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SCHOOLING IN THE YAO
MOUNTAINS:
AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF EDUCATION AMONG THE TU YAO IN GUANGXI, CHINA
A
DISSERTATION PROPOSAL SUBMITTED TO THE THESIS COMMITTEE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG IN FULFILMENT FOR THE
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
MAY 2001
BY
YUAN
TONGKAI
SUPERVISOR:
DR. TAN CHEE-BENG
THESIS
COMMITTEE: DR.
JOSEPH BOSCO
DR. MARIA S.M.TAM
DR. TAN CHEE-BENG
22/05/2001
I.
Abstract
II.
Introduction
III.
Anthropological
Study of Education
IV.
Research
on Education and Minority in China
V.
Scope
of Study
VI.
Research
Methodology
VII.
Significance
VIII.
Reference
Abstract
This study, based on extensive library research and
fieldwork, will seek to understand the
process of Tu Yao people's political, economic, and especially educational
marginality at the grassroots level in the remote areas of Guangxi,
China. In a general sense, especially in the eyes of most of the educational
researchers and local leaders in mainland China, educational failure in
minority rural areas is mainly caused by monetary problems and less-developed
cultures. Anthropological method, however, is quite different, it uses “the
real-life setting as its laboratory” (Kimball 1974) and seeks to understand
educative processes through the activities of individuals in broader contexts. Through a "deep description”(Geertz 1973) of Anchong Village, one of the Tu Yao communities,
and a general research of all the other Tu Yao villages in Hezhou, this study
explores the governmental and local discourses on rural minority education, the
distribution of state power and its impact on rural minority schooling, the
impact of local ecology and the mode of production on schooling, social and
cultural context, integration, and gender issues. It shows how minority groups, though distrustful and skeptical, adjust themselves to the Han dominated
school teaching. This study, to some extent, holds the promise to
bridge the theoretical gap between the research on educational anthropology in
Mainland China and that in Western countries.
The
subject matter of this proposal, in its broadest scope, is about minority rural
school education in disadvantaged mountain areas in China. More specifically it
seeks to investigate Tu Yao people's political, economic and educational
marginality in the remote areas in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Tu Yao are
a sub-group of Yao minority, who live mainly in Hezhou, Guangxi. Generally
speaking, education for minorities living in the vast border and mountain
regions is below the national
average at different levels. This is especially the case with the Tu Yao
people. In rural minority areas, because of the lack of qualified teachers,
infrastructures and funds, the dropout rate is much higher than that in Han
areas and urban centers. This has drawn much attention from scholars
both at home and abroad. Before
the 1980s, the problem was
mainly due to financial difficulty, as most of the minority villagers were too
poor to send their children to school. After the economic reform,
however, the standard of living
of most villagers has improved but most still do not want to send their
children to school. The dropout rate is still very high, especially among
female students. According to official statistics, in some
Yao mountain villages in Guangxi, more than 50% of teenagers do not go to school. Among the teenagers who do
go to school, about 70% fail to
complete the primary school education (Guangxi Yearbook 1998),
let alone completing the 9-year compulsory education.
Local
researchers have spent a lot of time researching this issue and have suggested
that the government should pay more attention to minority rural education.
Though the provincial and local governments have implemented various methods to
increase school attendance and some genuine efforts have been made to improve the condition and teaching
system and help the rural students to improve their school performance, little progress has been
achieved. Is it that the
villagers, who used to regard school as “a means for their children to get out
of their poverty-laden way of life” (Baker 1988: 16), now have lost trust in school education, and treat schooling as a wasted investment? Based on this assumption, this research project will explore the following questions: Why is school education not providing social and economic mobility in minority
rural areas? Why do minority rural families lose faith in the link between
education and personal improvement? What are the issues of concern at the local
level? To what extent can school education construct and reconstruct ethnic,
cultural and social integration and identity? Is the Han dominant
school teaching program perceived as an acculturation process that is
detrimental to their cultural identity? How can the functionalist theory (see
below) helps us to understand, firstly, why we think there should indeed be a
link between education and personal improvement and economic development, and
secondly, how we can make sense of this phenomena in minority rural China?
By going to the
grassroots and living with the minority rural families, I will try to
understand the issues in their lives and view the education problem through the
local cultural context, and then find out why and how the local government has
failed, for example, to convince the minority rural families to send their
children to go to school. This
project focuses on minority rural school education, but through a "deep
description”(Geertz 1973)
of Anchong Village, one of the
Tu Yao villages, as well as a general research on all the other Tu Yao
villages in Hezhou, it will also
enable us to have an insight of other minority rural schools in South
China. The research will highlight
the changes and transformations of the economic, cultural and even political
institutions in the Chinese rural societies and show how minority
groups, though distrustful and
skeptical, adjust themselves to the Han dominated school education.
