Gerard A. Postiglione. Educational Review, Volume 60, Issue 1 February 2008, pp. 1-20
(TAR)
The urgency of basic education for all
“Although the TAR is one of the most remote regions of China, the prosperity of the mainland and the central government's intention to make the TAR economically prosperous, culturally visible, nationally integrated, and politically secure, have led to steadily rising living standards for many Tibetans (Goldstein et al. 2003; Sautman and Dreyer 2005)… Contemporary Tibet's main educational policies are set within the context of a socialist state adapting to market economics, while permitting a special status for Tibet's educational needs…Nomadic regions present the greatest challenge because of their remoteness and poverty levels…. Popularizing basic education in rural and nomadic regions of Tibet is a daunting task, even though major infrastructural developments have led to increased optimism.
Tibetans continue to face the question of how schools can become vibrant institutions within their communities, integrated with their values and traditions, yet functional to the household economy and a rise in their living standards. Cognizance among Tibetans about sustaining their natural and cultural resources is ubiquitous. Tibet's devoutly religious population and internationally popularized cultural traditions are legendary. Trilingual capacity, limited as it is to a tiny (but growing) number of young intellectuals, is impressive nonetheless, especially given that Tibetan, Chinese, and English are vastly different languages. As institutions of selective social and cultural reproduction, the complex role played by Tibetan schools will come to have a significant impact on the aspirations of a new generation of Tibetan youth.
Historical antecedents and education targets
“Beijing assumed responsibility for the management of Tibet in 1951. Monasteries remained the principal educational institutions until the fourteenth Dalai Lama fled during the uprising of 1959…During the Great Leap period, basic education was expanded rapidly though community (minban) schools. China's TAR was formally established in 1965, and land became redistributed and administered by People's Communes (Grunfeld 1996; Xia, Ha, and Abadu 1999). The Cultural Revolution wrought havoc and destruction on monasteries and schools, followed by an admission of errors by government. By 1978, with a loosening of restrictions on religion, many children studied at monasteries. Communes were abandoned in 1984 and the quality of schools improved, making them more attractive… School enrolment rates stagnated before rising significantly in the 1990s, albeit accompanied by offsetting dropout rates at the upper grades of primary school… Literacy rates and school access in Tibetan regions of China have continued to rise year by year… Yet, educational progress in Tibet has been far slower, and not nearly as impressive as in the rest of China…
Preferential education policies for Tibet
Aside from the huge financial outlay for basic education, school access targets in China's ethnic minority regions could not be achieved without additional policies designed for implementation in ethnic minority regions (Ha and Teng 2001)…For example, some county authorities instituted a system for school attendance reward points to be converted by households to cash at the end of the year (Postiglione, Ben Jiao and Gyatso 2006). Also, a small part of teacher salaries are withheld in some areas as an incentive for them to sustain attendance and promotion rates. Such short-term measures vary from county to county but some policies are consistently applied throughout the TAR, including the three guarantees (sanbao), bilingual education, and the neidi Tibet schools (Xizang neidiban).
The Three Guarantees: “The "three guarantees" is specifically directed at enrolment rates in primary schools. It includes measures designed to relieve families of costs associated with schooling. It makes provision for food, at least a tea drink during the daytime for children who live beyond 2 kilometres from school and tsampa (barley flour) and other foods for those who board at school. It also includes providing clothes, school wear in some cases, and a blanket at boarding school. The third guarantee is living quarters, since geography necessitates that most rural and nomadic children be accommodated at school beginning in upper primary and junior secondary school… The extent and manner in which the three guarantees are implemented remains a subject in need of further study.”
Ethnic identity issues are naturally less salient in poor rural and nomadic areas where there is little exposure as yet to other ethnic groups and school instruction is conducted in Tibetan. Moreover, the struggles of day to day life in most households, struggles similar to life among poor rural and nomadic people anywhere on the globe, take priority over questions of ethnic identity.
Medium of Instruction: “few Tibetans advocate not learning any Chinese. Most agree that Chinese is needed to ensure survival in a market economy since it broadens access to non-farm occupation. Dual track education (Tibetan and Chinese) is generally available in the urban areas, but after the primary school grade three, there is a shift toward Chinese as the medium of instruction, with only language and literature courses taught in the Tibetan language.
While TAR secondary schools use Chinese as the medium of instruction, many secondary schools in Qinghai province, bordering the TAR, use Tibetan for school subjects (science, math, history, etc.) up through senior middle school. Experiments in the TAR that use Tibetan as the language of instruction for science and mathematics subjects have yielded successful results. There are advocates of Tibetan as a language of science and modernity, as well as a means of raising achievement scores since students will learn more efficiently and then can perform better on college and university entrance examinations. This is fraught with some risk however, as proponents of Tibetan medium instruction may be labeled as separatists…
China has done a great deal to produce school textbooks in ethnic minority languages, including Tibetan and about 21 other languages. The five province/region Tibetan learning materials leadership group has facilitated the production of Tibetan language learning resources and has visited other countries to learn about how bilingual education is undertaken elsewhere. However, the Tibetan language school textbooks in mathematics, science and other subjects are often direct translations of Chinese language materials. Moreover, the updating of Tibetan language textbooks is slow and costly. Meanwhile, Tibetan medium of instruction is often viewed as a hindrance to advancement as TAR secondary school graduates soon discover when they have to compete for jobs with the thousands of TAR students returning with good grasp of Chinese from 7 years at neidi schools. The neidi schools add more complexity to the issue of language education as well shall see later…
Dislocated education: “The third major policy with significant implications for rural education in the TAR is the neidi xizang ban (inland Tibet secondary schools and classes) or dislocated schools, which send primary school graduates to secondary schools across China… these bilingual youth are well suited to be cultural middlemen/women between Tibet and the rest of China. The form and content of their education represents the kind that the state would like to be the norm for Tibetans, and the increasing demand on the part of parents for these schools ensures that the neidi education policy will continue indefinitely, despite its stratifying effect upon Tibetan society.
