Khmer educator makes difference

Muoy You of the Seametrey School

Nov. 16, 2011
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS

A person can store a million facts in his or her head, but it’s not what one knows but how one thinks (to compare, relate, analyze for purpose of understanding) that determines the quality of everything one does, the quality of one’s future, and the future of one’s country.

One Khmer woman who grew up poor in “a squatter’s shack in Phnom Penh,” with a father who repaired bicycles for a living and a mother who was “an illiterate street vendor,” won a scholarship to study in France in 1972. She intended to return to Cambodia to help rebuild her homeland.

Politics interrupted that plan. Though Cambodia fell to the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975, she still wanted to return to help, and she applied for a Khmer Rouge passport. By the time the passport arrived, she was too far along in a pregnancy to fly. While her Khmer friends left for Phnom Penh, she was stuck in Paris.

After the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed in 1979, she found out her parents and her siblings had died, along with 2 million others.

Abroad, she raised her family, got a Ph.D. degree in French literature at the Claremont School in Paris, worked as a teacher in Africa and the Middle East. But she never lost sight of returning to work in Cambodia.

She returned to Cambodia in 1997, but in the chaos surrounding the coup in Phnom Penh a few days after her arrival, everything she had shipped to Cambodia for a project was looted and lost. She took her children back to safety in Paris. She returned to Cambodia again in 2003, for good.

I first read the story about Muoy You in asialifeguide.com in 2009 — the year her architect husband passed away — and I followed the development of her “Seametrey Children’s Village,” created in 2003.

Believing that “the only salvation of Cambodia is through education,” Muoy established her “integrated bilingual” school with “social and cultural integration” as a policy, and with the goal to provide “quality education to students of all backgrounds, Khmer and foreign, rich and poor.” A self-sustainable project, “Children pay fees according to their parents’ income, ranging from nothing to relatively high fees for rich Khmers and foreigners.”

Asialifeguide.com reported that for Muoy, “the crying shame is that Khmer children are really bright. It is the approach to teaching and its quality that is a real problem.“

She lamented the lack of human and material resources; she saw too much time spent watching television as “dulling people’s minds and suppressing critical thinking,” and TV programs spreading “consumerism, but no education.”

Muoy admitted it is “difficult to change,” but she ditched the deeply rooted “rote learning” of Khmer children, who are “not taught how to take initiative.” She created “a school of international standard … where children are rooted in their own culture, but internationally aware.”

Muoy’s work was highlighted in July 2011 in an article by Tibor Krausz in the Christian Science Monitor: “Muoy You, who escaped Cambodia’s killing fields, now teaches self-respect and integrity.” As she told Krausz, “I don’t just want to teach (children of low-income cleaners, laborers, farmers and tuk-tuk drivers) to read and write. I want them to become professionals, writers, thinkers, artists — to make their country proud.“

Muoy has provided her own children with just that sort of opportunity. Her four children all are university graduates. One of her sons teaches aeronautics at the University of Washington in Seattle; another is earning a Ph.D. in particle physics at Geneva’s European Organization for Nuclear Research..

Muoy’s school now has 80 students “from dirt-poor villages, urban slums or well-heeled Phnom Penh.” They are taught in small groups from nursery through primary school, are treated alike — “and are expected to treat one another alike, too.” Muoy seeks to “break down social barriers and emphasize our common humanity.”

Asialifeguide.com reported that Muoy sees “a lot of improvement” in Cambodia that is “much more abreast of the world. But there is a moral decline. The gap between the rich and the poor is huge.”

A key part of Muoy’s school curriculum is “moral education,” with Muoy’s teachers — Khmers and many foreign volunteers — teaching the children “to value ethical behavior as its own reward.”

Krausz described a 4-year-old boy who scuffled with a little girl because, he alleged, “She pushed me first!” Muoy chided him: “Shouldn’t you be a gentleman and not push back?” The boy agreed and went back to play. After only two years at the school, he’s “a bright boy with leadership and oratory skills remarkable for his age,” according to Muoy.

Krausz’s article ended with Muoy assertion: “Place children in fertile soil and they’ll blossom and flourish.” She gives an analogy of education by pointing to the flower vine in her garden: “From its pot, the plant has climbed all the way up to her fourth-floor balcony.”

I am seeing something positive happening among Cambodians engaged in the rebuilding of Cambodia, a country that went through hell and fire during the Vietnam War in 1970-1975, the brutalities of the Khmer Rouge — who killed 1.7 to 2 million people — in 1975-1979, the Vietnamese occupation in 1979-1989, and now undergoes a regime charged with violations of the rights and freedom of Cambodian citizens.

Cambodians’ exercise of soft power, as demonstrated by Muoy’s Seametrey School, offers the best hope for the future and the survival of the Khmer nation.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.