The local leaders have been concerned about the problems encountered in school by the Tu Yao people and have come to realize that the foremost step for the Tu Yao people to take to improve their present social, economic and political status is to be educated first. It is hard for any of us to imagine that, among the Tu Yao people, most of them cannot even complete the primary school. To date, there are only a couple of Tu Yao students who have completed the lower secondary school (Xiaoxue). In order to change this situation, Zhao Jin-chun, who had completed his secondary school education, was recently recommended for admission to the Agricultural Department of Guangxi University in 2000 by the local government. He will be the first Tu Yao college graduate student in Tu Yao’s history[1]. Although the Tu Yao people are still very poor compared to the other minority ethnic groups in China, it is clear that monetary problem is not the key factor preventing them sending their children to schools. Then what are the main barriers hindering their success in formal education? Is it “the historical and wider societal forces that discourage” (Ogbu 1991) the Tu Yao people from striving for school success or is it their “collective attitude toward schooling” (Ogbu 1991) that hinders them achieving academic success? To understand this, learning from Ogbu’s point of view (1991), we should consider the Tu Yao’s own “notions of the meaning” of and the “how-to” of schooling in the context of their own social reality. In most theoretical discussions, there is an enormous gap between theory and praxis. In order to understand the bitter reality of educational and other constraints in the Tu Yao communities, it is essential to go straight to the grassroots level to see how the schools function in Tu Yao areas.
From the 1950s till the last decades, theoretical thoughts of educational anthropology have witnessed great dynamics. In his case study of school education in disadvantaged areas in Sri Lanka, Baker (1988) has made a general review of the main stream of anthropological study of education before the 1980s. In his point of view, the main stream of thoughts can be divided into two catalogues: the equilibrium paradigm and the conflict paradigm. The former mainly includes functionalist (or structural-functionalist) theory (including socialization theory, manpower or human capital theory, and incrementalist theory) and evolutionary theory. The latter consists of Marxist and neo-Marxist theory (including dependency theory, structuralist theory and reproduction theory, and allocation theory and legitimation theory), radical and /or utopian theory and revitalization theory. For the purpose of this study, only functionalist theory and Marxist and neo-Marxist theory is focused on.
The principal streams of thoughts on anthropological study of education, broadly speaking, were dominated by functionalist theory from the 1950s up to the 1970s (Welch 1985; Baker 1988). Functionalist theory, stated briefly,
“views society
as a system of interdependent parts. The substructures of the
system serve
functions, which help the system to survive. These substructures
have an adaptive capacity
and are positively valued, as proved by the fact of
their very existence” (Baker
1988: 10).
It
regards schools as one of the substructures which “dependent on the larger
society for resources and legitimation, while society depends on schools to
continue the socialization process and the intergenerational continuity needed
for societal maintenance”(Paulston 1977:380; Baker 1988:10). Spindler is one of
the most outstanding figures advocating the anthropological study of education.
Most of his educational research is based upon the “structural” and “functional”
theories. For him, “cultural therapy ” can be treated as a partial solution to
the social problems confronting modern Americans. Some other educational
anthropologists, such as Bushnell and Rappaport, also analyze schools as part
of social system. The book Planned Change in Education: A Systems Approach (1971)
is an example.
Socialization
theory is one of the sub-schools of the functionalist theory. Durkheim's
series of paper (later compiled in the
book Education and Society) regarding education and socialization theory
marks its beginning. According to Durkheim (1956), education is “above all the
means by which society perpetually recreates the conditions of its very
existence”. It reinforces “the essential similarities that collective life
presupposes”, and “consists of a systematic socialization of the young
generation” (Baker 1988: 11). Spindler (2000) views school education as the
process of socialization in various ethnic groups. That’s to say, school
education is the key process of cultural transmission. It is an institution in
which the members of each society acquire the basic knowledge for survival.
Bock (1982) argues that “education has the function of socializing people to
internalizing higher levels of competency, which serves to improve society as a
whole”. In his study on Fiji, Bullivant (1983) also argues that “the curriculum
content is designed to mold ideal citizens for the kind of society chosen by
those who control knowledge and power”. Baker’s Sri Lankan case shows that
education plays a positive role in socializing the younger generation. He
(1988: 25) assumes that “teacher’s qualification plays a key role in the
processes of the school’s contribution to socialization”. This branch of
thought, in general, is too optimistic, which holds that school offers equal
opportunities for all, the school failure is supposed to be the result of the
deficits the pupil brings to school. It pays less attention to the conflict and
power relationship, which may bring inequalities both within and beyond
schools. But the idea that school is part of society and depends on society is
important for our understanding of the relationship between the Tu Yao schools
and their society.
The
theoretical schools mentioned above could be seen as harmony model. Marxist and
neo-Marxist theory, however, “views change and conflict as a constant and
unavoidable feature of social relations and institutions”, that’s to say, in
the life world, “there is a straggle for dominance between competing groups in
socio-economic conflict. Formal education, for example, is viewed as part of
ideological and political structure, which the ruling class controls to
maintain its dominance and privilege” (Klucknikov 1977: 40; Baker 1988:19). For
Marxists, formal education is always directly or indirectly connected with the
distribution of power. In the perspective of the structural-functionalist,
school dropouts can be seen as a technical problem or malfunction, while the
Marxists point out that the problem is part of a control process; they criticize
the fact that dropouts are taught to accept responsibility for their failure
and thus their disqualification in the competition for power. In Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, Paulo Freire (1970) demonstrates how the oppressors use
education as a tool to control the oppressed. In this perspective, we should be
fully aware of the functions school played. Schools are more than instructional
sites, they are also cultural sites as well, which “actively involved in the
selective ordering and legitimation of specific forms of language, reasoning,
sociality, daily experience and style”(Mclaren 1999). In short, school
education is closely linked with power relations. For the purpose of this
research project, Marxist and neo-Marxist theory is useful for us to view
school opportunities in a more critical thought. As Mclaren (1999) eloquently
argues, “It is obvious that there are inherent weaknesses in present
educational systems due to unjust social, political and economic structures and
these macro-structures serve to perpetuate the position of power already held
by the dominated groups.” With reference to his ethnographic approach, I hope
to reveal how school experiences are organized within specific relations of
power.