Most schools, if not classes, are ethnically segregated…All teachers (except one or two Tibetan teachers for Tibetan language and literature courses) are local Han Chinese…
My research based on oral histories of neidi school graduates makes it clear that these dislocated Chinese boarding schools do not conform to the stereotype of institutions to unmake ethnic minorities (Spack 2002). While there is a strict separation between religious and the state education, the schools themselves have not been used to de-culturate by prohibiting the use of native language and the erasure of students' cultural memories. Tibetan families are not coerced to send their children to the neidi schools. Moreover, many families whose children fail to score high enough to gain entrance to these schools will pay the extra fee to get them admitted. Still others send their children to the growing number of private (minban) secondary schools in China, Chengdu in particular.
The stated mission of the neidi schools is not explicitly to civilize the Tibetans. However, Tibetan culture, though celebrated throughout China, especially in its popular media, is defined by the state schools. Unlike many other twentieth century boarding schools for indigenous peoples in other countries, the neidi schools for Tibetan students offer classes about ethnic language, and literature. Moreover, the school environment recognizes Tibetan culture through its many representations of art and architecture, music and observance of Tibetan holidays. Behaviour is not controlled through corporal punishment and it is not used if students speak Tibetan while inside or outside of the school. Nearly all students speak of the close relationship they had with their Han Chinese teachers. Discipline rather than fear is the norm shaping behaviour, though the schools also make use of ample reference to moral and political education curriculum, school rituals and teacher modelling to shape behaviour. Communication with students' Tibetan home is not cut-off by school authorities. Parents are permitted to visit and a small but growing number do visit the schools, though for most the travel costs are prohibitive.22 …
A major challenge for them was Chinese medium instruction, for which most experienced difficulty... At the same time, students also study Tibetan language and literature as a school subject at junior secondary school level… Attention to the study of Tibetan wanes in senior secondary school as students prepared for the national entrance examination for college and university…
Students who graduate from the Chinese boarding schools generally feel that they learned to become more independent and self-reliant than their counterparts who stayed in Tibet. They also remark positively about teaching methods used. Their employers, many of whom are school heads, comment positively about the capabilities of the neidi school graduates, even while being ambivalent about the inland school policy…
Among the cohorts we interviewed, all wanted to return to Tibet after graduation. Of those interviewed, only a few expressed a wish to remain in China, though these few also returned to Tibet. Some considered further education and would be willing to return to China for such study. Nevertheless, staying in China for work was not an option. The intention of the neidi school policy is that students return to help Tibet's development. However, enforcement of this policy would be difficult…
Those in Tibet who fail to enter neidi schools need to be given opportunities to study for at least some period of time in other parts of China, including the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, in order to broaden their understanding of China and the world. This approach resonates with China's emergent global influence. This will also work to moderate the social stratification resulting from the structured inequality in Tibet's education system with neidi school graduates elite status among graduates of TAR schools…
Education, harmonious society and Tibetan civilization
The heart of the matter of education for Tibetans lies in the improvement of access to quality education for sustainable development of social, cultural, and economic resources. At the very least, quality education is about learning how to read, write, and communicate; how to perceive, plan, act, and innovate; how to think critically and creatively; how to learn how to learn, how to be confident, engaged, and effectively committed to community development…
Cultural diversity in China rivals that anywhere else in the world. This is not to say that multi-ethnic diversity is strongly encouraged, only that is it increasingly salient and widely recognized. While ethnic minority culture is celebrated, ethnic diversity is managed. The "harmonious society" campaign prescribes Chinese ethnicity as "plurality within the organic unity of the Chinese nation" (duoyuan yiti geju) (Fei 1986).24 Yet, there is no question that a more open attitude toward education for cultural diversity has taken place in some ethnic minority areas of China (Yu 2007). Given that Tibet is the most remote and ethnically homogenous of China's five major provincial level autonomous regions, future developments could have national implications for the way that ethnic intergroup processes are conceptualized in a more globally integrated China. The debate over cultural preservation, ethnic autonomy, and state schooling remains complex. As Appiah points out in his work on the ethics of identity, "We must help children to make themselves: and we have to do so according to our values because children do not begin with values of their own" (Appiah 2005, 137). Making Tibetans within China is an educational task that remains a work in progress. This debate cannot remain disconnected from strategies for the improvement of the learning environment and academic achievement of Tibetans. In searching for reasons why Tibetan educational achievement levels are far behind those in the rest of the country, a variety of perspectives are available but new thinking about a well resourced and community driven learning environment for schools is a natural step forward.
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