Alienation of Tibetan Adolescents in Rural Boarding Schools

Abstract

Adolescent alienation is a symptom of problems in relations among the individual, school, community, and family. Based on a research conducted with a sample of 897 Tibetan adolescent students in Grades 7 to 12, this study reveals that over one third of subjects experience high levels of alienation.Questionnaire data and field work show possible sources of this alienation in contemporary rural Tibetan society in China, factors that may reduce alienation, and explanations for low levels of alienation among some students. The paper concludes with an argument for researchers and policy makers to pay greater attention to the issue of alienation among minority boarding school students.

Contexts of School and Pastoralist Family Communication in Rural Mongolia

“…Moreover, this study suggests that herder parents mainly communicated with teachers in order to ask for a child's leave of absence from classes. This finding is similar to Cao's (2016) finding that in general, Tibetan parents rarely asked about their children's learning and living in boarding schools. The relationship between school and Tibetan families was passive and parents were given no opportunity to take part in school teaching and decisionmaking.…”

“…Removing children from rural schools and sending them to better province-center schools is becoming another common phenomenon among herder families. This finding is rather similar to the situation of Tibetan nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyle families who send their children to faraway boarding schools because the schools in their hometown and villages do not offer adequate educational opportunities (Cao, 2016). Also, the same phenomenon is reported in English and Guerin's study (2017) that quality secondary education is often not accessible to Indigenous Australian pupils in remote communities and they usually move to a metropolitan city or rural town to pursue a quality education.…”

“…Parental involvement in children's education among Australian Aboriginal groups and Torres Strait Islander families is barely visible in boarding schools (Benveniste, Guenther, Dawson, & Rainbird, 2014). Cao (2016) conducted a study in boarding schools in a Chinese county where Tibetan inhabitants lived as nomads or lived a semifarming/semi-nomadic lifestyle. Cao reported that often less than half of the parents would visit the school on the parental visiting days due to long distances and travel expenses.…”

“…However, the strategies of split households and staying with relatives seem to be more likely to put pressure on herder parents in terms of finance due to purchasing a second home or to contributing to the relative's household expenses. Cao (2016) discussed that parental mobility influences the traditional family structure and increases divorce rate. The participants of this study, however, did not report any family divorce cases due to households splitting.…”

“…Such efforts to visit rural herders could be combined with activities for working around the literacy issue since illiteracy among herder parents was reported to restrict some forms of communication. Furthermore, one of the important strategies that schools could use to encourage improved herder parental involvement, as recommended by Cao (2016), could be the participation of herder parents in the decision-making and administration activities of the school.…”