For
a long time, scholars in the field of educational anthropology have
concentrated on the problem of academic failure of minority students in the
dominant society (Ogbu 1982; Erickson 1987; Postiglione 1999). During the late
1960s and early 1970s, educational anthropologists began to actively participate
in the debates about why ethnic minorities are less successful in schooling
than the dominated group. They generally emphasizes “cultural difference”
rather than “cultural deficit” when explaining minority school failure. Hymes
(1974), for example, argues that language is the cultural difference that makes
a difference. In the early1980s, cultural discontinuity hypothesis still
assumes that the idea that linguistic and cultural differences between “the
home environment of a minority group and the school environment in which they
are expected to learn the values of the dominant majority were the primary
cause for the poor performance by minorities in minority communities”
(Postiglione 1999). This hypothesis, however, has come under
increasing criticism in the last ten years or so. Among the critics Ogbu is a
prominent figure. He (1982) raises the question that, if cultural differences
are the main cause, why some minorities, in a minority situation, actually
perform better than others? He always takes the Chinese Americans as an example
of an educationally successful immigrant minority. He maintains that immigrant
minorities, like the Chinese Americans, in some sense satisfied with their
minority status, “see cultural and linguistic differences as surmountable
barriers to success in the host society, and consider themselves guests who
should not complain and who will have to move up into mainstream society
through hard work and thrift”. They view the host culture critically and only
select from it what they think desirable, and reject others. They participate
in majority education and observe the “rules of games”. This does not mean they
have succumbed to the majority culture, but is simply a sensible way to get
ahead. With this attitude and ideas, they are always optimistic and much more
successful in school education. On the contrary, the involuntary immigrant
minorities, such as the African Americans, view their fate pessimistically.
They reject the dominant culture and education, they are deeply confirmed that
no matter how well they do in school they can never escape their marginal
position and low-status of employment, this makes them perform poorly in
schooling (Ogbu 1982).
In
his case study of the Dutch
Chinese, however, Frank N. Pieke(1991) holds a different point of view. In his article “Chinese Educational
Achievement and ‘Folk Theories of Success’ ”, he focuses on issues of
“human agency”, on individuals’ acting and interacting as well. He argues that
Ogbu’s “folk theory of success.” cannot account for “differences in educational
behavior between groups of comparable social positions, or between different
subgroups of the same minority, and most importantly, how educational behavior
changes”. It is right for him to conclude that educational behavior,
like other types of behavior, cannot be described with “static interpretive
frames (such as folk theory), but entail a flexible cultural logic formulating
desirable ends and strategies” (Pieke 1991). Taking the Dutch Chinese as an example, he (1991) argues that under the surface of the educational
success, there may exist a
complex and often conflict-ridden social reality, which cannot be understood
and described simply in terms of a folk theory of success.
Schools are central to the social and cultural shaping of the young, and
often become arenas of intense cultural politics. Levinson and Holland (1996)
argue that the concept of “cultural production” allows us to gain a better
understanding of “the resources for, and constraints upon, social action—the
interplay of agency and structure—in a variety of educational institutions”. In
the 1970s, there emerged the first wave of critical studies of schooling, which
shedded light on the study of schooling. Scholars such as Althusser (1971),
Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), elaborated a radical critique of the social
effects of schooling and endeavored to show that schools were not “innocent”
sites of cultural transmission, or places for instructing “consensual values”.
By the end of 1970s, “reproduction theory had emerged to explain how schools
served to reproduce rather than transform existing structural inequalities”
(Levinson and Holland 1996). The concepts of “social production” and “cultural
production” gathered momentum in the 1980s, while the 1990s are witnessed to a
broadening of horizons in the critical study of schooling (Levinson and Holland
1996). According to Bourdieu’s work on Frech schools and the Kabyle peasants of
Algeria, “the valuation of cultural styles and competencies was what buttressed
an unequal social order” (Bourdieu 1977). For Bourdieu, “cultural capital’, a
kind of social resources, is analogous to economic capital, and can be
reproduced and converted to economic capital. His account of cultural
reproduction and symbolic violence shifts our focus on school education to a
wide variety of social contexts.
For
the purpose of this research, functional theory, Marxist theory and the latest
theoretical thoughts on educational anthropology will be taken. Functionalist
theory, together with its various sub-schools, will be useful in viewing the
inter-dependent relationship between school and society. They will also help us
understand how school functions in maintaining social continuity and stability,
and in turn, how society legitimates the cultural and symbolic capital
(Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) of school in the local context. Marxist and
neo-Marxist theories will, on the contrary, enable us to reveal conflict and
inequalities within school and between school and society as well. In addition,
I will integrate some other influential theories in educational anthropology
into this study, especially Ogbu’s “folk theory of success”, Bourdieu’s notion
of “cultural capital” and Levinson and Holland’s concept of “cultural
production”. In Foley’s terms, “no one who has read the educational literature
on school failure doubts that his ‘folk theory of success’ has merit and
explanatory power”(Foley 1991) in explaining the possibility of academic
failure among some ethnic groups. Ogbu, however, focuses too much on racial
dominance and hardly explores the survival strategy of the ethnic communities
he studies. Reflecting on the weakness of Ogbu’s “folk theory of success”,
Foley (1991) develops a “macro ethnography of schools” that incorporates
sociolinguistic and interact ional concepts into a modern, flexible version of
“folk theory”. It provides a more dialectical understanding of class and
ethnicity. In particular, Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, as argued in
Levinson and Holland’s article (1996), helps us to think through the potential
role of schools in establishing new forms of symbolic capital, such a
perspective can can be helpful for exploring the effects of schooling across
historical and cultural contexts. The theories reviewed above enables me to
observe Tu Yao children’s academic failure in multiple perspectives and a
broader context beyond schools and educational institutions. But in order to understand how schools
function as part of society in the Tu Yao areas, we need to investigate the Tu Yao
in the schools and in the villages in particular local contexts.
