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.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
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.