Fabricating an Educational Miracle

Jinting Wu

Description

Winner of the 2017 American Educational Research Association's Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award

Winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

In today's China, education is translated into both acute social desires and profound disenchantment. Shanghai's stellar performance in the recent Program for International Student Assessment paints a celebratory image of educational success yet tells only a partial story. For many in rural China who are schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops, education remains an elusive ideal and offers a hollowed promise of social mobility. Fabricating an Educational Miracle laces together complex accounts of how compulsory education produces dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. Drawing from interviews, participant observations, oral history, and archival research in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Qiandongnan Prefecture, Guizhou Province, this book examines the manifold and contradictory agendas that have captured rural ethnic schooling at a crossroads.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

1. The Rural Ethnic as Political Projects: Development’s Storied Edges

2. The Politics of Compulsory Education: Universal Ideals and Local Discontent

3. New Bottles, Old Wine: Governing “Quality” and the New Curriculum Reform

4. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Unlocking Educational Audit Culture in Qiandongnan

5. Tourism as Spatial Pedagogy and New Rural Literacy

6. The Way Out (注路): Life after the School Walls Crumble

Conclusion
Along the Development Grains: Disenchantment of Education Revisited

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Types of rural communities

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438460383
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 13 Mo

Extrait

Fabricating an Educational Miracle
Fabricating an Educational Miracle
Compulsory Schooling Meets Ethnic Rural Development in Southwest China
JINTING WU
Cover image: A primary school covered with state slogans; photo by Ruan Yuan.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wu, Jinting.
Fabricating an educational miracle : compulsory schooling meets ethnic rural development in Southwest China / Jinting Wu.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6037-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-6038-3 (e-book)
1. Education, Rural—China, Southwest. 2. Rural development—China, Southwest. I. Title. LC5148.C6W825 2016 370.9173'40951—dc23 2015018365
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
The Rural Ethnic as Political Projects: Development’s Storied Edges
Chapter 2
The Politics of Compulsory Education: Universal Ideals and Local Discontent
Chapter 3
New Bottles, Old Wine: Governing “Quality” and the New Curriculum Reform
Chapter 4
The Emperor’s New Clothes: Unlocking Educational Audit Culture in Qiandongnan
Chapter 5
Tourism as Spatial Pedagogy and New Rural Literacy
Chapter 6
The Way Out ( 出路 ): Life after the School Walls Crumble
Conclusion
Along the Development Grains: Disenchantment of Education Revisited
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations Figure 1.1. Map of China. Figure 1.2. Map of Guizhou. Figure 1.3. Miao women gathered to embroider elaborate patterns on colorful cloth. Figure 1.4. An elderly woman beating a stack of cloth to even out the indigo dye. Figure 1.5. Villagers beating glutinous rice to make a local dessert baba . Figure 1.6. Terraced rice paddies as working landscape. Figure 1.7. Panoramic view of the village of Majiang. Figure 1.8. Distant view of the village of Longxing. Figure 2.1. A primary school covered with state slogans. Figure 2.2. A child carries her sibling and shoulders family responsibilities at a young age. Figure 2.3. Wall display of school awards in a Dong household. Figure 2.4. Wall display urging pupils and teachers to use standard Mandarin. Figure 3.1. A Dong song expert and her young disciples. Figure 4.1. Students in school uniforms gathered before an inspection. Figure 4.2. A shiny trashcan standing against dilapidated wooden schoolhouse. Figure 4.3. Students singing on-stage for the inspection delegation. Figure 4.4. Village students trekking mountain paths to and from schools. Figure 4.5. A bricolage of images on the wall of a rural household. Figure 5.1. Student paraders in ethnic uniform. Figure 5.2. School playground half dug-up for making a tourist parking lot. Figure 5.3. Drying cotton and fruits on the roadside. Figure 5.4. Pristine scenic view with decorated drum tower and roofed bridge. Figure 5.5. Village students summoned to clean up the street and riverbed. Figure 5.6. A woman vendor’s stand on a market day. Figure 5.7. Students taking care of chores in and out of the dorm. Figure 6.1. Village Guibei at dawn. Figure 6.2. Nee cooking on an electric plate during her weekend visit home. Figure 6.3. Grand opening ceremony staged by ethnically attired village performers. Figure 6.4. A corner of the metal chain workshop.
Preface