In mainland China, some
research on education in minority regions has been conducted, but most of it focuses either on history or
language, such as Zhu Xielin's Gan-Ning-Qing minzu jiaoyu shi
jianbian (The short history of national education in Gansu,Ningxia and
Qinghai) (1993), Li Ying's Erlunchunzu jiaoyu shi kao (A survey
of the educational history of Er-lun-chun nationality ) (1987), Han Ta's zhongguo shaoshuminzu jiaoyu shi (The history of
national minority education in China) (1998); Deng Chenglun's Yi-Han
shuangyu jiaoxue yanjiu yu shijian (A study of Yi and Han bilingual
teaching and Practice )(1998), Ho Chunfang's Zhongguo shaoshuminzu shuangyu
yanjiu (Research in Bilingual teaching of national minorities in China )
(1998), and Guizhou shuangyu jiaoxue lunwen ji (A collection of essays
on bilingual teaching in Guizhou) (1989). Taking Zhu Xielin's research
for an example, we can see that
it is merely a quantitative research on the historical development of
governmental and non-governmental schools in Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai. It is
not based on intensive fieldwork in specific communities but on official
documents. This kind of research is useful but it cannot elaborate upon detailed processes of how ethnic
minorities adjust to state schooling. It also cannot allow us to understand
“the manner in which minority children and their families come to
construct the meaning of schooling within their own communities” (Postiglione
1999). Thus, indepth study of
the schooling in particular ethnic minority communities is essential to
understand the manner in which ethnic minority communities innovate in their
adjustment to state schooling. Drawing on the tradition of Ogbu's and Harrell's
theories in the anthropology of education, this project will try to investigate
how the Tu Yao children adjust themselves to the Han dominated state schooling.
Ethnographic
case studies have greatly improved our understanding of the processes in the
field of rural minority
education. Compared with previous decades, the 1980s have seen an increase in
the amount of quantitative research on minority education in China. Such as Guizhou
minzu jiaoyu diaocha (A survey of National Minority Education in Guizhou)
(1990), Qinghai minzu nutong jiaoyu yanjiu (Research in National Girl-Student Education
in Qinghai) (1994), Chi-Tak
Yao's Education of the Li minority in Hainan China (1984), and CheaJin
Lee's China's
Korean minority (1986). Though this information has been useful in understanding the general situation of
minority school education, establishing and making comparisons between
different ethnic groups, it has limited use in describing the actual processes
of minority education. Ethnographic methods, in contrast, by participating into
communities and viewing issues in the natives' perspectives, can provide answers to the
question of why minority children have higher dropout rates than Han students.
It can also show how the cultural value of schooling plays a key role in
persuading parents to pay schools fees for their children. Ethnographic
case study enables us to expatiate upon the manner in which the state uses schooling education for “political
socialization”, especially within the classroom (Postiglione 1999). Kelly
(2000), however, persists that ethnographic methods are not always appropriate
for conducting educational research. He argues that, at the most basic level,
employing ethnographic methods requires a knowledge of the language used by
informants. If a researcher knows nothing about the local language, the use of
quantitative methods is more applicable to this situation.
Steven
Harrell and Ma Erzi's ethnographic research in Baiwu Township in Liangshan,
Sichuan province examines the relevance of the cultural discontinuity
hypothesis for ethnic minority education in China. Finding this inadequate to
explain the success of why some Yi sub-branches perform better in schooling
than the others, they (1999) employ John Ogbu's notion of folk theories of
success, which assumes that,
“If members of a
minority hold the view that they can use education to achieve
success, they
devise ways to surmount the obstacles posed by cultural divergence.
If they hold, on the
other hand, that the education system will merely strip them of
their own culture
and identity without giving them equal opportunity in the wider
society, they will
respond with resistance” (Ogbu 1974, 1991).
Harrell and Ma argue that most involuntary minorities hold the oppositional folk theory of success, and most voluntary minorities hold the positive folk theory. From their case study of the Liangshan Yi, they conclude that ethnic subgroups of the Yi have distinct differences that explain differential success in school. For example, the success of the Mgebbu, a Yi subgroup, is highly attributed to their folk theories of success. Differential school success in Baiwu cannot be explained fully in terms of cultural and linguistic differences, however, “mother tongue teaching did matter greatly for Yi girls” (Harrell and Ma 1982). Based upon fieldwork carried out among the Tai in Sipsong Panna and Naxi in Lijiang in Yunnan Province in Southwest China, and by looking into the aspects of education that are most directly related to ethnic identification, M.H.Hansen discusses the impact of education on the changing forms, contents, and expressions of ethnic identity among ethnic minorities in China. She argues that “Chinese state education promotes the idea of one ‘Chinese nation’, and attempts to achieve a high degree of cultural and political homogenization” (Hansen 1999).
