The Prison School in Vietnam: A Course Interpreting Revolutionary Education in the Historical Museums of Ho Chi Minh City

ABSTRACT This paper considers a course on critical thinking in Vietnam with a case study focus on historical prisons as they are represented in museums. Reflections on prison narratives in history and literature, texts, film excerpts, and museum visits were used in classes for students of anthropology and sociology. In Ho Chi Minh City (hereafter HCMC), a series of museums tell versions of the wider colonial and military story and in part turn that story into one of pedagogical resistance that students today study as history. That is, the colonial prison is remembered and presented—to Vietnamese and international visitors, with quite different levels of preparedness—as a space where anti‐colonial struggle was organised, and a determined revolutionary Party ethos built up a ‘revolutionary school’ ( rường học cách mạng ) within the prisons. Our class made use of concepts from Discipline and Punish —the panopticon, the tableau, the diagram, and the calligraphic—to evaluate and critique a global cinematic version of the story of war, contrasting representations of prison in the museums of HCMCs to expand accepted understandings and challenge the curriculum and history of national liberation.