This piece reflects on education reform in postcolonial societies through a personal letter addressed to my mother. In the letter, I connect Ghana’s ongoing conversations about educational reform and digitization to the history of the Tonkin Free School in Vietnam, an anti-colonial education reform movement founded in Hanoi in 1907. By placing Ghana and Vietnam in conversation with each other, I explore a key tension in global engagement: how formerly colonized societies can adapt tools from dominant global systems without losing their own cultural identity, values, and knowledge traditions.
I chose to include this piece in my e-portfolio because it represents how Global Engagement has pushed me to think across borders while remaining grounded in my own positionality. The reflection allowed me to move beyond a simple rejection of Western educational models and toward a more nuanced understanding of adaptation, power, and cultural rootedness. It shows my developing ability to compare historical contexts and think critically about what meaningful reform should look like in postcolonial nations such as Ghana.
