Abstract

Approaching the issue from the political cultural respect and basing on the conception, that national identity is a spiritual complex of the whole national communitty based on common value orientations that are realizing in national characteristics, national symbols and ways of cultural behaving, in the first part of this article the author examines the four ways, in which foreign scholars have tried to define Vietnamese national identity. These have been summed up by K.W. Taylor in one of his studies published in 1998. In the second part of this article, the author points out the important role of education, particularly of history education, in the socialization of the ways in which the young generation imagine of their national community. According to Pham, the Vietnamese educators have to overcome the ways that provide a one-sided or exclusive nationalist imagination, because they do not support the young generation of Vietnamese to understand their national identity as a unity of // in diversities.