Religion characters the culture of most of China's minorities, and the study of religion in terms of schooling is one of the important aspects to be highlighted. In his paper “Religion and the Education of China's Minorities”, Colin Mackerras (1999) outlines the basic situation regarding the impact of religions upon formal schooling in minority areas in China, with particular emphasis on Islam and Buddhism, and examines “how monasteries, mosques and churches, which predated state schooling, remain repositories of traditional culture and learning”. Dru Gladney (1999) critically explores these processes of expansion in his study of Chinese Muslims, and notes how state education runs counter to religious teaching and how China's Muslims initiate a process of negotiation to deal with conflicting sets of norms. He (1999) argues that education for Muslims, in sum, “seems to result in parallel streams, one in which the state represents Muslim culture and the other in which Muslims represent their own culture”.
Another major challenge relating to ethnic minority culture and schooling is language. The manner in which the state permits ethnic minority languages to be used in school is crucial for the form of ethnicity that schools reproduce. Taking four minority languages, Zhuang, Yi, Uyghur and Tibetan as examples, Rdgie Stites (1999) examines “China's efforts to develop a viable bilingual system of education and maps out the complex linguistic diversity of China as well as examines language policies and the literature on bilingual education in China”. Janet Upton's research (1999) shows that bilingual teaching in Tibet is particularly illustrative of the dilemma of ethnic education in China. Her fieldwork in Songpan County of Aba region, Sichuan province, provides insight into school-based Tibetan language education. It shows that because of easy access to occupational opportunities, more and more Tibetans are willing to learn Chinese though their mother tongue is encouraged in school teaching. Her detailed description of Tibetan language school in Songpan demonstrates “how the school had a profound effect on the surrounding communities in its role as a training ground for the elite of Songpan”. The theoretical paradigms, at least to this project, create new perspective of viewing education and are of great significance for the studies on minority education in rural China.
These studies, in short, examine ethnic minority education in
China and address issues that relate to culture, society and schooling in
broader contexts. In general, for lack
of exchanges with international scholars, the Chinese researchers focus more on
quantitative date collection than on ethnographic case studies. What's more,
their research has been fragmentary, without forming a ‘school’ through the accumulation of their findings. Most of the analysis is not in
anthropological perspectives, and not systematic. The researchers outside China,
in contrast, pay much more attention to ethnographic case studies. It is safe
to say that, in the field of anthropology in China, the studies of educational
anthropology have long been marginalized. It is obvious that there is a big gap
among the theories on educational anthropology in Mainland China and those in
Western countries. This study, to some extent, holds the promise to bridge the
gap.
This project, based upon the theoretical thoughts briefly reviewed above, will pay special attention to the following contents: the governmental and local discourses on rural ethnic minority education, the distribution of state power and its impact on schooling, local ecology and the mode of production and school education, social and cultural context and school education, integration and schooling, and gender issues.
In the 1950s and
1960s, education and development was once one of the key topics in the field of
educational anthropology. Education, "the most powerful factor in making
men modern" (Inkeles and Holsinger 1974:2), was a term
connected with human progress, social development and modernity. The major
theoretical orientations applied to the topic of education and development hold
that formal education plays a decisive role in the process of cultural and
social changes. Schooling not only
was viewed to perform direct economy-enhancing functions, but also other
development-supportive functions such as giving the poor an opportunity for
social mobility, thus serving to promote social equality. This point of view, in some sense, supports the Chinese state
discourse on school education. The educational officials, who seldom go to the
grassroots, often argue that state education provides an equal opportunity to
everyone. It is an indispensable mechanism “for achieving a fuller development
of the potential of individuals and whole societies”(Baker 1988:5). But it is not so viewed
in the disadvantaged areas in mainland China, especially in the rural
ethnic minority areas in Guangxi, where schooling means little to most of the
rural minorities. The rural minority dwellers there have lost faith in the
relationship of education and development, and fail to see any significant and
economic or social advantage in spending money on school education in Han
dominated society. School education is no more functional in giving the poor
minorities an opportunity for social and economic mobility. The analysis of the
discourses between government officials and local natives will shed light on
our understanding of what real going on about school education in rural
minority areas.
Ecology and mode of production of the local is one of the key factors to understand the success and failure of schooling. The governmental explanations have given insufficient attention to understanding Tu Yao people’s poor school perform from the point of view of the Tu Yao people themselves, but from the perspective of the Han dominant group’s perceptions of their own social reality. When explaining the high rate of school failure among Tu Yao people, the officials hardly pay any attention to the cultural and social contexts of the natives, but emphasize the deficit of Tu Yao people. Geographically, the Tu Yao people live in the Dagui (the Great Guangxi) mountains in the eastern part of Guangxi. Numbering only about 4000 people, they are distributed over more than four-fifth of the mountain areas in Ertang and Shatian townships. These areas are sparsely populated, hard to get to, and are deficient in natural resources except forests. There is no suitable land to cultivate rice and other subsistence crops. Cutting woods and selling lumbers to earn money to buy food was the only way of living for the Tu Yao people. Since the 1980s, the local governments have encouraged the hill people to cultivate ginger, but the outcome is not so promising. According to my preliminary investigation in July and August, 2000, and again in April, 2001 together with my supervisor Professor Tan Chee-Beng, I find that their living conditions remain almost the same as it were. Due to their poor natural environment and difficult living conditions, no one from the other ethnic groups would normally want to marry them. Partly because of this, endogamy has been practiced and they marry very early, between the ages of 13-16. There are no medical care facilities at all. Up to now, there are no clinics in any of the Tu Yao villages, they have to walk for hours on the mountain paths to see doctors. According to the local statistics, the death rate among the Tu Yao is the highest in Guangxi, even in the whole country. In light of their particular situations, it is important for us not to view their school failure without paying special attention to the complex social reality.
