Northwest Hui Civic Education Research

The institutionalized school education doesn't cover the rich educational life of human beings. "The Hui's non-governmental education" as a concept proposed in the paper aims at scanning today's national education life and research from a new angle, stand and value pursuit, analyzing today's education from an open perspective, exploring the limitations and weaknesses of the current educational research, probing into the reliability of the national non-governmental education known as "informal education" and its operating mechanism, and perceiving the grass root people's educational demand and educational wisdom which accord with the features of their national culture and meet the needs in their production, living and development.Minorities take on different features in their educational cultures in the "Diversity and Unity" of the Chinese nation and its culture. The inheritance and development of the minorities' cultures in our country depend more on their conscious non-governmental education for lack of the institutionalized school education. In such cases, the study of non-governmental education of such minorities as the Hui brings us to pursuit for the reasonable ways to meet the need of the minorities' special education in the institutionalized school education. Only in this way can "appreciating one's own beauty and beauty coexistence" be formed for the Chinese educational culture, so as to promote the harmonious development among each nationality.Taking the Hui nationality as a case, the study puts forward and describes the concepts and characteristics of non-governmental education and the Hui's non-governmental education. On the basis of the text analysis, the study systematically sums up the backgrounds of the origin and development of the Hui's non-governmental education in time and space, cultural and historical development. Combining with his own experiences, the researcher chooses three places to observe and does his field study: Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province with large Hui people, Linxia, a city often known as "small Mecca" in China, and Xinglong, a town in the south of Ningxia province, and then makes a deep description and research on the diversified and multi-level system of the Hui's non-governmental education and the problems in the course of development:the traditional family education of the Hui people in Northwest of China, mosque education, jamat education and many kinds of modern vocational education institutions run by the Hui people, such as Sino-Arabian schools, feminist study of the Hui nationality. The researcher concludes his findings as follows:Due to the feature of "binary one" of the Hui's culture, it is the system of the Hui's non-governmental education, together with the institutionalized school education, that supports the building of the education of the Hui nationality for thousands of years.The Hui's non-governmental education in northwest of China, existing in dominant culture and taking faith education as its foundation, is an education of Islamic culture, of national identity and keeping national cultural characteristics and of general recognition from the Hui nationality.The Hui's non-governmental education is created, inherited and appreciated by the Hui people and so making a functional analysis on it aims at exploring its functions and roles in the production and life of the Hui nationality. Meanwhile, the research reveals the resulting loss and negative functions of the Hui's non-governmental education, which needs to be bravely confronted with by the Hui people.The non-governmental educational life contains the special educational wisdom of the ordinary people. The present school education should pay attention to the following features of the Hui's non-governmental education:religious education runs parallel with science education; the Hui people all are incumbent on "their own education"; lifelong education-"learning from cradle to grave", is carried out with cultural foundation; humanistic education, such as early education, teaching students according to their aptitude and gender, is emphasized; sentimental education is valued; educational methods, for example, experience, edification and demonstration, etc. are attached importance to; etc.The Hui's non-governmental education and the institutionalized school education don't act in their own ways from the perspective of combination of history and reality. The competition, adjustment and understanding between the two kinds of education have never come to an end, nor has the constant adjustment of the bottom-up national cultural self-consciousness and its development direction. The modernization of the Hui's education has much to do with the modernization of the Hui's non-governmental education. So it is necessary to explore the institutional developmental space of the Hui's non-governmental education and to search for the possibility of interaction and adaptation between the Hui's non-governmental education and the present school education from the national education legislation and related educational policies of our country.Change and development of the national education needs the related people's constant national educational consciousness. At present, the key to limit the fast development of the Hui's economy in the northwest of China lies in the fact that the Hui people haven't received enough modern school education. So the Hui people should attach importance to strengthening the modern school education and the modernity of national non-governmental education, especially improving the literacy level of the females, and meanwhile, in the school education of the national area, presenting rationally the content of minority culture and satisfying the special appeal of the minorities. In this way, both the Hui's non-governmental education and the modern school education can undertake the responsibility of promoting national education together by conversation, interaction and complementation.