On her book Fabricating an Educational Miracle: Compulsory Schooling Meets Ethnic Rural Development in Southwest China
Cover Interview of January 03, 2017
In a nutshell
In the media spotlight, ruthlessly dedicated Chinese students
and their superb performance in international testing continue to fuel global
interest in China’s education system. This, however, tells only a partial
story. On the flip side of an educational “China rising” is a vast rural ethnic
landscape trapped in educational mediocrity, stagnation, and crisis. This crisis
has been deepened by China’s economic boom and optimism about development that
offers abundant manufacturing jobs while also enabling a school-to-the-factory
pipeline. In scholarship and the popular press, the myth of China’s educational
success seems to be quickly fading, as more and more youth find themselves
schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops.
The book laces together accounts of how compulsory education
encounters rural development to produce dilemmas and possibilities in village
schools in Southwest China. The study draws upon multi-sited ethnography, oral
history, and archival research to investigate conflicts between education
policies and modernization agendas in rural China. It starts out with a central
puzzle: how do we understand the profound disenchantment and high attrition
rates among rural ethnic youth despite the nationwide educational desire for
success, despite the state’s relentless efforts to enforce compulsory
education, and despite the folk belief in “jumping out of the village gate
through academic success?” Reasons behind the disenchanted sentiment are
complex, and the book ventures into the domains of policy, audit culture,
tourism, labor migration, and people’s contingent life choices (or lack thereof)
to highlight the complexity. The volume provides a detailed account of how an
educational miracle is fabricated in everyday maneuvers in rural minority
schools; and how schooling becomes increasingly penetrated by development
programs, audit culture, tourism, and translocal labor migration to produce
unintended consequences.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
In the media spotlight, ruthlessly dedicated Chinese students and their superb performance in international testing continue to fuel global interest in China’s education system. This, however, tells only a partial story. On the flip side of an educational “China rising” is a vast rural ethnic landscape trapped in educational mediocrity, stagnation, and crisis. This crisis has been deepened by China’s economic boom and optimism about development that offers abundant manufacturing jobs while also enabling a school-to-the-factory pipeline. In scholarship and the popular press, the myth of China’s educational success seems to be quickly fading, as more and more youth find themselves schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops.
The book laces together accounts of how compulsory education encounters rural development to produce dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. The study draws upon multi-sited ethnography, oral history, and archival research to investigate conflicts between education policies and modernization agendas in rural China. It starts out with a central puzzle: how do we understand the profound disenchantment and high attrition rates among rural ethnic youth despite the nationwide educational desire for success, despite the state’s relentless efforts to enforce compulsory education, and despite the folk belief in “jumping out of the village gate through academic success?” Reasons behind the disenchanted sentiment are complex, and the book ventures into the domains of policy, audit culture, tourism, labor migration, and people’s contingent life choices (or lack thereof) to highlight the complexity. The volume provides a detailed account of how an educational miracle is fabricated in everyday maneuvers in rural minority schools; and how schooling becomes increasingly penetrated by development programs, audit culture, tourism, and translocal labor migration to produce unintended consequences.