Within the framework of functionalist, there has long been a dispute on the question of whether there should be one system of education for all children in a country, or whether there should be a different and more relevant rural education for children of remote areas. In Tan Chee-Beng’s article “Education in Rural Sarawak” (1993), syllabus and textbooks are viewed as one of the major factors which hinder the academic achievements of students in rural Sarawak. It is also the case in Mainland China. In China, the curricula are designed to prepare children for white-collar office jobs, which are beyond the reach of the majority rural students, thus the education they pursue is said to represent wasted investment on their part. What the rural students, especially the minority students learn at school is irrelevant to their real life. If they fail in the decisive examination, what they learn will be proved to be useless. What’s more, sometime education even spoils the children, as some of the parents complain, those who are educated and fail in getting a job refuse to do farm work any more. In this sense, it is important to adapt the present educational system to the traditions and culture of ethnic groups, protecting the positive elements of their traditional culture. It is understandable for the ethnic minorities to voice desires for protection of their endogenous cultures. If this aspect is neglected, it will be very difficult for any governments to put any educational plan into practice in spite of thorough attempts at implementation. In China, since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, and especially since the inception of the Reform program in the late 1970s, education has been characterized by attempts to universalize at least elementary education, despite wide variation in culture, language and local customs, the same subjects are taught with the same materials almost over the country (Harrell and Ma 1999: 218-219). Such a uniform, universalistic system of educational practice runs into problems in ethnic minority areas, especially the Tu Yao, who are linguistically and culturally different from the dominated Han. The Two Tu Yao lodging classes in Ertang middle school serve as a good example. Though the local government and some charity organizations in Hong Kong provide half of the tuition for each student, they paid less attention to the students’ local culture, language and customs, which is quite different from that in the dominant education. Educational arrangements are inevitably a reflection of deeply embedded political, economic, and cultural factors that are unique to a particular society.
According to
Ogbu's theoretical paradigm, “minority school performance can be seen as both a
socio-economic and cultural response to the structure of power relations in
society” (Ogbu 1987). To understand why the Tu Yao are not doing well in
school, it is essential to study the nature of their strategies for survival in
Han dominated society, which may often become embedded in their culture without
the conscious knowledge of its members and affect their attitude towards
schooling. Generally speaking, the relationship between the ethnic
minorities and the schools controlled by the dominant group is characterized by
mistrust and conflict. Just as Frederick Erickson points out, teaching requires
a relationship of mutual trust. If the ethnic minorities doubt whether the
dominant education is in their own best interest, “they may refuse to cooperate
to get educated in the way the majority thinks best for them” (Ogbu 1987). What’s
more, “there may be incongruent between the requirements of the job market,
educational institutions, and those of alternative survival strategies
developed by minorities to cope with their restricted economic and social
opportunities” (Kahn 1992:21). This, in some sense, has a close relationship
with the distribution of state power and the inter-relation of power among
ethnic groups. According to anthropological research, the power of the state is
in fact not a neutral one, but is generally dominated by the dominant ethnic
group or groups. “The state through its centralization of rule and
administration and policies on cultural and political rights, as well as the
distribution of socio-economic resources, plays an important role in
influencing ethnic identification” (Tan 2000). As a result, the inequality
access to power and economic opportunities eventually lead to the internal
ethnic identification and community integration of the Tu Yao. Thus, in
response to the long-term impacts of inferior education, unfair access to power
and resources, and widespread disillusionment, the Tu Yao people may
de-emphasize formal education as a way of "getting ahead". This, in
turn, inevitably makes the Tu Yao people, consciously or unconsciously,
alienate themselves from the dominant ethnic group and identify strongly with
their own ethnic group. Based on preliminary research, I hypothesize that the
Tu Yao encounter the dilemma that if they are successful in the Han dominated
school, they will be "assimilated" into the dominant-group culture
and lose their cultural identity; if they try to keep their traditional culture
and discourage academic efforts, they will continue to suffer from their
poverty-laden way of life. In the process of cultural and commercial
globalization, in Ogbu’s words, “ethnic minorities interpret their cultural
differences as symbols of identity to be maintained and consciously or
unconsciously resist crossing cultural boundaries”. In this sense, the school
performance of minority children, in terms of the cultural-ecological theory,
“is shaped both by barriers and opportunities in the wider society and by
factors from the minority community itself” (Ogbu 1992).
At the social-system
level, according to structural-functional theory, “society depends on schools
to continue the socialization process and the intergenerational continuity
needed for societal maintenance” ( Paulston 1977:380; Baker 1988:10). This
shows what school education means for social integration and progress. According to Mette Halskov Hansen (1999),
since the Qing dynasty,
“many Chinese leaders and intellectuals have
regarded institutionalized educa-
tion as a means of integrating, controlling,
and civilizing the various peoples
who inhabit the border or peripheral
regions, especially since the reform period
in the 1980s,the Chinese government has paid
increaseing attention to develop-
ment of education among ethnic groups.
