Beyond Assimilation: The Tibetanisation of Tibetan Education in Qinghai

Abstract

China's minority education in general – and Tibetan education in particular – is often viewed as a hegemonic tool designed to assimilate minorities, seeking to integrate them into Han culture and society, while at the same time marginalising them through discourses of cultural inferiority and backwardness. The aim of this article is to go beyond seemingly straightforward portrayals of minority education (and especially of Tibetan education) as a device for sinicisation by analysing the historically situated, complex and often contradictory dynamics of how it has facilitated the simultaneous expression and suppression of different aspects of Tibetan 'culture' and language. Through an evaluation of the development of Tibetan-medium education in Qinghai province, it is demonstrated that minorities are not just passive victims at the hand of a dominant state, but strategising agents who can creatively explore and expand the political and cultural space within which they operate.

Alienation of Tibetan Adolescents in Rural Boarding Schools

“…Thus, children have been sent to boarding schools because their hometowns and villages do not offer adequate educational opportunities. Research on Tibetan boarding schools mainly focuses on the influence of state schooling on Tibetan students' ethnic identity (Zhu, 2007), contradictions and mismatches between state policies and implementation (Wang & Zhou, 2003), the Tibetanisation process in Tibetan schools (Zenz, 2010), and identity construction (Qian, 2007), especially in dislocated boarding schools (xizang neidi ban; Postiglione, 2009;Postiglione & Jiao, 2009;Zhu & Deng, 2015). Studies on Tibetan adolescent alienation at boarding school are quite rare.…”

“…Students at school actively participate in these associations. Zenz (2010) found that since 2000, minority education in Qinghai Tibetan area has formed a bottom-up Tibetanisation process which differs from the past. Through utilizing Tibetan textbooks, cultivating Tibetan teachers, and speaking pure Tibetan, Tibetan schools enable the reconstruction of ethnic identity in the educational space.…”

When English Meets Chinese in Tibetan Schools: Towards an Understanding of Multilingual Education in Tibet

“…Models of multilingual education for Tibetans in China are vivid expressions of such a power relationship. For example, Tibetanisation (e.g., adopting a "pure Tibetan" model and replacing nationally practised morning exercises with traditional Tibetan dancing in schools) was more likely to occur in Tibetan-majority areas and schools where headmasters were ethnic Tibetans than in Tibetan-minority areas or schools where persons in charge were non-Tibetans (Zenz, 2010).…”

“…As the size of a minority population increases from one place to another, the pattern may gradually change to han jian min (mainstream Han Chinese using Mandarin most of the time, only occasionally using a minority language), or min jian min (one minority group, such as Luoba or Menba, using their native minority language most of the time, but occasionally using another minority language, such as Tibetan). When the Tibetan population overwhelmingly outnumbers the size of Han population, as in those Tibetan-majority areas mentioned in Zenz (2010), it is likely that the pattern will evolve to han jian min. Having examined choices of linguistic models by schools and communities, we proceed to study by what means parents arrive at such decisions.…”

“…How should policy makers of minority education strike a balance between development vs. stability and consistency vs. continuity? It is evident that policies related to bilingual education in Tibet since the 1950s have oscillated between Chinese-led and Tibetan-led models -they primarily depended on the leadership and the way in which Tibetans responded to the authority exercised by the leadership (Bass, 1998;Ma, 2011;Zenz, 2010). Indeed, education can have many competing aims, and the balance between the retrospective value of understanding one's past culture, history, and linguistic tradition must be weighed against the prospective value of equipping learners for the world they will inherit (White, 1982).…”