On her book Fabricating an Educational Miracle: Compulsory Schooling Meets Ethnic Rural Development in Southwest China
Cover Interview of January 04, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.