To ensure the integration of ethnic mino-
rities into the Chinese State, formal
schools become the main political arenas
promoting the idea of the unified Chinese
nation as a common denominator for all
fifty-six ethnic groups and achieving a high
degree of cultural and political
homogenization for the purpose of stability”
(Hansen 1999).
As a formal institution of socialization, education is necessary in
socialization for ethnic membership and for ethnic consciousness. The Chinese
elementary school's curriculum,
with its emphasis on the national history, mainly the history of the dominant
ethnic group or groups, and patriotic lessons, and regular rituals such as salutes to the national flag and commemorations of national
holidays, are basic uniform courses for ethnic socialization (Hansen 1999). Tan's research in the case of the
associations in Sarawak, Malaysia, however, argues that national integration
does not mean uniformity. This argument does not accept the melting pot theory.
On the contrary, it recognizes and accepts ethnic diversities. It emphasizes
the importance of “a sense of participation in nation-building” and an “equal
access to socio-economic resources in the country” (Tan 1991: 241). In this
sense, how to educate
the Tu Yao people to participate in
local and state policy-making and economic development should be viewed as the
key indicator of national integration. The Yao are divided into many sub-groups, each has its own
ethnic label, such as Tu Yao, Shanzi Yao, Daban Yao, Pan Yao, Ao Yao, Chashan
Yao, Hualan Yao, and Landian Yao. Within the Yao themselves, each group
emphases its own cultural features and stresses the differences (they use
different languages, wear different styles of clothes and have different
customs) from the other groups, but to non-Yao, especially the dominant ethnic
group, such as the Han and the Zhuang, all the sub-groups identify themselves
as the Yao. To compete politically for access to power and economic
opportunities, all these sub-groups integrate into one big group: the Yao. Just
as Tan Chee-Beng (2000) points out, “within a state, the need to compete
for resources along ethnic lines results in a greater consciousness of ethnic
identities and a need to manipulate identities for political and economic
purpose”.
The attitude towards gender is one of the important factors that affect
school attendance in rural China. In the last decades, anthropological research
on gender issue has enriched our understanding of how gender is intertwined
with some aspects of social life. Anthropologists have come to realize that the
study of gender goes beyond analysis of women, sex roles and sexuality. Many of
them argue that gender reflects other aspects of culture such as general
values, relationship of power, the creation and maintenance of group boundaries
and identities (Stambach 1999; Lutkehaus 1995; Strathern 1987). In this
perspective, we avoid considering gender simply in terms of what boys’ and
girls’ different achieve in school, rather, as Leacock (1978) argues, it is “a
vehicle through which people talk about wider forms of social inequalities”.
Gender study shows that the rate of “interruption” among girls is higher that
that among boys[2]. If it is
true among Tu Yao people, is it caused by early marriage or household chores?
What is their “interruption patterns”? How about the “return rate”? For the
role of male and female, each society has its cultural expectations, what is
the “private sphere” of Tu Yao women? These questions are crucial to our
understanding of the high rate of school failure among the Tu Yao girl
students.
This project is mainly based on library research and
extensive field research. I have already spent nearly three months conducting
library research on educational anthropology at the libraries of The Chinese
University of Hong Kong. The fieldwork will be conducted in rural Tu Yao areas
in Hezhou, Guangxi for ten months, participant observations and face-to-face
interviews will be greatly stressed on.
Data Collecting (written documents)
This will be done in the initial stage. I will collect data regarding to my research topic, mainly in Nanning, the capital city of Guangxi, and in Hezhou, the county to which my research sites belong.
Guangxi Daily: This is the only official newspaper in Guangxi. The reports are political and authoritative. I will pay special attention to the state policy towards minority school education. By analyzing the articles concerning minority education, we can see to what degree the government attaches importance to minority school education and gain an understanding of the governmental discourse on formal school teaching.
Governmental Documents: State and local governmental documents concerning minority rural education, especially the documents issued by the local education departments.
Minzu.jiaoyu yanjiu: This is the most authoritative academic periodical on education in China, which often publishes field reports on formal school education in minority areas. Their samples will serve as a good reference for my research to compare with.
Statistical Data: The analysis of the following statistical data can shed some light on my project:
---Local statistics regarding the enrollments and the dropouts.
---Proportion of students entering schools of a higher grade (including those entering junior and if possible senior middle schools).
---Statistics about the education level of the people leaving the villages and working outside, especially those working in governmental departments.
---Governmental and non-governmental investments on rural education.
