Ga Postiglione

Education in Tibet : policy and practice since 1950

* Contents * Introduction * Part 1 * 1. Background * 2. Red or Expert: Shifting Priorities in Education, 1950-1978 * 3. Socialist Modernisation, 1978-97 * 4. Regional Disparity in Education Provision * Part 2 * 5. Primary Education * 6. Funding of Primary Education: Urban versus Rural * 7. General Secondary Education * 8. Vocational Secondary Education * 9. Higher Education * 10.Pre-school Education, Education for Girls, Special Needs EDucation * 11. Teachers and Teaching * 12. Tibetan Language Policy in Education * 13. Concluding Comments

Anchoring globalization in Hong Kong's research universities: network agents, institutional arrangements, and brain circulation

International competition drives research universities to find ways to anchor globalization for academic productivity and innovation through cross-border collaboration. This article examines the case of pre- and post-colonial Hong Kong and how its universities transited from undergraduate institutions to highly ranked research universities within 30 years. While this is attributed to an enabling environment of institutional autonomy, open borders and cross-cultural capacity, a case study of one research university points to the role played in all of Hong Kongs universities by network agents, institutional arrangements, and brain circulation to recruit and retain international scholars and scientists. While this has strengthened capacity, it cannot be sustained without indigenous academic leadership to ensure that globalization is anchored in local culture. The article makes the case that the Hong Kong model already studied by research universities on the Chinese mainland, is generalizable as a cosmopolitan model for developing countries.

Crossing borders in East Asian higher education

This book examines issues that have emerged as higher education systems and individual institutions across East Asia confront and adapt to the changing economic, social, and educational environments in which they now operate. The books focus is on how higher education systems learn from each other and on the ways in which they collaborate to address new challenges. The sub-theme that runs through this volume concerns the changing nature of cross-border sharing.

Dislocated Education: The Case of Tibet

As the United Nations Millennium Development Goals deadline for education approaches, boarding schools offer one option for providing access to quality education for children from remote communities. Developing countries already make use of them in rural areas to rationalize costs and concentrate resources, as well as to settle nomadic populations. Boarding schools are viewed as especially suitable for remote areas where populations are dispersed. Yet, boarding schools for indigenous peoples are hardly a new phenomenon. Moreover, their establishment has had as much to do with a civilizing mission as with the aim of providing educational access to underserved communities. As globalization’s march continues to homogenize through mass schooling, the last populations are among the most culturally diverse. Efforts to provide education for all are inevitably accompanied by national missions to “civilize” minority peoples through boarding schools that dislocate children from their home communities. The early nation-building experiences of Australia, Canada, and the United States are marked by the establishment of boarding schools to assimilate indigenous peoples. Such institutional efforts to civilize failed spectacularly, with Australia and Canada having recently apologized for dislocating children from their home communities. Systematic dislocation continues in many parts of the world. Contemporary examples in East Asia include Laos, Vietnam, and China, each with over 50 officially designated ethnic minority groups. China is perhaps the most notable, not only for its boarding school initiative in Yunnan, its most multiethnic province, but also in Tibet and Xinjiang, where an ambitious program dislocates students to schools beyond their regional borders to central China. Starting in 1985, such boarding

Making Tibetans in China: the educational challenges of harmonious multiculturalism

This discussant paper focuses on education in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), and provides a background to situate the articles that follow about education in selected Tibetan communities of China and India. It also provides a brief review of education policies concerning free basic education, bilingual education, and hinterland boarding schools. The paper argues that while enrolment rates in most parts of the TAR continue to rise, schools produce only mixed results. This is due to the widespread lack of quality learning environments that can promote a culturally diverse and locally relevant education to foster a harmonious multiculturalism and sustain Tibets social and economic development. Only by doing so, will schools propel Tibetan academic achievement to levels comparable with the national average. Until then, the potential of education to help Tibetans live and work as critical and innovative thinkers in a rapidly changing market economy in the TAR and across China will remain limited.

Representations of Ethnic Minorities in China's University Media.

This paper examines the representation of ethnic minorities in China through a review of campus newspapers, a major print medium in which universities exercise power over the discourse of cultural recognition. Three universities attended by minority students were selected. A two-dimensional mode (content and configuration) is established to analyze ethnic representations. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis is used to categorize and analyze text and photographs relevant to ethnicity. The study concludes that (1) different discursive practices are employed to construct ‘images’ of ethnic groups as ‘Others’ or ‘Us’; (2) representations of ethnic minorities and the Han generate three discursive dichotomies between minority and majority: minority groups are distinctive, potentially separatistic, and visible; and the Han people are normative, patriotic, and invisible, respectively; (3) the university media reflects an ideology of ‘state multiculturalism’ that constructs a reflexive representation of the relationship between majority and minority.

China's Global Bridging: The Transformation of University Mobility between Hong Kong and the United States.

Despite its size and great distance from the Chinese capital, Hong Kong has long served as China’s bridge in international educational exchange. It is not only the cradle of the Chinese tradition of crossing the Pacific to study in America, but it has continually refined its role as changes occurred on the mainland. This is especially true during the past quarter century when many students left China for study in the United States. While the mainland was sending talent across the Pacific, Hong Kong reaped the benefit of educational exchange in the opposite direction, attracting large numbers of academic staff to its rapidly expanding university system, resulting in a gradual transformation of academic culture.

Questioning Centre–Periphery Platforms

How much is hegemony and how much is self-determination in the higher education systems in Southeast Asia? This paper argues that while the question of centre and periphery is still relevant to the analysis of international university systems, the analytical frameworks from which it has arisen may lose viability in the long term. Southeast Asian states are making use of higher education to act in ways that will contribute to the altering of their peripheral position in the global economic and political system. While changes in Southeast Asian higher education are closely tied to global markets and follow what sometimes appears to be a dependent pattern of adaptations driven by Western developed economies, the paper argues that there is also a significant amount of resistance. As Southeast Asian countries adapt in ways that help embed economic globalisation within their national landscape, the manner in which the adaptation occurs is more selective, open, and democratic than before. Moreover, while global communication with core (centre) university systems has been more open and transparent, the system is closed to direct intervention from the outside, making hegemony a less plausible explanation for the manner in which the system is reacting within the new global environment of financial interdependency.

Household Perspectives on School Attendance in Rural Tibet.

This study explores household perspectives on school access at the village level in rural Tibet. Data from two rural areas are compared. This paper argues that despite abolition of all school fees, the use of Tibetan as a medium of instruction, the provision of boarding schools, and other incentives, dropout rates in rural areas remain high. This is largely due to the opportunity costs associated with removing a child from the household labor force. Beyond acquiring basic literacy, rural households seem less willing to make the sacrifices involved without receiving direct economic return through access to non‐farm labor jobs after graduation. Nevertheless, there are other factors at work. Moreover, villages in different parts of Tibet are far from homogeneous with respect to the factors that affect school attendance.

Transformations in Higher Education: Crossing Borders and Bridging Minds

This book examines issues that have emerged as higher education systems and individual institutions across East Asia confront and adapt to the changing economic, social, and educational environments in which they now operate. The focus is on how higher education systems learn from one another and the ways that higher education institutions collaborate to address new challenges. The sub-theme that runs throughout this volume concerns the changing nature of cross-border sharing in higher education. In particular, the provision of technical assistance by more industrialized countries to lower and middle income countries has given way to collaborations that place the latter’s participating institutions on more equal footing. At the same time, the number of partnerships linking higher education systems within the larger East Asia region to one another has increased.