In today’s China, education is on virtually everybody’s lips: metropolitan residents invest intensely in their own or their children’s education and seek better opportunities overseas; 1 urban parents vie to enroll their children in various extracurricular activities to cultivate in them culturally sanctioned “good” tastes and dispositions; private educational training becomes an immensely profitable market niche. In the broad strokes of journalistic accounts, China represents a success story of education, with an intense educational desire driving social competitions for elitism and prestige. The discourse of “China Rising” witnesses the nation moving toward continual prosperity and unprecedented educational expansion as a signature “soft” landmark of a globalizing China.
Indeed, six-and-a-half decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the country professes to have achieved an education miracle. With a 99 percent literacy rate (up from 20 percent in 1949 upon PRC’s founding) and high mass participation at all levels of schooling, China demonstrates remarkable records to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, outperforming many of its Asian neighbors. 2 Recently, Shanghai’s stellar performance in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) topped all other participating countries in math, reading, and science, continuing to showcase China’s relentless educational progress while adding to the deep-felt anxieties in the western hemisphere (Dillon 2010).
Yet, such triumphalism conceals as much as it reveals. In the heterogeneous landscape of China, education is a study in contradiction. On the one hand, as part of a greater anxiety over the global competition, an educational craze is turning affluent urban China into a mad elitist race. As a New York Times article vividly depicts, wealthy parents in Shanghai take their children for extended stays overseas for them to learn Western-accented English; they also compete to enroll their children in private lessons of fine manners and lifestyle training (French 2006), echoing the concerted strategies of Chinese parenting depicted in Amy Chua’s controversial volume Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom as a response to intense education competition. The widespread educational desire envelops contemporary Chinese society in a form of social struggle for prestige (Kipnis 2011).
On the other hand, education remains an elusive ideal and offers only a mirage of the good life for many who find themselves schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops. With a sense of disenchantment, rural ethnic populations participate in the internationally acclaimed “educational miracle” of China as bystanders. While urban kids enjoy ready access to leisure commodities, free from domestic labors yet disgruntled about weekend piano lessons and restrictive parental control, children in the countryside are pressed by more immediate concerns for food, shelter, and clothing, and obligated by family necessities to work at a very early age. According to China’s 2010 Population Census, 61 million children (below the age of 18) are left behind in rural regions as “institutional orphans” while their parents eke out a living as migrant workers in urban centers. 3 Their leisure time is consumed by house chores, farm labor, care of younger siblings, and long hours of hiking on hilly mountain paths to and from school. They draw chessboards on the ground and play with rocks, twigs, discarded cigarette cases to entertain themselves. While elite urban schools charge astronomical tuition and boarding fees, rural schools in inland regions are often strapped for resources and struggle mightily to get by.
What the global image of China’s educational success conceals is an educational system replete with cacophonies and frictions. While the urban desire for education is palpable, many rural and ethnic residents are ambivalent and disenchanted with schooling, 4 even when the law stipulates that basic education (grade 1–9) is free and compulsory. Once, during an interview, a high-profile official at an Education Bureau of the capital city of Guizhou Province sarcastically called himself a firefighter who dashed around to attend to constant emergencies in rural minority schools. What is on fire? What is the state of emergency concealed by the national discourse of “harmony” ( 和谐 ) and the global discourse of “China Rising”? How does the fire affect the crumbling walls of rural schools, metaphorically speaking, where social mobility becomes a hollowed promise? What triggered the decay of the centuries-old Chinese aspiration of “jumping out of the village gate and into scholar-officialdom through academic success” ( 学而优则仕 )?
The widespread disenchantment as well as high rates of attrition/dropout are not only prevalent among rural ethnic students in southwest China where this volume is based; they are also a haunting issue in a growing corpus of comparative studies of education around the world (Aronowitz 2001; Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994; Rifkin 1995; Willis 2003; Hurtig 2008; Lou 2011a). It is no news that formal schooling in many parts of the world has consistently failed to deliver its promised fruits, creating instead cohorts of unemployed youth with disillusioned life goals. This book is an attempt to unravel the complex formation of educational disenchantment in China’s rural ethnic marg