Participant observation
Doing rural ethnography is the main way for me to obtain the data for my research project. I will choose Anchong, a Tu Yao village of Ertang township in Hezhou, Guangxi, as my basic research site, and all the other natural villages in Ertang and Shatian as complementary sites. There are eleven natural Tu Yao villages, three in Ertang (Anchong, Meihua-wei and Daming) and eight in Shatian (Dalengshui, Xiaolengshui, Dachong, Xiaochong, Baihu, Mawo, Yawei and Huangnan). As mentioned above, Tu Yao people are sparsely scattered on the vast Dagui mountains. It takes at least four hours to walk from one Tu Yao village to the nearest neighboring village and most of them are sparsely populated. In comparison, Anchong is a densely populated village, with more than five hundred villagers. Anchong primary school, too, is a key primary teaching site, accommodating one hundred and one students at the present. I have conducted my preliminary fieldwork there during July and August 2000. In April 2001, I went to Anchong with my supervisor professor Tan Chee-Beng for a second time, and he confirmed the feasibility of the field site. I will spend another 8 and a half months conducting intensive research in the field sites. During this period of time, I will work as a voluntary part-time primary teacher in Anchong Primary School and try to participate in the daily life of the Tu Yao people, conducting formal and informal interviews, attending school and community activities, observing classrooms, and meeting with teachers and students and interviewing parents. At the same time, I will share two months or so to gain a general understanding of the other ten villages and paying special attention to the role of the local schools in broad social contexts. During the initial contact period, I will only use the observation and natural conversation methods, getting myself accustomed to the new cultural environment as well as letting the locals come to understand my research purposes. When I am more accepted by the local people, I will collect data in a more systematic way.
In recent decades, postmodernists such as R. Rosaldon, R. Tylor and V. Crapanzano raised the predicament of the discursive aspects of cultural representation (Marcus and Clifford 1986). They argue that the writer’s “voice” pervades and situates the analysis, and objective, distancing rhetoric is renounced, and the discursive ethnography becomes the constructions of the constructions of the constructed native. In their notion, ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of “something made or fashioned.”(Clifford 1986) A cultural event, like a text, is pregnant with meaning (Crapanzano 1986), the interpretation of the text should be understood as a creative one. In cultural studies, just as Clifford puts it, can only be known as “a partial truth” (Clifford 1986). They holds that the ethnographer’s personal experiences, especially those of participation and empathy, are recognized as central to the research process, but they are firmly restrained by the impersonal standards of observation and “objective” distance. The subjectivity of the author is separated from the objective referent of the text. The postmodernists, though a little bit radical, remind us the possibility that the simplest cultural accounts are intentional creations, that interpreters construct themselves through the others they study. To the Tu Yao communities, I am an outsider, this can prevent me from “enmeshing” too deep into the target group and help me to keep a relatively “outside” point of view. But in a broader sense, compared with the foreign researchers, I am an “indigenous ethnographer” and can more easily “merge” into the communities and observe the cultures in the native’s point of view, which can offer new angles of vision and depths of understanding. I was brought up among the minorities such as Kazah, Uyghur, Mongolian in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and have now learned the basic knowledge of anthropology and gained a better understanding of the latest theories on educational anthropology. My early training in mainland China both as a student at the Ethnological Institute of The Northwest University for Nationalities and later as a teacher at the Anthropological Institute of Guangxi University for Nationalities, and the current training at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, I think, will help me participate into and simultaneously distance myself easily from the Tu Yao culture and enable me to produce insightful descriptions of the Tu Yao society. It also allows me, in relation to the socio-economic-political structure of the society, to explore the crucial role of formal school education in structuring and restructuring Tu Yao people's social integration and cultural and ethnic identity in a more objective way. Other than general observation, I will also conduct some more systematic interviews and apply some other field research methods.
Interviews: Through formal and informal
interviews, I can learn about the key process of rural school teaching, school
administrative system and to what extent school education impacts on ethnic
cultural and social integration. I will find out rural inhabitants' attitude
towards the state educational policy and system; children's attitude towards
school teaching, and families' sources of income and economic well-being. The
informants include kids, parents, teachers, administrators, and educators at
various administration levels. In Ertang Middle school, there are about forty
Tu Yao students studying in two special Tu Yao lodging classes, which are
mainly funded by the local government and some charity organizations. Students there
will be the “educated persons” among Tu Yao people. Their motivation and
attitude towards schooling as well as their point of view on the Han dominated
school education will be studied.
Content analysis: The local school records, such as enrollment and dropout lists, final term reports, students' grades, teachers' comments; financial investment by the government, etc. will be analyzed. By content analysis, I can look at what happened to all the children who began school in, say, 1990, and try to find out whether they have gone on to more schooling, if not, why? And see the impact of parents' education, family income and parents' attitudes towards education, children's grades etc. on education.
Education is one of the most important feature of society, whether it is in a pre-industrial society or an industrial one. As Calhoun and Ianni (1976) have put it,
“The study of education has
been a part of social and cultural anthro-
pology almost from their
inceptions. As fieldworkers set out to record
the structure and content of
social life, they cannot pass up a look at its
continuity, this continuity
is learned, and more than that, in every society,
there exists more or less formalized processes to partially
determine the
learning of the young”
(Calhoun and Ianni 1976:1)
But unfortunately, “education has been something about which a few anthropologists write a lot, and the rest feel free to ignore.” (Calhoun and Ianni 1976) In Mainland China, hardly any anthropologists have paid sufficient attention to the study of education. This study will contribute to the ethnography of education in China, especially the minority people in particular.
Yao people is
an international ethnic group, most of its sub-branches, such as , Shan-zi Yao, Ao Yao, Cha-shan Yao, Hua-lan Yao, and Lan-dian Yao have been studied
by local and foreign scholars. But Tu Yao, due to their remote settlement, has
been ignored by scholars. This study, in addition to studying education, will
also provide detailed ethnography of the Tu Yao community. In addition the
study will shed light on the life world of other minority ethnic groups in
South China and enable us to gain a better understanding of how minority ethnic
groups in rural China, especially those in remote mountain areas, resist and
adjust themselves to the Han
dominated society.
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