Education for peace and social harmony: Rethinking the roles of care and justice-oriented civic reasoning through Vietnamese lens

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Citizenship, Communities and Justice in Southeast Asia

Proposal

Peace education often aspires to create “harmony”, yet in day-to-day schooling, harmony can be understood as conflict avoidance—getting along by avoiding disagreements. My research with Vietnamese teachers and students suggests that while social harmony can be at first seen as non-confrontation and maintaining social order and stability, it also denotes tensions between collective priorities and supporting individual rights and freedom. Building on care ethics, deliberative civic education, and Vietnamese moral traditions, I propose the Harmony-Based Civic Education that values relational and collective strengths of harmony while legitimizing dissent through deliberative actions.
Care, interconnectedness, and justice-oriented civic reasoning.
Care ethics clarifies why attending to needs, sustaining trust, and confirming the other are morally primary in education (Held, 2006; Noddings, 2005). In care terms, peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of responsive relationships. However, care that never confronts wrongdoings risks complicity. Justice-oriented civic education addresses this gap by asking students to analyze causes of injustice, weigh evidence, and consider remedies and responsibilities (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004; National Academy of Education, 2021; Gutmann & Thompson, 2004). Meanwhile, Vietnamese cultural resources of Confucianism and Buddhism already value relational interdependence and interconnectedness (Thich, 2014). Confucian harmony is not uniformity but a creative balancing among differences—he er bu tong (harmony without sameness)—opening normative space for principled contention that protects relationships (Li, 2006). Engaged Buddhism adds compassion and non-harm (ahiṃsā), and reframe critique and justice demand as acts of care toward the whole (Thich, 1993). Put together, justice-seeking becomes a way of caring well for the interconnected world community.
Research Design and Findings
The key research questions focus teachers’ and students’ perception of social harmony and their visions of civic engagement for social harmony. This is a qualitative study that involves data collection through semi-structured individual interviews, site observations, and focus groups with Vietnamese elementary students and teachers. The data is analyzed inductively, comparatively, and recursively. The findings reveal three key overlapping themes in students’ and teachers’ understanding of social harmony.
First, participants commonly begin defining social harmony with the absence of violence and the presence of everyday safety and predictable order. Harmony is first a felt condition that allows children to study, families to work, and communities to function. Second, as conversations deepen, harmony is reframed in relational terms: students and teachers emphasize cooperation, helping others, and ritual civility in families, classrooms, and neighborhoods. Harmony here becomes a moral practice, sustained by everyday “care work”—checking on peers, sharing resources, and protecting one another from embarrassment. Third, participants describe responsibilities distributed across levels. Students tend to emphasize individual effort and self-control, while teachers are more attuned to the state’s obligations to ensure safety and fairness. Strikingly, the role of civic associations—spaces between family and state—rarely appears in their talk, revealing a participatory gap that matters for how people imagine collective action. Fourth, concerns about justice cut across the dataset. Participants identify corruption, favoritism, and unequal treatment before the law; they also affirm, in principle, the importance of freedom, fair procedures, and human dignity. Yet public contention—loud disagreement, demonstrations—can be read as a threat to harmony, especially when it feels unpredictable or unsafe. Many participants are forward-looking about innovation but simultaneously protective of valued traditions, producing an ambivalence that is itself pedagogically significant.
Vietnamese policy and sociocultural context.
Vietnam’s socialist orientation emphasizes collective welfare and cohesion in education, while politically sensitive discussion (including some human-rights topics) can face constraints on academic freedom (Nguyen, 2022; Ngo, 2019). This environment makes it especially important to ground deliberation and civic reasoning with cultural and social sensitivity, which encompasses—care, compassion, and harmony—rather than importing “perceived” adversarial scripts. Aligning civic aims with relational values can make justice-focused inquiry feel less like disruption and more like caretaking of the community.
Based on the findings and considerations of Vietnam’s particular socio-cultural and political context, I proposed a Harmony-Based Civic Education Framework and procedure that center care, interconnectedness, and justice. In systems where social cohesion is prized, a care-led, justice-capable peace education can legitimize student voices without appearing adversarial. The Vietnamese case demonstrates that culturally rooted concepts—harmony, compassion, collective welfare—can scaffold deliberation and rights learning instead of suppressing them. The framework offers a portable design for schools and teacher education programs in similar sociopolitical contexts. The peace-and-rights tradition centers universal dignity; contemporary human rights education differentiates coexistence, citizenship, and transformative approaches, with the latter urging learners to identify and change unjust structures (Bajaj, 2011). Justice-oriented civic education similarly distinguishes “personally responsible” from “participatory” and “justice-oriented” citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). The proposed Vietnamese model integrates these with care: students learn to notice needs, understand interdependence, and reason publicly about justice claims in ways that preserve relationships and restore community.
Conclusion.
Education for peace and social harmony should not trade care for justice or voice for quiet. In Vietnamese schools, reframing harmony through care, interdependence, and justice-oriented civic reasoning can cultivate compassionate, courageous learners who deliberate well and act to restore dignity—hallmarks of a peaceful society.
References
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Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0195180992.001.0001
Li, C. (2006). The Confucian ideal of harmony. Philosophy East and West, 56(4), 583–603. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2006.0055
National Academy of Education. (2021). Educating for civic reasoning and discourse (C. D. Lee, G. White, & D. Dong, Eds.). https://doi.org/10.31094/2021/2
Nguyen, T. (2022). Exploiting ideology and making higher education serve Vietnam’s authoritarian regime. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 55(4), 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2022.1819231
Ngo, H. T. M. (2019). Opportunities and constraints on human rights education when academic freedom is not guaranteed: The case of Vietnam. Human Rights Education Review, 2(1), 8–26. https://doi.org/10.7577/hrer.3466
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Thich, N. H. (1993). Interbeing: Fourteen guidelines for engaged Buddhism. Paralax Press.
Westheimer, J., & Kahne, J. (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237–269. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312041002237

Author

• Thi Nhu Quynh Dang, Indiana University Bloomington