, the academic setting, and the guidance a good school can offer. The association and exchange of ideas are important also.
My way was suited to me. I have never been very good at taking instruction. I enjoy lectures, and have attended many, but mostly I prefer the quiet of a library and the freedom to go off in any direction that pleases me.
What I have learned is only a modest amount of what I should like to have learned, and I have read few books that I could not read again with profit, but there have been only a few to which I have returned.
I have never had to strive to graduate, never to earn a degree. The only degrees I have are honorary, and I am proud to have them. I studied purely for the love of learning, wanting to know and understand. For a writer, of course, everything is grist for the mill, and a writer cannot know too much. Sooner or later everything he does will find its uses.
A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in first.
I have studied a thousand things I never expected to use in a story, yet every once in a while these things will find a place.
I have read because I loved reading, and I have learned because I loved learning, yet all one needs cannot come from books. It can come from sounds, from music, from the play of light and shadow, from the people one meets or those one does not meet.
Much of my background reading has been in diaries written by westward-moving people, or in memoirs by people from this country and others. What I want to know is how people were living, what they were thinking, how they expressed
Champa had always been a rich agricultural region, its bountiful crops a challenge to less fertile northern countries. Both Annam and Tonkin, usually with assistance from China, had attempted to dominate Champa. The Vietnam War was simply another move in the same continuing effort.
A very good book on the history of the area is D. G. E. Hall's A History of South-east Asia, although there are a number of other good ones.
Acquiring an education has many aspects, of which school is only one, and the present approach is, I believe, the wrong one.
Without claiming to have all the answers, I can only express my feeling that our methods of instruction do much to hamper a child in learning. Our approach is pedestrian. We teach a child to creep when he should be running; education becomes a task rather than excitement. Yet each of us can remember one or two teachers who made learning an adventure, which it surely is.
Personally, I believe children should be taught to see, to observe, and to subject what they have seen to analysis, and this in the earliest grades. Very young children will often learn a difficult subject easily unless someone tells them it is "hard." To me it also seems obvious that a child should be taught some methods of reasoning, methods of scientific investigation.
Children have an innate feeling for logic and, given the opportunity, would learn quickly.
Such instruction would be unthinkable in any country not a democracy, and if carried out in a democracy it might clear the air of a lot of loose thinking, loose public speaking, and the kind of questionable statements that fill the air during political and other campaigns. The first generation of parents who had such children would have a difficult time but would find their own thinking undergoing drastic change.
We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different. Many of the political ideas that have disturbed the world in the past fifty years could not exist in such an atmosphere.
Often I am asked if I would recommend my way of learning to others. I certainly would not. A young man once asked me that question and I told him that the first time he read fifty nonfiction books for fun, in one year, he could think about it. Most students require the disciplined atmosphere, the academic setting, and the guidance a good school can offer. The association and exchange of ideas are important also.
My way was suited to me. I have never been very good at taking instruction. I enjoy lectures, and have attended many, but mostly I prefer the quiet of a library and the freedom to go off in any direction that pleases me.
What I have learned is only a modest amount of what I should like to have learned, and I have read few books that I could not read again with profit, but there have been only a few to which I have returned.
I have never had to strive to graduate, never to earn a degree. The only degrees I have are honorary, and I am proud to have them. I studied purely for the love of learning, wanting to know and understand. For a writer, of course, everything is grist for the mill, and a writer cannot know too much. Sooner or later everything he does will find its uses.
A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in first.
I have studied a thousand things I never expected to use in a story, yet every once in a while these things will find a place.
I have read because I loved reading, and I have learned because I loved learning, yet all one needs cannot come from books. It can come from sounds, from music, from the play of light and shadow, from the people one meets or those one does not meet.
Much of my background reading has been in diaries written by westward-moving people, or in memoirs by people from this country and others. What I want to know is how people were living, what they were thinking, how they expressed
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