On The Monastic Education Of Dai Children In Sipsong Panna And Its Countermeasures Of Educational Policy And Law

Monastic education of Dai Children is a unique educational phenomenon in the compact community area of Dai in Yunan Province. Its uniqueness requires adapting measures of educational policy and law suiting its local condition and circumstance.In general speaking, the problem that the educational policy and law is going to solve has the same character in its essential with the problem in other ethnic gathering area. The problem is how to guarantee the ethnic students reach the level of knowledge and ability that the nation requires and at the same time inherit and expand its own ethnic culture. The specific character of the problem in Sipsong Panna is Dai nationality has formed a mature monastic education system aiming at cultivating believers, which has been lasting for hundred years and has integrated into the social structure of Dai community. It is much more difficult to balance the two educational systems, the school education and the monastic one.Speaking from aspect of legal practice, the measure of forcing parents to send their children to school does not achieve high quality of school education. On the other hand, it results the contrasting feeling of Dai people to government and the work capacity and pressure of school teachers soaring. Most of teacher said that their main mission is to prevent students from dropout and to maintain class order with little attention focusing on improving of teaching quality. After year of2000, the enrollment rate of school education finally reached the standard of national level with enormous effort, while three other problems are becoming more and more severe. First, lower scholastic achievement. According to the statistical data of2001to2004, the passing rate of primary school in Sipsong Panna is between60%and80%, and the senior school is between20%and60%. Second, the higher recessive dropout rate. Take Liming Senior School in Mengzhe County for instance, around80%of students absent more than20lessons for no reason and two weeks of personal and sick leave. Third, double objectivization of teaching process. Both teachers and students have lower sense of achievement.The uniqueness of the problem in Sipsong Panna determined this study shall review the applicableness of educational policy and law based on the field work. In the past researches, there are two interpreting categories:The first one is called single factor interpretation. This category regards the problem as the result of one factor, or a series of factor influencing. The factors mainly could be classified into three:religion, economic and awareness. It is looks like that the irrational of religion has absolute conflict with modern scientific knowledge, while it does not in real life. On the one hand, Dai people grow crops under the guide of scientific ration; on the other hand, they consecrate the soul of rice with a series of rigorous ceremony. It is also true that the economic condition of Dai is much better than the other ethnic area, while affluence does not inevitably make for dropout. In the contrast, material well-being life often accompanied with increasing calling of spiritual and cultural life according to the general rule. It is much stranger to interpret the problem with awareness. As we all know, awareness is just the reflection of social reality, not the determinable factor. Some researchers regard the problem as the process of cultural adapting. It is true, but too broad to solve the actual difficulties.The second one is called conflict interpretation of educational space-time, which regards the problem as a conflict of space-time arrangement for two different educational systems. The advantage of this category is focusing much more on the education itself. While, logically speaking, the intention of educational policy and law is just dealing with the conflict of space-time arrangement for two different educational systems properly and the intention could not be the cause of itself.So, this study has to find new breakthrough. This study based on such a proposal: the modern school educational system is a system suiting with the industrial social structure, which surly will encounter structural fence when it was implanted into relative enclosed agricultural community of Dai with the government force. This study also believes that the structural fence will be solved through adjustment of educational policy and law. Based on those norms, this study is trying to find out the requirement towards educational policy and law from local social and cultural reality, such as local value, vested interest and so on. The research methods of this study are mainly structure projection and comparative analysis, which put the problem under the context of wholly structure transition of Dai community and exploring the meaning of different education forms toward their life through diachronic and structural comparativeness.There are three conclusions of this study:First, the crucial reason for the difficulty that the modern school education facing in Sipsong Panna is not the tradition that Dai children has to have an experience of monk life, which could be illustrated by the attitude of Dai people. Most of Dai parents and old monks are not against school education. Some old monks even are willing to push forward the improvement of school education. Only teachers and school administrators hold the negative opinion on monastic education, especially the staff in senior and junior school. It is easy to understand that their working pressure of entrance examination is much heavier.Second, this study discovered that the general reason for the educational problem in Sipsong Panna is that the content, teaching method and organization forms of school education does not suiting the social and cultural structure of Dai community, and the crucial reason is that the school education has formed a exocentric and unified teaching mode with rigid single evaluation criterion. It is such mode caused the predicament of educational policy and law in Dai community.Third, there is rigid and simplification tendency for legal practice of educational policy and law for the reason of ambiguous definition, variance understanding, interests relating and so on. One example is the understanding of the amendment of compulsory education law in2006. The14th article of the amendment has clearly allowed executing compulsory education out of school, but the educational administration department always inclined to reject the application. Another example is that the simple understanding of the principle of separation of religion and school education caused to exclude religion knowledge out of school curriculums.This study finally puts forward four suggestions with the reference of operations abroad:first, loosen entrance requirement, strengthen supervise of educational process and outcoming control; Second, building up norm-referenced evaluation system; Third, introducing religion general curriculum; Forth, improving curriculum development ability of teacher in order to integrate ethnic educational resources. There are still a lot of works to do for these suggestions, such as accompanying synthetical and comprehensive policy and law to support, and so on.In the past, the study of educational law always takes such a research approach: phenomenon-institution-rights-value. This is the classic approach of western law study, and also is the mainstream of Chinese research. While, if this study mode based on western discourse system could be implanted into China local study, there are still existing arguments and debates. This study avoided theoretical debates and put study into the condition of facing the problems of reality directly, and tried to advance the education, economic and social improvement of Dai community through policy and law adjustment. The modern school education is facing the difficulties since the late Qing dynasty and the early republican china. If this study could make a little bit to help, it is worthy enough.